Harebrained Schemes co-founder and legendary game designer Jordan Weisman (Shadowrun, BattleTech, MechWarrior, Mage Knight, HeroClix) has designed a new game that bridges the physical and digital worlds. Golem Arcana is played on terrain with miniatures aided by a tablet or smartphone. We spoke to Weisman, co-founder of Harebrained Schemes, at Gen Con (occasionally aided by Harebrained producer and metrics analyst Brian Poel). In Part 1, Weisman talks about the game play and the technology. In Part 2, he gave more game details and talked about what retailers can expect. In Part 3, we talked about the Kickstarter, the product configuration, and the company behind it. Tell us about your new game.
Weisman: Golem Arcana is really an attempt in the same kind of vein that WizKids was. The goal of WizKids, with the Clix system, was to make miniature games much more accessible, faster playing, but not lose the depth of play. Here this takes that to a much further extreme. We take advantage of the supercomputers we all carry in our pockets now. We’ve created this stylus that allows you to tap the figures, tap the map, and all that data flows to your smart phone or tablet, so that all of the record-keeping, and the math, the reference look ups is done in that device.
Bastion was trying something like that at one time (see "'Ex Illis' Publisher to Cease Operations"), correct?
Weisman: Indeed. I think there have been several attempts over the years. I think we’ve finally found a tech that allows it to be really seamless. Before you had to manually enter all sorts of information; here all you do is just tap the name of the figure, the figure information comes up on screen. You tap the square you want to move to, it figures out is that a legal move or not? If so, you’re off to that square.
What do you mean tap the square, on the playing surface?
Weisman: So these are small maps for demos. You’ll see, (the player) taps the name of the figure…
So you use a handheld device that connects to a tablet or phone via Bluetooth?
Weisman: Exactly. It’s a Bluetooth device. We’re using a technology of microdots. So the map is covered with microdots, all the icons around the base of the figure are covered with microdots, and then the microdots are read by the handheld device and transmitted via Bluetooth to either your smart phone or tablet.
What’s a microdot?
Weisman: The technology is called OID; it’s been around for about 5 or 6 years.
What does that stand for?
Weisman: Optical ID. It’s really clever. It basically uses carbon ink, which you can print on a normal printing press and then inside, our device has an infrared light and an infrared camera. The carbon ink absorbs the infrared energy, which is read by the camera.
Is the app iOS or Android?
Weisman: iOS, Android and Windows (for Windows phones and Surface and so on).
Are those free apps, then you pay for the miniatures?
Weisman: Exactly. The game is sold at retail. We’re projecting a $75.00 retail price. It comes with the stylus, six large scale fully painted and assembled figures; the map is in tiles, on heavy 50 point board, tiles that you can build any of the map you want for play, and then more tile sets to be available so you can expand into much bigger games.
It’s a point based system, like WizKids’ MageKnight or HeroClix. You establish how many points of armies you want to build and then the armies are constructed out of the Golem figures: Golem Knights, which are digital characters you get from the app; and Ancient Ones, which are Gods you can get blessings, curses and miracles from. So it mixes digital characters and physical characters together on the game.
How do the physical and digital characters interact?
Weisman: It’s all driven by the physical characters--because this is a tabletop game, it’s not a video game. We think about the tablet like a scoreboard; it’s not the game, it’s just the scoreboard. What you do is assign the digital characters to a figure, and then their benefit then becomes part of the figure. It gives you abilities that that character wouldn’t have had by assigning that pilot to it.
The way it would be packaged would be a starter set (six figures, six tiles, the stylus, a bunch of digital characters) and then there will be additional figures available.
Weisman: That’s correct. The players share one stylus and you can share one phone or tablet, or if you each have your own phone, that’s fine. Phone or tablet, whatever you want. Anything from Kindle up to an iPad, or any pad. Anything that has Bluetooth 4, which became the standard around mid-2011.
So how do you use the stylus in play? You said it knows where you are, it knows your moves, but how does it know that?
Weisman: How it works on my turn, I can use all of my figures. So the first thing I do is tap the name of a figure, to activate that figure, then I tap the board where I want to move that figure, then I move the figure there, to make sure it is a legitimate move, tap it again to confirm, I move the figure there.
Then I tap one of its attack names and then I tap the name of the target I want to shoot, and (the game) says 'you can’t shoot him--blocked line of site.' So then I tap a different name, and it says 'He’s out of range.' So I tap this guy, he’s in range, so I have to roll a 62 or better to hit him. Ok I want to do that! I tap the name again to confirm or I roll physical dice if I want and enter the numbers. If I hit, it tells me the damage and any special abilities that took place as a result.
So all that math, all of the modifiers, all that kind of stuff you normally have to do is all done for you. So you can just focus on the strategy and tactics and not on the drudgery of record keeping and math.
Poel: It also opens up different kinds of tactics and strategies that would be burdensome to track if you didn’t have that computer. So we can have powers that have cool downs. So rather than have little chips that you have to keep track of for when you can use that power again, the computer lets you know 'oh! I can only use this every third turn, or second turn.' You can have really massive attacks that you only get to use once, every once in a while. That would be impractical for a more standard miniatures game.
Weisman: The other big thing that is really a key feature of the fact that it’s all digitized is that, how many times have you set up a big table of miniatures, you get halfway into the game, and then you have to clear the table for dinner? Now you just hit 'save game.' It saves the status of everything, you clear it all off, you hit 'resume game' and it shows you where every figure was, it has everybody’s game stats completely saved so you can pick the game up and just continue from there.
Click here for Part 2.
