The Dune Board Game is in many ways a very great game and a very true adaptation of the Dune Universe to a board game. Unfortunately, this game has a few flaws, not the least of which is the combat system, and a notable imbalance in the abilities of the various houses. So, if I’ve already made my mind up about this game, why blog about it? And what’s with that “Redux” that I tagged on the end of the title…
…Well, in talking with Ian over Winter break, we’ve decided to take a crack at reworking some of the mechanics, while trying to keep it as true as possible to the Dune Universe.
I don’t want to go into too many details here since Ian and I are still discussing how a lot of things will work, but our main goal is to tackle what we see as the major flaws in the Dune board game. In particular, our current goal is to consider the following:
- The combat system – reworking how combat takes place and the consequences.
- Diplomacy – a new system for proposing, creating, and breaking alliances.
- House abilities – reworking house abilities into a smaller number of house abilities and adding abilities for specific heroes (as well as some rebalancing).
- The Storm and the Worm – a slight restructuring of how these work and their consequences.
- The Map – a possible redesign taking into account how other things change.
I’ll be fleshing these out on my blog as progress is made, and comments are always open.