FIELDS OF VISION: DEVELOPMENT AND IDEAS

The fields of vision in the book are a really interesting and fun aspect of the game. Each dinosaur has three fields of vision: frontal, peripheral, and rear. Dinosaurs can make target various areas and make various attacks, depending on which field the enemy is in.

This is a large part of the "predator / prey" relationship, that we aim to emulate in the book. We demonstrated the way this works with visual diagrams in the book (seen below in a screen snap) but we have been discussing how to explain this to players in a physical context at the games table.

Players can for the most part work these areas out by eye, but we feel it important to explain it where possible with photographic examples, perhaps in a few ways. Failing that, we considered providing a paper template but because people will be using variable collections of dinosaurs, some larger than others, it's difficult to give people a "catch all" template.

Much development time was put into this template idea, and eventually it was scrapped, mainly because it just wasn't very "multi-use" and it seemed people would have to download and re-size one for their own force.

One of our key aims with Cretacea is to keep it simple, so we had a serious think about the template and went back a few steps...at which point we realised something very basic: by simply placing a straight edge between the back-corner of a base and the diagonally-across front-corner, one can easily determine the areas of vision, so long as players are being fair with their basing allowances. 

More updates on this will come. As with most rules writing issues, when you're working with a book inspired by documentaries as opposed to older and established games, we do our best to keep things simple, fun and quick to grasp.

​Wicked Wargames