Race for the Crown – Gameplay
Let’s talk about gameplay. We’ve had lots of questions and these blogs were seriously delayed so let’s get this moving.
The Game Overview
That all said. Let’s talk about the game. Race for the Crown is a Fantasy Chariot Racing Tabletop Game. Ok, that’s a bit of a mouthful but it’s accurate. The various races have decided that they’re tired of killing each other for control of the kingdom. It’s wasteful, they don’t get to spend time with their families, and generally speaking, field rations are horrible. So, they’ve decided to bypass (most) of the bloodshed and instead hold a yearly chariot race to determine who should rule the kingdom. Honestly, considering some of their other political ideas this one seems like a perfectly reasonable form of government.
The Rules
· Each race of the land gets a team and can enter up to 3 chariots.
· The race is decided at either 1 or 2 laps and the first team to get at least one of their chariots around the track the appropriate number of laps is the winner.
· Attacking other chariots during the race is discouraged. The officials have also been either paid off or are so blind they wouldn’t notice anyway so… there’s that.
· Hint. It’s a little-known fact that if you’re the only one alive in the race you win by default.
The Setup
As a player you’ll choose one of 4 unique teams. Each team gets 1-3 chariots to enter the race. The number of chariots can vary depending on the number of players but generally you want 6-12 chariots on the field at the start of the game.
Each team has its own specific stats for their animals, driver and chariot. These can be updated for each chariot independently. As an example, Dwarves tend to be pretty defensive in nature. But you also have several build cards that you can use to customize your chariots, We’ll get into this deeper on another post.
Each team has one unique ability. These abilities vary but can give you extra abilities, improve existing ones or add traps to your chariot. Each changes how that team plays.
Each chariot also also gets to choose between 3 Team Perks. Some of these are traps you can drop on the field, some affect the stats of your chariot and a few are innate magical effects. A lot of the customization at this level is to decide whether to enforce areas your characters are strong at or augment areas where they might be weaker.
The map is then configured to add some obstacles. There are some easy rules of where things are allowed to go and each of these obstacles can slow you down, or cause some damage etc. This makes each race play a bit different.
There are 2 types of terrain obstacles you’ll place. Rocks and Water, each with various sizes. The rocks are placed on the rock sections and the water is placed on the mud sections. The terrain causes blockages and areas you want to avoid, though you can run over them if needed.
Off to the Races!
So you’re all setup. Now what? Each chariot sets their movement and let’s everyone know they’re ready to go. Then, each of the chariots has a flag and number. Their tokens are put in a bag and you’ll from there to determine who goes first, second etc. we’ll go more into the turn order in a later blog but during the turns you can move, attack other players, attack their animals, and use your abilities or perks. You do this until you’re out of movement points determined, and the next player starts.
Combat is easy to manage but brutal. Your can ram your chariot into the opponent, run over their mounts or attack driver to driver. Or if you have a trap handy just toss it in front of their chariot to watch them crash. Each attack method has a modifier. To determine damage you roll your die, add the modifier and that’s your attack. Subtract the opponents defense and that’s the damage they take. There are also critical fails where they can effectively counterattack as well but we’ll get into that later.
There are two modes, 1 lap or 2 depending on how long of a race you want. As soon as someone pulls off the appropriate number of laps around the track without flipping or getting killed they win! The Kingdom is run by that race for another year.
So that’s it. I mean, that’s a super simplified version of it but in some of the future posts I’ll break into more details on each aspect of the game. As of the date of this post the art is mostly complete and we’re playtesting the rules and putting together prototype copies with a plan to launch on Kickstarter in 2023. We hope you’ll join us for the journey!
