As a Canadian kid, I spent most of my childhood playing in the snow, building forts and slides, and imagining the craziest snow fight scenarios. In my memories, these were the biggest and the best snow castles ever; unbreachable and with perfect hidden passages. Of course, this is from my child's perception... The movie La guerre des tuques (1984) certainly played a huge role in all this fantasy.
I since then always had in mind to create a video game under that same theme, but I knew this was more than ambitious. I then had this idea of creating a board game instead. That was the first game I started designing in July 2019.
As of today, the idea is the following :
Winter Solstice is a 2-5 player Area Control / Action Selection game where players compete in the most ruthless snowball fight since La Guerre Des Tuques.
Each player controls 4 unique characters over a modular hex-tile map and have a limited amount of actions they can take on their turn to make their characters move, take a ranged attack, build snow constructions to defend themselves and use their unique ability.
No luck involved, just pure strategy. The game thus feels a lot more like a medium-weight Euro than a regular War Game.
... but the game did evolve a lot since the begining.
At first, the game was supposed to be a 2-player skirmish game using a fixed hex-tile board. In fact, it is just recently that I decided to move away from that idea and start exploring the 2-5 player version with a modular board. It think it is for the best.
The first version of the game also used an Action Points system using dice. But I hate dice.
The new system is simple, but adds good depth in terms of planning. Each Player controls 4 Heros (selected through a draft), that each have 3-4 action slots such as "move", "range attack", "build" and "special". Each Player also have 4 Action Tokens. During their first turn, the Players place their Tokens on action their Heros' action spaces and take the actions. For all the subsequent rounds the Players must MOVE the tokens they previously placed to a different AND unoccupied location, one token at a time, take the action immediately, and then flip the Token to the B-Side to indicate it has been moved. The Players continue until all four Tokens have been flipped. Then it is the next player's turn.
The Heros all have different attack range, speed and special ability. Some can build terrain upgrade, others can't. Some even can attack twice.
Playtesting should become shortly on Tabletopia. Stay tuned to get more updates !