At an intermediate stage of Sands of Time, the game was a study in dichotomies -- each action could be directed inward or outward, you could acquire peasants or warriors, you could pursue crops or gold, etc. Most of these choices weren't true dichotomies, and in the end the design moved on, but I have nevertheless thought it would be interesting to design a game where every decision is truly binary. How would this work? Maybe something simple like action cards that say "Do X or do Y", you draw a card and do what it says each turn. I'm not sure how fun a game like that would be, though, but it would certainly be easy to play. Actually, it could probably even fit into the recent fad of games without rulebooks, or at least with very few rules. In fact you could probably see a simple little area majority game that worked in this way. (And yes, it does occur to me that a game about giving other players ultimatums is itself a game about binary choices -- there is and always has been crosstalk between my designs to be sure.)
Anyway, that's not the game that this post is about. I've not really made a gateway game, but there are lots of gateway games out there; is it possible to do something different? To start we'd first have to ask what elements are common to gateway games, and the big 3 point to some commonalities -- trading (Settlers), tile placement (Carc), drafting (Ticket to Ride). There are plenty of other games that use each of these, so perhaps a new game would have to be built around something different; what could that be?
My idea was for something that I might call "flow control". Picture the Wheel of Fortune game, "Plinko", where the player drops a disc, it bounces around, and ends up in a box at the bottom. What if you controlled the path it took to bounce so as to control where it ends up?
So in that sense, maybe we are fairies in the haunted forest, and unwitting travelers are going to enter the forest. The path through the forest contains many forks, and at each fork one of us is going to steer a traveler down one path or the other. Maybe that happens as an intentional action, or maybe it's that we place 'toll-gates' that can variously open or close off the different paths. I suppose that at the opposite edge of the board there are cities or castles or something that we're trying to steer people to, and maybe we get a reward depending on how many people arrive at each castle.
On further thought, I thought that perhaps these represent different kingdoms, they want something from the fairy forest but are too scared to enter it themselves, but we are too little to carry anything, so we have to convince the travelers to do it for us. This led to an idea that each traveler is represented by a stack of a couple of gold coins, representing their purse. During the game, we'll place tiles which can convert those coins into other colors of discs (so that we can keep it together as a stack), representing the 'magic goods' from the forest that the kingdoms desire. And then the reward upon reaching a kingdom is dependent on the number of goods carried by that person, of the type that that kingdom says it wants.
What I'm really aiming for here is an uber-simple turn mechanic, something like "place a building tile, then move a traveler two spaces". This leads to questions that mostly revolve around what the players own -- do they 'own' individual travelers, or houses, or certain paths? I think the answers are "no", "no", and "maybe", which would mean that the game isn't so much about building the best routes, but rather about capitalizing on good routes by loading them up with 'toll collectors'. So when you move a traveler, you can follow a path that loads that traveler up with goods but it will mean that the players squatting on that route will make points from it.
If players don't control individual travelers, then there's an element of 'I don't want to be the one to put this piece in position from someone else to move it into a good kingdom and score the points for it'. To be sure, if the game forces you to advance a traveler or two, then eventually every piece will have to find a home, but the game will mostly be about not being the one to set up the other player for the big score. So maybe you should be able to gain ownership of each traveler -- you place a pawn on the stack of discs or something like that. Actually this could be nice, if you are still allowed to move any traveler -- you could essentially guide another player's traveler down a path that bleeds that traveler of his excess wealth.
Clearly this is a very, very rough idea that barely even counts as a game at this point. But it's posted here in the spirit of completeness and in the hope that thinking about it a bit may shake some ideas loose.
(A more cynical take on the theme would be that the 'kingdoms' that we're leading the travelers to are really the villains of fairy tales, but that's pretty grim and not particularly family-friendly!)
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Ooh-de-lally
I mentioned in a previous post a design concept that unwittingly ended up being a combo of two of my favorite games from my own childhood. The idea in this post appears to be an unwittingly nostalgic amalgamation from my daughters' childhood.
