Gearhearts

Created:

Fall 2018

Materials:

Cardboard, Cardstock, Laser-Cut Acrylic, 3D Printed plastics (PLA and Resin),

Role:

Co-Game Designer, Co-Writer, Fabricator

Co-Creators:

Edanur Kuntman (Co-Game Designer, Graphic Design) and Jeff Petriello (Co-Game Designer, Co-Writer)

Featured in:

NYU Student Showcase 2019

Summary

Gearhearts is a cooperative tactical board game created as the final thesis project for the NYU Game Center’s MFA Program.

Gearhearts takes place in the post-climate apocalypse called “The Mosaic”, a patchwork wasteland of opposing ecological biomes. In the Mosaic, deserts border arctic tundras, and dense rainforests clash against craggy mountains. You play as a teenage pilot trying to survive in the Mosaic with a large, mechanical robot (Mech) salvaged from an ancient time.

With your mech, you will fight, salvage and navigate the wasteland through various scenarios made possible through an array of modular pieces.

Gameplay

While there are many missions and ways to play Gearhearts, the main mechanic behind the game revolves around the Gearheart. The Gearheart is the item that allows you to interact with the world with your mech. You have a deck of cards that have a set of commands you give your mech, such as move, attack, and interact. 

On your turn, you have 3 action points, which you can spend on the following:

• Inserting a command into the Gearheart

  • At the end of your turn, your mech will execute any command that’s in your gearheart. Those commands stay inside the gearheart until you use an action point to remove it.

• Removing a command into the Gearheart

  • You pull a command from the Gearheart and put it back in your hand. 

• Switching commands inside of the Gearheart

  • Each card has two commands. You can use an action to turn a card inside of the gearheart to it’s other command.

• Healing a point of damage

  • Damage is direction based, when a side is damaged, commands in the damaged slot don’t execute.

At the end of your turn, your mech executes the commands. The order of command execution starts from the northern position of the mech, and then goes clockwise. Players take turns spending action points and executing commands, fighting monsters and accomplishing goals. The crux and appeal of the mechanic is the conflict between direction and timing of execution. 

For example, if a mech wanted to both move north and attack a location to the northeast, they would have to pull and place their commands carefully, making sure that their mech isn’t moving out of position before attacking an enemy.

Postmortem

Gearhearts began as an ambitious project to create a prototype of the world’s first massively multiplayer board game. Our initial plans were to prototype a system in which different sessions of the same board game would effect each other in different ways. Development took a turn when we landed on our main mechanic, what would become the “Gearheart”. We then shifted gears and spent the rest of our year honing this core mechanic to provide robust gameplay experiences— while also making sure it was versatile enough to give us room to create scenarios that our players could play in.