FenPaints
patreon
My Favourite Mechanics in Boss Battlers
🕑 Added 2023-06-16 09:00:02 +0000 UTCI am on record writing/saying that while I adore Kingdom Death: Monster's trailblazing position for the Boss Battling board game genre; it is the games which come afterwards and seek to improve/refine the systems that come after it that I am most excited for. KDM's own design is half rooted in the 1980s and early 1990s school of design; something which is both a benefit and a detriment to its systems. However, even if the game was absolutely rock solid and balanced, game design improves via inspiring other people to make their own iterations on the original.
In this article I want to celebrate the very best pieces of the mechanics across the board, because no one game has got it completely “right” for me and I seriously enjoy different aspects of each one on this list.
Note: I will not be writing about Sankokushin's mechanics in this list as the game is not yet ready for launch, but I will state firmly that if I could write about it, it would also be appearing on this list twice with new innovative and engaging mechanics.
AL and Hit Location Decks – Kingdom Death: Monster
One can't not start this list without acknowledging the single most important step that Boss Battlers took to separate themselves from the dungeon crawlers they spawned from. That step was the behaviour decks, not just an active behaviour for monsters the way that Gloomhaven and Descent's Coop modes used, nor a simple set of instructions that every monster uses in the same way, no.
This was a living breathing pair of engines that provide the enemy nuance, character and ways of scaling when they are essentially an automated puzzle battling four units controlled by humans. The odds are always stacked against the bosses when you go into these kind of things because of the lack of intelligence that these plastic minis have. The behaviour decks however give monsters a way of scaling against multiple foes while also expressing personalities, physical characteristics and species behaviour traits.
We had hit locations in roleplaying games for a long time, but KDM was the place where they made it to board games for automated enemies in a huge fashion.
Impactful & Thematic Terrain – Townsfolk Tussle
In many cases terrain often feels like an afterthought, for every boss fight with meaningful terrain like say the Hermesian Pursuer, Dung Beetle Knight, Alpha Temnos or Sunstalker there are ones where the terrain is almost incidental to the fight or absent altogether.
No game manages to marry its bosses with the terrain as well as Townsfolk Tussle. Each environment feels not just like a natural place where the boss could be found, but they often interact with the boss (or the bosses' final fight) and on top of that they also offer opportunities for additional tactics or even sometimes places where feats can be completed.
In a game where you would be fighting the same boss over and over, having fixed terrain can be a detriment because it adds to that same-y feeling that can result in a loss of engagement or even contempt, so there are benefits to randomised terrain. But when you have a given boss appearing at most once in a session and quite often not at all, you can craft a really well integrated, symbiotic relationship between the boss and their arena of choice.
Monster Behaviour Signals – Monster Hunter World: The Board Game
Honourable Mention to Aeon Trespass: Odyssey & Oathsworn
One of Kingdom Death's greatest shortfalls is caused by the way that its card backs are all identical for a given monster. The strength of this system is that it creates a world where the game is surprising, where each new card revealed is full of possibility and surprise. However, in a game which is as punishing as Kingdom Death, a game where there is such a large zero to one binary between success and failure, it turns out that players will flock towards ways of gaining information.
Kingdom Death's main ethos is the same as that of Fear & Hunger; it is an arbitrarily cruel and mean game that seeks to gain advantage over its players by punishing them for making bad decisions when they had no idea in the first place what the correct choice might be. This is at its most evident in the hunt phase and settlement phase cards, but it also applies to the showdown combat.
When you go to games like the three mentioned at the head of this section you'll find that the games each offer a different level of information on the monster's behaviour ahead of time. These range from ATO's signalling of what “level” the attack is (and also warning you about the signature super dangerous card); through to Oathsworn's straight up 'here's what's happening next, you work out how to handle it' level of trust in its players.
Monster Hunter World on the other hand hits a sweet spot I really appreciated. While the monster AI cards themselves are a little on the small side (which is not a mechanical detriment per say but it is a spectacle and readability failure) the information they provide is wonderful; on the left side of the card it tells you the target, on the right side it tells you what body part will be attacked. Learn the monster well enough through fighting and this becomes like a translated rendition of the dance in the video game (and Dark Souls/Elden Ring/Bloodborne). You get the “animation” signal that the enemy is about to do a certain attack, you learn what that is and with time and experience you react appropriately.
Ultimately what these three games all prove is that giving players some information about how a monster/enemy/boss is going to behave in advance does not make the game easier, in fact it actually frees the game up to do some really catastrophically powerful things with its bosses without feeling unfair because it has surprised you. If you want to experience how much this can improve a game's texture without making it too easy, try out playing KDM with the top card of the AI deck revealed at all times.
