It is time I really got more diligent about doing updates on the game I have been designing for years, Surrounded By Danger.

I say “have been designing” but it is designed. As I said last time, I have had a fully functioning prototype of the game for like two years, as seen in the image above (taken on my floor because I don’t own a table capable of playing the game I designed). I don’t want to give away all the secrets of Surrounded By Danger, and let some unscrupulous game designer poach all my ideas, but I need to post something about it. So I will now begin a hopefully-monthly look at what I have so far.

The main thing about this game is that I wanted it to be cooperative. I am not a competitive person by nature, I often find competition to be annoying and childish, and when playing board games it is hard for me to care about who wins, especially when me working toward victory means working toward someone else’s failure. But if we’re all working together, suddenly I can care. I’m not vying against my friends, I am helping them. So obviously I wanted my game to be cooperative.

The coolest form of cooperation is, of course, when action heroes are standing back-to-back with a horde of enemies around them. So that’s what the game is. Originally the game was intended to star characters from my webcomic Secret Government Robots, but that version of the game was too complex. If I wanted to finish the prototype, I had to simplify. Well, what is the simplest kind of horde that can surround action heroes? Zombies. There’s a reason about fifty percent of videogames for decades had them in there. The version of the game of which I currently have a prototype exists under the working title “Surrounded By Danger: Zombie Mode”

Each player in Surrounded By Danger is one of the action heroes who are struggling through a zombie outbreak in Flagport City. Surrounded By Danger is a game with a lot of cards. There are two main decks that matter, the Crowd Deck and the one currently being called the Shift Deck.

The Crowd is the actual opponents who are surrounding our heroes, in this version it is mostly zombies but also some baddies who are revelling in the chaos and a handful of innocent bystanders. Each hero can only handle so many foes at a time before they are overwhelmed, and if one hero falls all the others do as well. There are 150 cards in the Crowd! When designing the game I wanted a couple things: it needs to really feel like you are surrounded, and each time you play it should feel like you can be surprised. The game is designed to take only about 20 or 30 minutes, so you should be able to play a handful of times and not see everything in the Crowd.

The Shift Deck is so named because it represents the shifting circumstances of the combat. Sometimes it can be good things, often it is bad things. Each turn, whichever fighter is in the Lead role (that’s as in “leading” the others, not in the lead competitively) has to draw from this deck and deal with the result. The most important cards in this deck are DANGER cards. If four DANGER cards come into play, the players lose! But the thing is, DANGER cards are akso the only way to win this game: they have conditions on them which, if met, means they can be turned into a VICTORY card. If you get enough of those, everybody wins.

That’s enough for this time, I think. I’ve certainly got the basics across, but there is a lot more to it.

If I were the Invaders by this point I would have a long list of everyone that David Vincent knows so that we wouldn’t accidentally stumble into his life and have him show up and ruin our plans. In this one it turns out that Vincent’s college roommate, Ted Willard, has been caught up in an Invader plan that had nothing to do with Vincent and Vincent comes and saves the day.

Ted and his brother, Martin, run the Willard Sanitarium. Martin is working with an Invader named Adam who is testing a new device for controlling humans. Mostly they were testing on patients, who ended up dying, but when Ted found out what was happening they decided to test it on him (Martin agrees, because the alternative is to just kill Ted). But it turns out that before they got to Ted, he sent a letter to his old friend David Vincent for help.

It all goes as expected. Vincent shows up, investigates, in the end the Invaders are stopped. Vincent gets a scene where he gets to avoid being run over by a car. We also have Ted’s fiance Janet in the mix. Oh, and Vincent’s rich friend Scoville turns out to own a company that services some machines in the sanitarium, so he has one of his employees go in under the guise of a yearly checkup or whatever, and I was surprised and pleased that that guy survived.

The device they’re testing is basically just an upgraded version of the hypnotism they already always use, but I guess for use at a longer range. I was very disappointed to learn that, in spite of the title of the episode, the device wasn’t allowing the Invaders to actually possess the bodies of humans and drive them around. Oh well. Anyway, Martin Willard is working with the Invaders because he is convinced they are going to win and he thinks that if they can just take over the world leaders and surrender, it will result in fewer deaths. In the end, Ted has to kill his brother to stop the plan, but Ted and his fiance get to live on as a new ally of Vincent and Scoville (and employee guy), so it’s a victory in spite of the tragedy.

Superman is in the WW2 again…

The Nazis have a secret base in Africa (presumably) where the Baron Strucker-lookin’ boss is posing as a god to make the locals serve under them (and also they have gun turrets build into some statues, which I do have to respect). Naturally Lois Lane is flying over and gets shot down and captured by the Nazis, which brings Superman’s attention to the whole thing. Together, Lois and Superman stop the Nazis’ plan, get some U-boats imploded, and make Hitler sad.

It’s a decent showing for Lois here. I’ve said it before I’m sure, but she has a reputation for being a “damsel in distress” that I think is undeserved. Sure, she’s rescued by Superman, but she’s not just a woman kidnapped because she’s a princess to be held for ransom or anything. At every point she is an active participant in this battle against the Nazis, hiding the important documents, resisting torture, and disguising herself to sneak into the base and radio the Allies. Sure, Superman takes a few rounds of turret fire directly in the back, but Lois is no slouch.

Also: it feels like it’s almost too obvious to say, but say it one must: the depiction of the African tribe isn’t great. It’s very in keeping with the way the genre treated Africa at the time (with Superman’s comics in particular not being any exception) like superstitious primitives. While this cartoon was being made actual African armies, not beloinclothed spearmen, but actual modern armies were actually fighting in the war. I can dislike the way the cartoon depicts its Natives, but even these days Africa’s role in the war is downplayed in movies or videogames that would rather just keep retelling America storming Normandy over and over. Still, that annoying fact doesn’t make this cartoon’s depiction any better does it?