My birthday falls in early April. It's unclear if Jason knows what day it is, but he generously threw me a birthday party at The Game Parlour. One Discord member thought that MMA Gauntlet had King of Tokyo vibes. We got to play it at the party. I really enjoyed the game and could see similarities between the games.
In King of Tokyo, every player chooses a monster persona to compete in the quest for citywide dominance. I selected "Kraken," the game's take on Cthulhu. The goal is to knock out all the other monsters or score 20 points. By comparison, MMA Gauntlet only has one win condition. Both games are trying to deliver that melee beatdown vibe. King of Tokyo feels way more battle royale while MMA Gauntlet had a more one-versus-one vibe. I will say having a character piece to put into the middle of the city was a strong image. Jason and I discussed a playmat for MMA Gauntlet, and after playing King of Tokyo, I think MMA Gauntlet definitely needs a ring for character cards to enter.
Mechanically speaking, King of Tokyo and MMA Gauntlet used dice rolling to simulate combat. However, the timing of the rolls was different. MMA Gauntlet had players simultaneously rolling for discrete combat. King of Tokyo had turn-based rolling. The rolls in Tokyo served other purposes than just laying the smackdown on your opponents. There are points to chase, energy to collect to evolve your arsenal. The gameplay in King of Tokyo revolved around moving in and out of the city to control the territory and accumulate resources. The currency in the game lets you buy abilities that change how the base characters behave mechanically. Adding abilities over the course of the game and putting together combinations of abilities made for a very compelling way for characters to evolve.
The biggest thing I've been considering as I iterate and develop MMA Gauntlet further is how to bring in a way for characters to scale or progress over the course of the game. As we’ve discussed, scaling is a big part of the fun factor for auto battler games, and I’m more and more convinced that my physical approximation needs ways to scale. There are a couple of solutions I'm currently considering. Drawing inspiration from King of Tokyo, I'm considering how to add a currency system that would enable characters to add abilities or states between fighting rounds. The second possibility is having more characters but having different tiers of buy rows where players buy an evolved or specialized version of characters that they have previously bought. That solution would also give me a chance to approximate the three of a kind rule in digital auto battlers where you get a stats boost and a cool treasure to add to your board when you get your third duplicate. I’m looking forward to sharing an updated version of MMA Gauntlet sometime down the road.
We played two games of King of Tokyo. The first was a crash course in learning where we blitzed our way to everyone getting knocked out. The second game was a bit more strategic. Jason snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with one of the most classic misplays of our friendship. I’ll leave that story for him to tell another time.
— Mark
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