Crafting Gear – Kingdom Death: Monster & Monster Hunter
Crafting gear from a selection of assorted parts from the monster you just killed is something that Monster Hunter the video game series takes credit for; but KDM took that mechanic and translated it into board game form. So I cannot give full marks to APG for this one, they will have to share the award with their inspiration.
However, it is such a breath of fresh air to experience a combat based “dungeon crawler” style game that instead of having a shop where you go an purchase weapons, or chests you loot armor from. Crafting may be overdone in video games at the moment, but it's still fresh and youthful in the board game space and KDM's crafting is still something that is avoided by some boss battlers.
Gear Grid Tableau, Keywords and Gear Affinity – Kingdom Death: Monster
I will never stop beating this drum until designers get it into their heads; the biggest reason why Kingdom Death pulls the large majority of the content I write about it is because of that Gear Grid and Affinity system. Every single other Boss Battler in this list shies away from doing something similar and that is an absolute shame because it is the single best portion of Kingdom Death's entire experience. The way that you are given a blank slate of 9 slots and left to fill them with all sorts of different options and then you're also rewarded for matching up colours that are in orientations that fit together is a puzzle that will never grow old. Each time new gear comes out there's a whole new world of possibilities that sit waiting to be discovered.
The faults we experience in KDM's gear system are not a core part of the system itself, they're caused by the armor system. Because armor requires 5 of your 9 slots and armor points are such an important “health” stat in the game for all types of survivors, this means creativity is somewhat stifled except when you have Crystal Skin or Acanthus Doctor survivors. But the keywords synergies? The Red/Green/Blue affinities? The grid you arrange those little off-white squares on? That's all amazing and people in the designing portion of the industry need to start acknowledging that.
Weapon Decks & Stamina Management – Monster Hunter World: The Board Game
A Steamforged Games game making it on a best of list not once, but multiple times? Yup, absolutely - we're living in a weird timeline. The game is honestly a bit of a hot mess due to typos and a few elements which are mechanically sound but fail in the execution (looking at you time deck); but controlling your hunters is not part of that. MHW's (Monster Hunter World) stamina based system, which has you drawing and placing cards on a 5 slot board combined with limited cooldown is really interesting and asks a lot of challenging questions to the players while also feeling thematically accurate in the way that it represents fatigue causing hunters to need to take a bit of time to recover.
Quite often you'll find that player actions in boss battlers boil down to Move here and do one thing. Which means that while team tactics are important, individual actions become less engaging. MHW does not fall into that situation, each player's turn is not just a significant portion of the team's whole round but it's also filled with multiple decision points in respect to how many cards you can play, how full your board already is (aka how tired your hunter is) and what those cards can do. It is even a massively different texture of an experience when you move from one weapon to the next; something like the Lance feels a world of a difference from the Hammer. It is incredible how much flavour is baked into this system and it's something that should be making designers sit up and take note.
I'd also like to give a separate honourable mention to Oathsworn's full characters who have a their own “stamina” system with the rotating cards that gradually cool down; it's a in sweet spot where you can engage with manipulating the system to cycle efficiently without getting one too bogged down in the weeds of the mechanics.
Escalation – Aeon Trespass: Odyssey
I think it is hard to understate just how exciting and engaging Escalation is as a mechanic. In many boss battlers the experience is either mechanically flat; as in the units on both sides remain relatively equal in power from when they start to near the end of the fight. Or they demonstrate a winding down; where the combating units gather damage through injuries that limit their options and make them weaker and/or more predictable near the end of the battle.
ATO Throws that out of the window with its escalation system; a mechanic that has all of the combatants become more and more powerful the nearer they are to death. As you harm the Primordial it loses parts of itself and deeper, tougher portions are revealed, likewise as it gets injured it moves towards more and more dangerous behaviours as its rage mounts.
Escalation knows how to make Kaiju bosss battles feel epic.
Options for Simplified Hero & Complex Heroes - Oathsworn
Sometimes you want to play with people who are not serious gamers, or with younger players. And in these situations handing them a Gloomhaven Mercenary, Grecian Titan or Gear Grid bristling with weapons can be a complete turn off. Likewise when soloing it can be mentally exhausting to control multiple complex characters at once.
Oathsworn solved this by offering players the choice to switch to a simplified version of its various characters and made them still powerful and tactically deep with a few optional builds. I was so impressed with this that I am now a bit disappointed that Gloomhaven/Frosthaven can't do something similar. Well, they can, but they just haven't bothered with it and that is a crying shame.
I'd also like to give a quick honourable mention to Oathsworn's flexibility in letting players use dice or cards as randomisation mechanics for the game. You can even have different players using whichever system they personally prefer and have sessions where both are used on the table in the same battle.
