Noetico

About

Noetico is a cooperative turn-based tactics board game in which two to four players control a single character without communicating.

Players work towards becoming a shared consciousness, acting in harmony without the luxury of communication. When they fail, the hilarity of unintended blunders is also part of the fun. Will your friends get your master plan? Will your solutions be the same? A game about trust, intuition, and adapting to chaos.

The players control only one hero at a time, but have three hero substitutes they can swap to so they can use their unique abilities too.

The game aims to bring out tension, improvisation, and connection. They are achieved through a turn-based system that separates planning the actions from their execution and the rule of silence.

Instead of each player programming their own character’s actions in advance like in RoboRally or Mechs vs. Minions, all players are programming one hero’s actions only. That creates a unique tactical tension.

Instead of just timing cards like in silent cooperation games such as The Mind or Hanabi, players will be making decisions about movement, combat, and abilities, planning ahead based on what character is chosen to be on the field and how the environment and random events will affect their plans. The “mind-reading” is embedded in an evolving tactical puzzle with improvisation. There’s no hidden information on the board, only hidden plans.

Stage of Development

The game has mostly been tested with three players. We would like to test it more with two players and four players. We initially made the game at PapJam and have been testing it since the early stages. We are attending multiple playtests to get as much data and feedback as possible. We are happy with the core gameplay loop and would like to expand the goals of the game for Fastaval

We have three types of enemies and over 10 heroes with different skills. We want to improve the synergy of the heroes and make more of them for more varied gameplay.

Most importantly, we need to test the metagame structure to decide what the objectives should be in a possible multi-scenario rogue-like campaign mode, which will be tested with a couple of friends to determine its feasibility. It will feature a character unlock drafting system as players progress, with a potential narrative aspect to it.

We are currently testing different win conditions. We have tested various bosses and the current single-session wave survival scenario.

Additionally, we want to design and test more hex grid layouts (both pre-made and procedural) and where environmental tiles are placed, as well as new event cards, different environmental tiles, and more.