As kids, my daughters loved Disney's Robin Hood. Loved it. Watched it all the time, had dress-up outfits that my wife made, had the bean bag toys of the main characters, played Robin Hood in the yard daily (with me always cast as the petulant Prince John, complete with Peter Ustinov-inspired vocal affectation). It was a great time in our family's life.
Separately, one of the first games my oldest daughter picked up was Mr. Jack, and we played it many times over the years. It never quite caught on with my younger daughter but that's ok. But we had fun playing, and my daughter even made me an expansion set of characters as a birthday gift one year, and they worked pretty well. This design isn't really a conscious attempt to combine these nostalgic reflections into a game, but it may be influenced by it.
I had a chance several years ago to playtest a Robin Hood game in which the players were the villains in the story, trying to shake Nottingham down for profit while avoiding the pesky Robin Hood. I didn't like the game very much, and a key reason was, I think, because my views of Robin Hood were so heavily shaped by the Disney movie and the Dukes of Hazzard. The villains are bumbling nincompoops and this didn't come through in the game at all. It was entirely too serious. I churned the gears in my mind for many years trying to come up with a way to capture this dynamic correctly but mostly left it alone.
Over the last few months, I've thought about the idea a bit more, but the latest thought is of a two-player game, fairly minimalist in its presentation, that captures some of the things about the movie that make it fun: Robin Hood himself is a slippery, well, fox, so attempts by the Prince to brute-force him often fail. Robin often shows up in disguise, so you never really know where he is. Robin is beloved by the populace, and stories that lionize him and belittle Prince John are important, almost more important than the actions he's actually responsible for. The Prince is always scheming, always trying to concoct the killer plan to ensnare Robin, but he is usually able to spring the trap. The Prince is obsessed with gold, and taxes the people mercilessly, but Robin, through theft and cunning, supports the people and gives them hope until King Richard's return.
You can see a lot of the same ingredients in here as the ones that animate Mr. Jack, as well as one of my other favorite 2p games, LotR: The Confrontation. That one is basically "Stratego with cards", but the card play adds a layer to the positional play and fog-of-war of the hidden movement.
My first idea, then, is that each player has a deck of (say) 9 cards, and 9 pieces (characters) that move around the board. For the Robin Hood deck, each card has an icon matching one of the moving pieces, and Robin Hood selects one of these and keeps it separate -- this is his disguise. There are a few implications of this. First, every time Robin plays a card, he's giving Prince John some info about his true identity. Second, Robin is also depriving himself of the power of the card he's keeping out.
I think each card has a special action that it initiates, but also has 1-3 icons for resolving a battle. The different locations on the board will each have an icon showing what type of battle is fought there if pieces from opposite sides should meet, and then you count up the icons of that type from (a) the pieces themselves, and (b) one card played by each player. Icons are precious so it will probably be that cards with more icons also have better powers.
Another thought I toyed with in a different game and may want to employ here is an idea of asymmetric currencies. Something like "Gold" and "Support". Robin would use gold to pay for his actions and would win by acquiring support, whereas John uses support for his actions and wins by acquiring gold (he doesn't care if the people love him or hate him, he just wants his gold).
I think there also could be some element whereby the different Team John characters could have each have a weakness, which somehow the Robin cards are able to exploit.
Overall I think it's a minimalist game and the key is to come up with a simple framework for the action to take place such that it can be played very quickly.
As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that an entirely different take on the game could be to still have it be a 2p game, but one of the players is Prince John and one is the Sherriff. They're on the same side but it's a competitive game, and the game would have to erect barriers to their ease of coordination with respect to their efforts to stop Robin Hood. Something like Prince John controls the strategic layer of the fight against Robin and the plundering of Nottingham, and the Sherriff controls the tactical layer, but these aren't always well coordinated so they won't always, or often, be effective. Hmm, that needs more thought. It sounds harder to design, but it might certainly offer something different.
As kids, my daughters loved Disney's Robin Hood. Loved it. Watched it all the time, had dress-up outfits that my wife made, had the bean bag toys of the main characters, played Robin Hood in the yard daily (with me always cast as the petulant Prince John, complete with Peter Ustinov-inspired vocal affectation). It was a great time in our family's life.