Hexagonal Movement – Oathsworn
There is no two ways about it, just like the simple fact that the D12 is the best dice in the game Hexagons are the Bestagons. Hex movement can hard to wrap your head around when compared to Orthogonal/Diagonal movement on a square grid for large monsters and it can also create some tricky situations when designing area of effect attacks. Oathsworn however did it with aplomb, giving us a fantastic experience where units could now move in six different directions (as opposed to 4 or 8 when you use grids).
Hex movement in many battle games is already a common thing because of how interesting it can make the experience and it's also something adopted by the Gloomhaven series though they avoid multi-space characters at the moment.
Multiple Hit Location Decks – Studium: No Exit
The Inspiration for this list existing is the upcoming No Exit from Watchtower Games. When I played the demo and got to the boss at the end; there was a revelation that the boss had multiple different hit location decks to attack. You could only hit those from certain locations, the target numbers to hit them changes andthere is a special hit location card at the bottom of each deck as a reward for cutting through a particular body part and overcoming it. You're encouraged to move around and get to certain locations; and hitting these locations also provides additional texture in respect of
This is the kind of thing that I find as exciting an innovation as the Behaviour signals mentioned above and it's one of the reasons why I am of the opinion that supporting Studium: No Exit is something I want to do. (Also their “dungeon crawl” hallway section
Extreme Player Customisation – Marvel Champions, Ashes: Red Rains & Aeon's End
First of all, lets just marvel at the concept that there is not just one, not two, but three distinctly different card game based boss battlers that also let their players craft their own decks for the conflict. Whether it is before playing (Marvel Champions/Ashes) or during play via deck drafting (Aeon's End), it takes a remarkably robust and well designed set of mechanics to give this much freedom to players without the system breaking and falling apart.
Not only can you select different characters to play in these three games, each with their own specific wrinkles and alterations to the game's main mechanics, but also you can alter your decks either before starting or during play and that is super interesting in itself. This isn't Sentinels of the Multiverse where you are piloting a fixed style for a particular character; you get to flex and change the decks if you want to (or draft them differently in Aeon's End).
Also; shout out to all three of these games offering a boss battle in under an hour's playtime and while they're all together I'd also like to mention that the way these three games allow you to scale difficulty as you desire is fantastic.
Schemes – Marvel Champions
While one wins in Marvel Champions by defeating the villain (most of the time); the villain wins by advancing their main scheme to completion, in addition as well as putting out minions for players to fight, the villain will also generate side schemes which add additional challenges and obstacles for the players to overcome.
The wonderful part of this is it allows the game to not just be focused on dealing damage, stopping progression of the main scheme and removing side schemes is a whole massive thing in Marvel Champions and it adds a lot of additional nuance to the experience. In multiplayer you can have a hero dedicated almost entirely to thwarting schemes and they almost never run out of things to do. It's a great way to split the push and pull between the bosses and the players, some bosses scheme more, others attack more, many land somewhere in the middle.
Honourable mention to Aeon's End which has some of its bosses run alternative loss conditions that have to be handled by players. Aeon's End is really good at throwing curve balls at its players and no two bosses feel even remotely similar.
Rewarding Teamwork – Aeon Trespass: Odyssey
ATO has re-written the way that team composition can work in boss battlers with its token system. When one attacks in ATO; after the attack you can often leave tokens in a pool, these tokens exist to help the next attacking player's titan, at its most basic level these tokens help the next titan's attack to hit or to score damage. This means that even an attack from a titan who has a low chance of scoring damage is still important because they can be setting up another titan to come in next and land an extra devastating blow.
This system means that not only are failed attacks still capable of generating excitement, cohesion and tension; but also one can play a “set up” titan if you are so inclined. Such a titan exists not to exclusively cause wounds (but they are nice when they happen), but they are also there to make the next “main attacking” titan's blow more accurate and more likely to succeed. This doesn't even have to be your main focus for that titan, quite often you'll find you have two titans alternating set up for each other.
Other games offer teamwork through rewarding role specialisation; in boss battlers dedicating yourself to a particular role; be that frontline tanking, dealing damage or some form of healing/support/control will always perform better than trying to do everything with every character. Four jack-of-all-trades will always be less effective than a tank, dps, support, healer for example; ATO's token pool system takes this further and the game is better for it.
So that's it for me, that's all the mechanics I really love from the current boss battling games along with the games which either innovated/created them or showcased them the strongest. While I can't say for certain that my perfect game would include all of them, some of them might even be mutually exclusive, but I can say that they are the parts of each game that I engage with most heavily. What are some of your favourite mechanics? What mechanics from outside of the current boss battlers would you like to see?
