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Hi I have for a number of years off and on been thinking about 2 variations of duel games and I even had a rough prototype at one point but thanks to I’ll health and procrastination by the time I came to do something with it another game used almost exactly the same system which killed that for me.

However my main concern is that knowing a lot of miniature gamers are how can I say it, adverse to change or new ideas I’m not sure if there is even a market for such a game.

So in my first idea basically you have 1 miniature in a small play area fighting an honour duel against another player with melee weapons in a fantasy/medieval type setting. You chose your weapons and your techniques/school and this can give a fairly large number of combinations of attacks and defensive options, you can also choose to take armour or not although more armour will slow you down it will provide better protection. The game is themed after my love of Akira Kurosawa films and marital arts movies and I want a cinematic feel rather than being totally historically accurate so movement is a major part of the game and if you do go toe to toe then expect a swift bloody conclusion to the game. If I could make a small range of miniatures that could be kitted out with weapons of your choice so bodies reflecting there armour level unarmoured,light,medium and heavy both male and female and then weapon kits do you think people might be interested?

The second Idea I have is for a sci fi game in which again you control 1 model but this time on a bigger play area including 3D scenery and against 1 or more players up to about 5 maybe 6 I need to test more to dial that in. Basically again movement is a big part of the game and includes jumping, wall running and all that good matrixy stuff but this time will include gun combat as well as melee. The very rough premise is a sect of cyber ninja training among themselves preparing for combat against a forthcoming enemy. You pick your armoured suit type that gives you your base stats and a standard ability and then you pick your weapons one set of ballistic and one set of melee, the weapons all have standard stats but you get to pick a perk for each to add some customisation.

While I am aware the above is all very vague I really just want to get a feel if there is even a market for a game where you basically only need one miniature but you get a fair amount of customisation options to make it feel your own. I would say while I want to keep the rules quick it would still give me room to be able to make them quite crunchy and still have a nice layer of fluff and hopefully keep a handle on balance.

It's hard to say what people might be interested in. For my experience in creating a board game that can be run as a duel, the rules and whatnot are much less important than the art and components. GKR Heavy Hitters by WETA, for example, generally isn't described as a great game in the reviews, but people are just excited by the models and stuff in the box. There's a bunch of WWE and knock-off wrestling skins out there too.

I think that a 1v1 duelling game would need some very good mechanics for countering, anticipation and the like, if it's just a slugfest it will get quite boring quite quickly - it needs to represent the players skill at using their chosen character, not the power of the character of the luck of the draw.

I imagine that some sort of mortal kombat game would be an option, with combos scoring you points as much as hurting the opponent. I might make such a game as:
6 different types of card in a deck: light attack, heavy attack, advance, fall back, dodge and block. players get a hand of cards to utilise from the deck, and play one at a time, face down and then flipped. Actions for each player have an initiative which never repeats (like roborally) so you know which order to play them in. have effects from attacks like knockback etc. which can affect things, EG if you are both in 1" range, both perform a 1" range heavy attack. The player with highest initiative on their heavy attack resolves it first, and knocks the opponent back. The opponent then performs their attack, but is too far away.

balance by making the faster units less likely to cause knockback and you have the basis for a system.

(I know you weren't asking for ideas but I have way too many so need to write them down somewhere!)

I can see it being interesting as a game, although you'd need some very clever rules design to make it feel sufficiently fast (there's an old hex-and-counter wargame about wild west gunfights that takes dozens of minutes to play out a single "quick" draw for example - that's not fun) while still adding enough detail to make the players feel like there's enough going on. The visual appeal is going to be difficult, though - anything smaller than a 4" action figure is going to look rather small and lost on a tabletop.

(hmm; rules for Star Wars lightsaber duels, there's an idea ...)

From an different standpoint (about RPG), I strongly suggest you look for "Musha Shugyo" - which is an beat-em-up Rpg (an available in English I believe).

