RTS Hex Game Iterations

The aim of the game was to eliminate other players, movement was implemented through a series of cards, which included: Move (in the current facing direction three spaces), Turn and move (only by one angle, in either direction and move 3 spaces), Turn (in any of the six available directions) and Fire, (fires in the current direction, eliminating players on that path). Each player would decide their move, and lay the appropriate card simultaneous to the other players laying their chosen cards, the moves would then be carried out in the same order as written above.

The problem we found with this game is that it could go on for a long time, when it got down to just two players, they would constantly try to out manouvre each other but with no prevail, this would continue until one player would purposely lose so the game could be reset, and the other players who are out join in again.

The iterations we made to the game included:

Walls The walls in the game were simply clusters of shaded hexes, which provided obstacles that could not be crossed or shot through, they would also act as cover that could be used for more tactical play, unfortunately the walls had little effect on the game, especially if a player tried to use the walls as cover, as it would slow down the game, and not necessarily give an advantage to the player.
Portals The portals on the board were simply a few hexes spread across the board with a spiral symbol on, these could be used to teleport to any other portal, when entered by a player. This had a mild affect on the game as on a few occasions a player could warp to a position behind another player, which would give an advantage, but this worked well rarely.
Turn and fire card The turn and fire card was implemented as we found that on many occasions players were faced with a situation where if they were able to turn and fire they would be able to eliminate a player. We decided to have this card as a one use only, which in hindsight may not have been the best choice, as it was a card designed to speed up the game play and tactics, once it was used it was not regain-able.
Sprint card  The sprint card allowed a player to move up to six hexes, in one turn, again like the turn and fire card this was one use only, so didn't help to speed up the game much. With both of these added cards we should have implemented a way to regain the ability, possibly by collecting tokens from points on the board, or simply by a regeneration over a number of goes (although the latter would be harder to keep track of)

Overall I think are iterations were not very affective but, were close to improving the game if they had been tweaked slightly. Even if they had been I think the game would still be lacking something, I felt it needed a different objective as the 'eliminate the other players' objective, seemed to make for a very simple game that would rapidly get boring for the players, perhaps introducing a capture the flag or king of the hill objective would have worked better for this game and should have been what we implemented, rather than implementing different tools to improve a game with a poor objective.