Battlerealm Bingo: A content design brainstorm

Here are the basic rules for Battlerealm Bingo.

1. You can place any champion from your roster into free space.

2. You pick exactly one champion from your roster to be on your attack team. It cannot be the champion you placed on free space.

3. You pick any square to attack. You must defeat that champion with your one attacker to continue.

4. When you defeat that champion, it replaces your attack champion in your attack team at full health.

5. You continue picking new targets to attack until you clear them all or quit. You may attack in any order, but each square can only be visited once.

6. Every bingo scores rewards (meaning: if you clear all the squares in any row, column, or diagonal). Blackout scores bonus rewards.

The game generates the card and adds appropriate nodes for difficulty purposes, the above is just a sample. But just to make sure everyone understands the rules, here's how a game might go. I place Hercules into free space. That finalizes my card. I now have to pick my attacker, my team only allows for one champ. I cannot pick Hercules, so I pick Cosmic Ghost Rider. Even though CGR is on the card, I can still use him from my roster. I then pick Darkhawk as my target. I defeat Darkhawk, but I'm down to 25% health. Darkhawk now replaces CGR as my attacker, and he replaces CGR at full health. I now pick Quake as my next target. I defeat Quake, and now my attacker is Quake. I use Quake to defeat Sinister, then Sinister to defeat Kingpin, Kingpin to defeat Rhino, and Rhino to defeat MODOK. At that point Darkhawk, Sinister, Quake, MODOK, and Rhino are all defeated, and I get the rewards for the I column bingo. I keep going until I blackout the card or decide I've had enough. Notice Kingpin is not in that column: I do not have to do the fights one column at a time or one row at a time, nor do I have to pick champions that are adjacent to prior picks. I can pick from anywhere on the card, based on what order I want to do them in.

Variations

* Iron Man: defeated champions replace attackers at attacker remaining health, not full health.

* Linked: champions gain buffs from all live neighbors

* Solo Competitive: two players draw the same card, first to score any bingo wins.

* Alliance Competitive: two alliances draw the same card, fastest fight time to achieve blackout wins, every player in the alliance (of those that wish to participate) must do one fight first before any player can take a second fight.

What's the point? Battlerealm Bingo adds a unique strategic element to game play. The player gets to choose the order in which they defeat champions, and the order affects the difficulty by having each defeated champion become the next attacker. So thinking about which champions would be the best counter to other champions can have a significant impact on the player experience, and since each champion must be used once as an attacker and once as a defender (except for the last one) there are a lot of opportunities for theorycrafting. Having different intermediate reward paths (bingos) adds additional opportunities for interesting design: bingos could award not only resource rewards but also consumables useful to the content itself, like picking up a revive on a normal map.

I also think Battlerealm bingo is an interesting design concept, because it can be used in three different ways:

One: it can be used as an alternate form of Boss Rush content. Instead of going through it linearly, players can pick and choose their path. When used this way, I would probably allow for more than one attacker on the team (maybe three), so players can use more of their roster while still preserving much of the strategic planning element of the mode.

Two: it can be used competitively: two players can race to achieve bingo. Two alliances could race to achieve blackout (by fight time, not game time).

Three: it can be used as a platform to award Legends titles. Unlike the original legends runs which were timed through static content, legends runners would be choosing their own path through the cards so their skill in choosing order would influence their time. But conversely, this is less dependent on roster: you get *some* advantage in choosing free space, but the rest of the map timing is determined by skill: fighting skill, and path planning skill.

If someone else has suggested something similar in the past, I'm unaware of it or have forgotten about it. If so, my apologies.

Comments, questions, criticisms?

Comments

GroundedWisdom

I like it. It's giving me a mixture of vibes. It may even be a way to try Champs we don't currently have in our Roster, if the card is randomly generated.

TheBair123

this seems like such a fun thing to do. this is where having a playground mode would be so much fun. you would really be able to do this and time yourself and compete with others to see how fast it takes you

Wicket329

I’ve always thought a game mode that gave players limited access to champions they don’t have in their roster could be a lot of fun (and cause players to say “oooh I liked playing with them, I want them”). My thinking had been that champion just being on your team in an EQ, but I really like this.

Very cool concept. Could even make themed cards where each column or row has its own identity. Lots of different ways to play with it.

DNA3000

Question: with the game generating the card, what happens when a champion comes up that you don’t have? Does the game have the functionality to allow you to play with champions you don’t have, or will the card only be populated with champions you have?

The intent is for the card to be populated by champions without regard to what you have in your roster. Whatever it is, at whatever rank it is placed at, that's what you would get to use, for that one fight. This means you could be temporarily allowed to play with champions you don't otherwise possess. I consider this to be a good side effect.