It is an rpg to create the classice arcade videogame of fighting like Tekken, Street Fighter etc.
Itused moves, attacks, counters, combos etc. but has a little section about detailing your journey (the musha shugyo is the warrior wandering), writing your warrior experience and progession and so on (it helps giving a little meaning to the succession of fighting).

So, if that can work for an Rpg, it may definitely work for a miniature game. Maybe it will lacks a little the collecting aspect which is a great driver in wargaming?

But, from a design perspective, I think it's wrong to think about it a miniature game. Because the miniature serve a purpose about exact positioning, scenic effect and so on.
I feel that the setting of 1vs1 arena denies almost, if not all, those aspect.

I suggest you approach it as a card game (or dice game) that use miniature for scenic effect. Unless, of course, like in "Wing of War", you are able to leverage on the specific feature of the miniature (and even Wing of War feels much more like an hybrid of a card game, a boardgame and a wargame then anything else).

Speaking of duels, Magic The Gathering is basically a duel, right?

As is chess. Checkers. Pushfight, and many others.

The question is not can a 1 vs 1 game be good/popular. They can. Its how solid is the games mechanics? How easily to play but with great depth? If the game has characters made up of hard counters to other characters its not interesting.

Hi thanks for all the replies its given me some things to think about. I am leaning more into the 2nd idea for the sci fi themed game as I think that is the easier one for me to visualise were it's going at the moment.

It's also the one I had furthest along before I'll health and procrastination struck

 Lance845 wrote:
As is chess. Checkers. Pushfight, and many others.

The question is not can a 1 vs 1 game be good/popular. They can. Its how solid is the games mechanics? How easily to play but with great depth? If the game has characters made up of hard counters to other characters its not interesting.

I was thinking in terms of what it is thematically. Chess isn't thematically a duel, as it represents a number of combatants. Two Queens facing off against each other would be a duel, but then the issue becomes how to make that interesting. In professional wrestling you get colour from whatever story-line is going on, the personas developed by the wrestlers, and then a ring that they can bounce around in (and sometimes out).

There's a game..Sons of Mars or something, that is about having a Gladiator school and having your gladiators fight in an area; I suppose 1v1 duels would be present there, but mixed with 'team deathmatch' or fighting agasint lions and such

Nurglitch wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
As is chess. Checkers. Pushfight, and many others.

The question is not can a 1 vs 1 game be good/popular. They can. Its how solid is the games mechanics? How easily to play but with great depth? If the game has characters made up of hard counters to other characters its not interesting.

I was thinking in terms of what it is thematically. Chess isn't thematically a duel, as it represents a number of combatants. Two Queens facing off against each other would be a duel, but then the issue becomes how to make that interesting. In professional wrestling you get colour from whatever story-line is going on, the personas developed by the wrestlers, and then a ring that they can bounce around in (and sometimes out).

The fluff is just trappings you put over the mechanics. How you explain what the mechanics represent is very different from the way the mechanics actually interact and the gameplay that emerges. Can a 1 v 1 duel be popular is a question of can a 1 v 1 game have engaging deep game play. The answer is yes.

Ace of Aces inspired a similar book-based duel game called Lost Worlds. Flying Buffalo Games still prints some of them. So there is a small market out there.

When I was in high school there was a system which claimed to be the ultimate in close combat realism: whether that was true I can't say, but it was tedious to play as it was detail obsessive. So mechanics for your proposed duel game should err on the side of playability rather than finicky rules and endless modifiers in the name of "realism".

Anything can be successful if marketed and priced correctly. If this is a clever little homebrew project with limited scope...write it up and put it up for $5-7 as a PDF and never look back.

You'll more or less know if your game idea is a mass market success that you want to build into a big $90 board game....or if it's just a cool little rules set.

There are some extremely popular games which are just simple PDFs for $5-10. Those designers aren't living off the stuff, but they're "successful" in that they sell plenty of copies.