Mech Championship Arena

Link to full rules documents on Github

This is a board game prototype I made about constructing giant robots and fighting each other with them. It’s sort of a tableau builder, in that you are laying tiles in specific ways, but it’s in service of the main fighting game premise. There’s even some worker placement in there too!

I’d love to return to this at some point. The concept stems from my love of “mechs” - giant, pilotable robots - and a feeling that in games they often never feel like truly giant robots, nor like you are really piloting one rather than just that you are the mech. Thinking about this is what caused me to land on the idea of a player moving around within a mech - providing that feeling to the player that the mech was explicitly separate from the pilot, and that it was so big you had to move into different rooms within it just to control it. The rest of the game was built around that initial concept, combined with the idea of building your own mech over the course of the game. As a result, some parts of the game I think are a little underbaked - the damage and money system could use an improvement, and though I like the general idea I came up with for a movement/range system I think in practice it has some flaws I didn’t foresee. However, I still love that core idea I came up with, and I’d love to iterate on this design more some day.