GroundedWisdom

Question: with the game generating the card, what happens when a champion comes up that you don’t have? Does the game have the functionality to allow you to play with champions you don’t have, or will the card only be populated with champions you have?
The intent is for the card to be populated by champions without regard to what you have in your roster. Whatever it is, at whatever rank it is placed at, that's what you would get to use, for that one fight. This means you could be temporarily allowed to play with champions you don't otherwise possess. I consider this to be a good side effect.

Definitely a plus.

DNA3000

Could even make themed cards where each column or row has its own identity. Lots of different ways to play with it.

I thought about including this within the base idea, but then I realized that if you're hand crafting cards for content (as opposed to randomly generating them) then "identity" can mean something completely different here, because of the attacker swapping mechanic. For example, in normal content a path might have all evade champs, requiring you to bring evade counters. But here, a row with all evade champs doesn't work the same way, because one evade champ isn't automatically going to be a good option for another.

But if a designer wanted to be *really* sneaky, they could deliberately build in long chains of "this is good for that, but in an unobvious way" into the card. There are a lot of obvious counters out there: Quake vs Mordo, Torch vs Maw, etc etc. But there are a lot of less well known or unobvious counters out there, and placing them into a card deliberately to teach players that they exist and how they work would be a kind of cleverness you cannot currently place in the kind of content that exists now, because we have no idea if the players possess the counters you're trying to highlight.

Because you're essentially handing players attackers to use, the idea of path identity probably has a lot of possibilities I haven't even thought of yet, so that's one I decided to leave open for others to run with.

DNA3000

Question: do you place your most awesome attacker into free space, or your most weak sauce defender?

I suspect we should make a rule that says free space cannot be the last square targeted, to prevent people from placing one star colossus there.

The fact that I didn't think of this until just now is somewhat embarrassing, given how I know you guys all roll.

GroundedWisdom

Question: do you place your most awesome attacker into free space, or your most weak sauce defender?

I suspect we should make a rule that says free space cannot be the last square targeted, to prevent people from placing one star colossus there.

The fact that I didn't think of this until just now is somewhat embarrassing, given how I know you guys all roll.

I suppose it depends on who's on the board. Unless it's hidden until we place.

Wicket329

Could even make themed cards where each column or row has its own identity. Lots of different ways to play with it.
I thought about including this within the base idea, but then I realized that if you're hand crafting cards for content (as opposed to randomly generating them) then "identity" can mean something completely different here, because of the attacker swapping mechanic. For example, in normal content a path might have all evade champs, requiring you to bring evade counters. But here, a row with all evade champs doesn't work the same way, because one evade champ isn't automatically going to be a good option for another.

But if a designer wanted to be *really* sneaky, they could deliberately build in long chains of "this is good for that, but in an unobvious way" into the card. There are a lot of obvious counters out there: Quake vs Mordo, Torch vs Maw, etc etc. But there are a lot of less well known or unobvious counters out there, and placing them into a card deliberately to teach players that they exist and how they work would be a kind of cleverness you cannot currently place in the kind of content that exists now, because we have no idea if the players possess the counters you're trying to highlight.

Because you're essentially handing players attackers to use, the idea of path identity probably has a lot of possibilities I haven't even thought of yet, so that's one I decided to leave open for others to run with.

I love puzzles, so this is extremely my kind of thing. I was looking at your example board up top and saw Mojo on it so I immediately started thinking “okay, who on here best counters Mojo that I won’t need for a different matchup?”

It kind of reminds me of the second iteration of My Little Symbiote, where you had to figure out the optimal order in which to activate your prefights so that you were properly prepared for the next combat. This is a mechanically very different thing, but it definitely rhymes from a design perspective.

As for potential identities, we could see a line of evaders next to a line of evade counters. Do you take the time to alternate between the two to maximize your chance of making it through, or do you try to rush through the evade path with sun-optimal counters to try to get it done faster?

You could also have fun with multiple iterations of the same champion on the board. For example, multiple Blades and a lot of Dimensional Beings tagged champs could make an interesting board. Mostly Mystics but with a Torch or two to account for. All kinds of different challenges become available when the game is able to dictate both attacker and defender strength

DNA3000

Question: do you place your most awesome attacker into free space, or your most weak sauce defender?

I suspect we should make a rule that says free space cannot be the last square targeted, to prevent people from placing one star colossus there.

The fact that I didn't think of this until just now is somewhat embarrassing, given how I know you guys all roll.
I suppose it depends on who's on the board. Unless it's hidden until we place.

No hidden nodes. At least I don't envision hidden nodes being suitable here. The whole point is for players to think about what they want to do. Hidden nodes automatically take that strategic element away. If you're going to hide the nodes, there's no point in letting people pick anything.

GroundedWisdom

Question: do you place your most awesome attacker into free space, or your most weak sauce defender?

I suspect we should make a rule that says free space cannot be the last square targeted, to prevent people from placing one star colossus there.

