One thing I’m not stopping myself from buying this year is rule books. Miniature agnostic rule books are really in a renaissance right now as people realize they probably have tons of minis (painted or unpainted) that can be used to quickly play a new tabletop minis game. Spearheading this field for me are games like Frostgrave, Rangers of Shadow Deep, or Five Parsecs from Home. Friend Colton threw a link my way for another game option:
Hametsu is billed as simply: “A game of high fantasy feudal Japanese monster hunting.” It is launching right now by Black Site Studios and is written by Doug Cundall. To be clear, I’m not affiliated with Black Site Studios or the author. I love feudal Japan and have a good amount of minis from all the Test of Honour that I played so I was very interested, especially with the solo/co-op angle they were promoting.
Sadly, I don’t really have fantasy feudal minis in my collection so I’ll have to hold off (no new minis this year) but it got me thinking about the whole “Monster Hunting” miniature game genre.
Hametsu the game looks awesome. The art shows these great scenes of a lone hero going up against a single, terrifying foe. This really struck a chord in me so I went hunting to see if there were other games out there like this. What I found was mostly board games like Kingdom Death Monster: big, pricey kickstarters driven by minis money and several still haven’t shipped yet after several years. This is common with kickstarters but it makes it hard to judge if these games are any good.
One trend I noticed was the games are co-op first, solo second. The games assume a group of players and consequently, a group of characters. Maybe some of these can pair down to a single hero but I’m really chasing after that epic inspiration from the art. Primal: The Awakening has that great terrifying monster in a showdown with the small hero. Monster Hunter is based on the video game of the same name with a similar premise but none of them are that single hero against overwhelming odds.
I get it. As a solo player, I can control multiple heroes but can’t simply add more heroes to a game if I want to push out the player count. Or rather, it can’t be done easily as scaling that balance is tricky. The economics driving the product works better if it can sell to both solo players and co-op groups.
But that is not what I want so I turned back to Hametsu only to find that it plays with a group of characters as well. All those beautiful 1v1 epic struggles are just conceptual art and not how the game plays, nearest I can tell. Doing a further scouring, I was hard-pressed to find any system that deals with a single protagonist hero fighting boss monsters in a strictly miniatures game. There are RPGs or traditional board games that fit that bill nothing on the level I hunger for. The economics of the venture must be coming into play or my want is so niche that I would need to dig very deep to find the gem I seek.
Or screw it, I’ll make my own! With the sad state that Joan of Arc is in, I would like to find a good use for the minis. I have some other ideas as well like Rangers of Shadow Deep or Lions Rampant and select Joan of Arc scenarios will be fine but this is a big batch of minis that seem to tick all the boxes for what I need to fulfill this solo hero monster hunter concept.
I’m in the early stages of both sketching out possible mechanics but also conceptualizing what I would like this game to do. It has been a while since I did a solid game design from the ground up. I play with variant ideas often but there is something even better when making a system up on your own. Of course, I’m not on my own. I don’t play games in a vacuum and really most game concepts are derivatives of some other mechanic down the line so whatever I make will hardly be new. But, still it’ll be combined in hopefully new and compelling ways and, if nothing else, puts those lonely Joan of Arc minis to good use. The working title is called “Valor.” Maybe it will have some follow on name equally as vague or boringly specific.