Hello again! For those of you who missed my first article, I’m Justin Gary, the Product Manager and Lead Game Designer for the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game. We are still about five months away from the launch of World of Warcraft Minis, and we are hard at work behind the scenes to get everything ready on time. In fact, even as I write this article I am en route to our minis factory where, along with our Art Director Jeremy Cranford and our friends at Blizzard, we are making the final tweaks to the minis before full production begins. It is a very exciting time for us, and I can’t wait to show you everything we have been up to for these last two and a half years. We have a lot of exciting things in store for you, so keep coming back to WoWMinis.com for more insights and minis reveals.

Time to Get Your Game On

I hope you have all been enjoying the last few months of articles and preview miniatures. We are very proud of how gorgeous our sculpts are, and we wanted to make sure you got to see them up close and personal, including some insight into the process of making them. As you might have noticed, however, we have been very tight-lipped about gameplay mechanics. Today, we are going to break the silence and shift the focus from our industry-defining sculpts to our revolutionary gameplay.

We take gaming very seriously at Upper Deck, and I think you’ll be as excited as we are at the way World of Warcraft Minis turned out. Over the next few weeks, fellow members of R&D and I will post articles focusing on the major mechanics and innovations so you can get an in-depth understanding of how World of Warcraft Minis works. This will all culminate in the release of a downloadable, printable demo of the game so you can all try it out for yourselves.

What Makes World of Warcraft Minis Tick?

This week, I wanted to start by explaining the core mechanic of the World of Warcraft Minis Game, which we call the Base10^™ Engine. Those of you who play World of Warcraft online know how important your damage per second (DPS) rate is, with subtle variations in attack speed, casting times, and cooldown determining the difference between a glorious victory and a horrible death. DPS combined with various other in-game resources (mana, rage, energy, and health) create interesting trade-offs that provide a deep gameplay experience.

We knew that we wanted to capture this dynamic in World of Warcraft Minis by using time as a resource. So, how do we make the subtle timing interplay of World of Warcraft online work in a minis game? Without the aid of a computer to track everything for you, we had to create a simple system to track game time that would be easy to use. This is accomplished via the game clock, a set of numbers from 1 to 10 on the side of the board.

Each round of the game starts with the clock on tick 1 (shown above). The clock slowly progresses from 1 all the way to 10 and then cycles back to 1 at the start of the next round. Basically, it works just like a regular clock, but with only ten numbers.

Here is where things get interesting: Each character has its own personal clock that is tracked on our specially engineered UBase^™ (more on this in a later article). When the game clock matches a character’s personal clock, that character gets to take a turn. During a character’s turn, it can pick from a variety of actions. Depending on what it does, the character will advance its personal clock by a certain number of “ticks” to pay for its action. For example, when Gorebelly takes a turn on tick 1 and swings his giant axe, it will cost him 3 ticks, advancing his clock from 1 to 4. After finishing his swing (and probably doing a lot of damage), he will have to wait until the game clock catches up to him before he can act again. Other characters, like Lotherin, have weaker attacks, but their attacks may only cost 1 or 2 ticks, allowing them to act more often.

Timing Is Everything

Those few paragraphs basically explain the core of the World of Warcraft Minis Game. But don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the engine! The ramifications of the Base10 system create endless variations and interesting decisions during play.

In your typical minis game, players will just alternate going back and forth in the classic “I go, you go” style of play . . . this can get pretty boring pretty quickly. In World of Warcraft Minis, when you get to do something next depends on what you decided to do previously. Clever players can set up powerful combinations by getting their characters to act on the same tick before an opponent has a chance to respond. Being able to make the most out of each tick you spend is key, but often it can be worth waiting for the right moment to strike. Instead of acting during their turn, all characters have the ability to “wait” by paying 1 tick. But don’t wait too long, or you will find yourself way behind as your opponent scores Victory Points by holding key locations or killing off your characters. (Look for more information on Victory Points and combat in future articles.)

Each character also gets to move up to two spaces for free on each of its turns. Because of this, how you spend your time also influences how quickly you can move around the board to take up key positions. If Dizdemona spends 4 ticks summoning a Voidwalker, she won’t be able to move again for a while, so she’s going to risk having some devious Rogue run circles around her to get a chance at a stealth attack.

Got Some Time on Your Hands?

That’s all I’ve got for this week. If my explanation of the Base10 engine has you hungering for more info on World of Warcraft Minis, come back next week for more insight into the game. Or, if you can’t wait that long, you can check out the Upper Deck booth at one of the many summer conventions we will be attending. Starting this weekend at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, we will be running live demos of World of Warcraft Minis, which will be open to all attendees! There is no better way to learn a new game than getting a demo from one of our knowledgeable and friendly booth staff. For those on the West Coast of the U.S., come by San Diego Comic-Con, where fellow members of the World of Warcraft Minis team and I will be there to demo and answer your questions.

We will be demoing and showing off World of Warcraft Minis at many other conventions as well, so check out our upcoming events schedule to find out if we are coming by your neck of the woods. But don’t worry if you can’t make it to these events! We will have full coverage right here on WoWMinis.com to show you all the excitement. Please post your comments and questions in the forums. We love to read your comments, and while we can’t answer all your questions (we can’t spoil everything all at once!), we appreciate the feedback, and it will help us determine what articles to write in the weeks to come.

See you next time!