The fact that I didn't think of this until just now is somewhat embarrassing, given how I know you guys all roll.
I suppose it depends on who's on the board. Unless it's hidden until we place.
No hidden nodes. At least I don't envision hidden nodes being suitable here. The whole point is for players to think about what they want to do. Hidden nodes automatically take that strategic element away. If you're going to hide the nodes, there's no point in letting people pick anything.

Fair point. That would be my angle, strategizing what I need.

DNA3000

It kind of reminds me of the second iteration of My Little Symbiote, where you had to figure out the optimal order in which to activate your prefights so that you were properly prepared for the next combat. This is a mechanically very different thing, but it definitely rhymes from a design perspective.

This resemblance is vague, but also not accidental.

Squirrelguy

I imagine that you’d have to think carefully with the free space and not just pick a great attacker/weak defender, but first make sure that there aren’t any fights that couldn’t be done with the available champs, and then make sure that at least one of the good champs can counter your attacker.

It would be super interesting if each column could access synergies from the others. For instance, the G column could be all symbiotes. You also could add in a mechanic where dead champs are removed from synergies, and you would have to prioritize fighting Knull first to remove his massive buff to all symbiotes, or something. Lots of potential. You could also just have themed columns for fun, like all the variations of spider-man (iron man, deadpool, etc), or most of the sinister six, or the OG MCU Avengers, or something. Could be easy to theme.

You could also pretty easily have each fight placed out on an island in a grid with portals leading to all other fights, as well as an ending node. It may be difficult to propagate a lot of unique versions of this, but it should be relatively straightforward to implement (maybe including some champion swapping aspect before each fight where the swap is mandatory and only the past champion is shown).

Hammerbro_64

A way to implement this: symbiote has a new persistent ability where a defeated enemy’s abilities overwrite his current ones, each lasting one fight

This makes the leapfrog mechanic work without a ton of infrastructure imo

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DNA3000

A way to implement this: symbiote has a new persistent ability where a defeated enemy’s abilities overwrite his current ones, each lasting one fight

This makes the leapfrog mechanic work without a ton of infrastructure imo

That could actually be very tricky to implement for a number of technical reasons. The way strikers were implemented probably hints at this. But also, we already have a mechanic to swap champs: the boss island portals that already allow players to swap champions onto their team. Those work voluntarily, but we should be able to use the underlying technology to force the swap without player intervention. The technical hurdle would be to allow players to use a champ they might not have on their roster. And once again, the implementation of strikers suggests this is not an insurmountable hurdle.

GinjabredMonsta

A way to implement this: symbiote has a new persistent ability where a defeated enemy’s abilities overwrite his current ones, each lasting one fight

This makes the leapfrog mechanic work without a ton of infrastructure imo

This makes me think of symbiotes as ditto and makes me happy

DNA3000

You could also pretty easily have each fight placed out on an island in a grid with portals leading to all other fights, as well as an ending node. It may be difficult to propagate a lot of unique versions of this, but it should be relatively straightforward to implement (maybe including some champion swapping aspect before each fight where the swap is mandatory and only the past champion is shown).

In theory you could do this, and in fact I considered this to be a positive aspect of the idea: it might be a radically new kind of content on the surface, but it doesn’t break from MCOC norms completely. It’s still very much MCOC. However, in practice I believe a 25-way portal mesh would be ugly and confusing for most players. The metaphor of the bingo card was something I chose because of its general familiarity to most people. People “get” bingo, which reduces the amount of documentation and explanation it takes to explain the concept to the average player.

This idea started as a modification to the standard boss rush style content with linked path segments. I wanted to make the paths less linear, where instead of going from easier to harder players could choose which the order of thee paths. But by itself that doesn’t mean anything, whether you do them easy to hard or hard to easy or whatever. Then I thought about the symbiote side quest where the order of the fights prompted players to try to find the best sequence of buffs. If you earned buffs on the paths, the order of the paths would matter. The. I considered switching from paths to fights. Each path had just one fight, so that instead of just four decisions you’d be making 24 decisions or more. But a mesh of cross links seemed too complicated, and that’s when I remembered the boss island swapping portals. Swap attacker after every fight. But this puts a ton of pressure on smaller rosters. And that’s where the idea of swapping the defender into the attacker came from: to solve the roster size problem.

All I needed then was a reasonable metaphor to explain this bunny hopping map, and that’s where bingo came into the picture. Blackout bingo matched the concept I was going for, and it eliminated the more busy idea of a maze of portals. The maze of portals was just an ugly way to implement the true gameplay option: picking the fights you want in the order you want.

Sounds pretty straight forward, but in fact it took many days of the ideas bouncing around to get from something vague and complicated to simple and specific. And I think a very important part of any gameplay idea is that it is as simple as it can be, and no simpler. It would be difficult to make this idea simpler. But it is still very simple to explain to the average player, which means players would spend more time playing it and less time reading about it, which is very important.