Metal Justice is a fully cooperative, multiplayer card game where the players are a squad of Rebel mech pilots who take on a corrupt Solar Federation by playing against a programmatic “Mission Deck” that deploys enemy units, traps, gambits and other gnarly stuff against them turn over turn. Each mission has its own win/loss conditions and its own unique mechanical hitch(es). If that sounds cool to you, great! You’re the kind of player that Metal Justice is for; I really hope you and your friends enjoy it.
Thing is though, when I set out to create Metal Justice, like most people who plan to make a game, I didn’t have a fully realized vision of what I wanted to make. What I had was a drive to make something, and a sense of what the scope of that creation should be. I wanted to make a boardgame that was within the realm of what I could realistically design and produce a working prototype of, by myself; and I wanted a game that you could sit down, set up and play in an hour. Beyond that, it was a blank canvas.
Looking at the hefty shelves stuffed with my and my wife’s boardgames, I immediately asked the question: what kind of game do we want? What genres here do we like, but are maybe under-represented? We pretty quickly hit on the idea that we’d like more cooperative games; we have some (as of writing) like Pandemic, Sentinels, Spirit Island, Dead of Winter, Cyptozoic’s deckbuilder thing, ShadowRift, and the like. They’re varying degrees of cooperative, with a decent variety in mechanics, but if I wanted to keep the scope down and make a tight experience, something with less board and less moving parts would be a must. I could make another Pandemic, maybe; but another Spirit Island wouldn’t do.
Next up, player count. We play a lot of games just the two of us, but we like to have a friend of two over sometimes, too. Games for 4 players exactly aren’t hard to come by, but good games for 2 or 3 players can be a real challenge to find. Some games we own scale smoothly, some not so much. Okay, so I wanted a small piece count game that scales well; optimized for 2 or 3, but able to play 4 or 5. I still didn’t know what I was going to make, so it was time to take a break, make some dinner and play something in the evening with my wife after we ate.
We settled on a cooperative video game we enjoy, where you form a squad of mech pilots and take on varied missions with differing loadout requirements for the squad. The pace is a bit slow overall, but the combat can be pretty frantic, leading to a good variety in the experience. A lot of idle chatter over comms, followed by frenetic combat coordination and impromptu strategy once we make contact with the enemy. Made by a cool Canadian company, which I also appreciate.
Well, that settled it. We like big stompy robots, we like lots of team communication, we like fully cooperative game experiences. Why not make that? All it needed was a theme.
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