Burning WheelTabletop Tuesday: Burning Man meets The Wheel of Time | Submitted by sage on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 01:31. |
Burning Wheel is the game that story- or character-oriented gamers brought up on Dungeons and Dragons always wanted. Burning Wheel is a fantasy game with many of the typical tropes (humans with sorcery and faith, elves with spell-songs, greedy dwarves, hateful orcs), but with an underlying system as adept at handling arguing law before a lord as it as at managing battle with a marauding band of horse thieves.
So... Battleship Chess. The destroyers move like rooks, right?
Well, no; don't take the name so literally. Like Chess, this is a turn-based abstract strategy game with surprising depth. Like Battleship, its theme is naval combat. But the gameplay is quite unlike those two games.
Each turn, you may move one (and only one) ship in your fleet, which may then fire; if it ends its move adjacent to a friendly ship, both (or all) ships may fire, so planning your moves to maximize your firepower is useful. Different ship types (battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers, and subs) have different movement ranges, armor ratings--and armaments. As you might expect, battleships have huge long-range guns, while destroyers have shorter-range but potentially devastating torpedoes. Actually, the ship stats are quite detailed, almost as if this were a naval sim, which it patently is not.