Separately, one of the first games my oldest daughter picked up was Mr. Jack, and we played it many times over the years. It never quite caught on with my younger daughter but that's ok. But we had fun playing, and my daughter even made me an expansion set of characters as a birthday gift one year, and they worked pretty well. This design isn't really a conscious attempt to combine these nostalgic reflections into a game, but it may be influenced by it.
I had a chance several years ago to playtest a Robin Hood game in which the players were the villains in the story, trying to shake Nottingham down for profit while avoiding the pesky Robin Hood. I didn't like the game very much, and a key reason was, I think, because my views of Robin Hood were so heavily shaped by the Disney movie and the Dukes of Hazzard. The villains are bumbling nincompoops and this didn't come through in the game at all. It was entirely too serious. I churned the gears in my mind for many years trying to come up with a way to capture this dynamic correctly but mostly left it alone.
Over the last few months, I've thought about the idea a bit more, but the latest thought is of a two-player game, fairly minimalist in its presentation, that captures some of the things about the movie that make it fun: Robin Hood himself is a slippery, well, fox, so attempts by the Prince to brute-force him often fail. Robin often shows up in disguise, so you never really know where he is. Robin is beloved by the populace, and stories that lionize him and belittle Prince John are important, almost more important than the actions he's actually responsible for. The Prince is always scheming, always trying to concoct the killer plan to ensnare Robin, but he is usually able to spring the trap. The Prince is obsessed with gold, and taxes the people mercilessly, but Robin, through theft and cunning, supports the people and gives them hope until King Richard's return.
You can see a lot of the same ingredients in here as the ones that animate Mr. Jack, as well as one of my other favorite 2p games, LotR: The Confrontation. That one is basically "Stratego with cards", but the card play adds a layer to the positional play and fog-of-war of the hidden movement.
My first idea, then, is that each player has a deck of (say) 9 cards, and 9 pieces (characters) that move around the board. For the Robin Hood deck, each card has an icon matching one of the moving pieces, and Robin Hood selects one of these and keeps it separate -- this is his disguise. There are a few implications of this. First, every time Robin plays a card, he's giving Prince John some info about his true identity. Second, Robin is also depriving himself of the power of the card he's keeping out.
I think each card has a special action that it initiates, but also has 1-3 icons for resolving a battle. The different locations on the board will each have an icon showing what type of battle is fought there if pieces from opposite sides should meet, and then you count up the icons of that type from (a) the pieces themselves, and (b) one card played by each player. Icons are precious so it will probably be that cards with more icons also have better powers.
Another thought I toyed with in a different game and may want to employ here is an idea of asymmetric currencies. Something like "Gold" and "Support". Robin would use gold to pay for his actions and would win by acquiring support, whereas John uses support for his actions and wins by acquiring gold (he doesn't care if the people love him or hate him, he just wants his gold).
I think there also could be some element whereby the different Team John characters could have each have a weakness, which somehow the Robin cards are able to exploit.
Overall I think it's a minimalist game and the key is to come up with a simple framework for the action to take place such that it can be played very quickly.
As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that an entirely different take on the game could be to still have it be a 2p game, but one of the players is Prince John and one is the Sherriff. They're on the same side but it's a competitive game, and the game would have to erect barriers to their ease of coordination with respect to their efforts to stop Robin Hood. Something like Prince John controls the strategic layer of the fight against Robin and the plundering of Nottingham, and the Sherriff controls the tactical layer, but these aren't always well coordinated so they won't always, or often, be effective. Hmm, that needs more thought. It sounds harder to design, but it might certainly offer something different.
Ars Poetica
This one is cheating a bit as I've already worked on this one a bit including several playtests, but in the spirit of sparking creative productivity I'll say a few words about it here.
P.D. Magnus is a good friend of mine, and I'm a huge fan of his creation, The Decktet. The Decktet is a game system, so P.D. and many others have designed games for it. It's a deck with a novel mathematical structure, whereby each card has two suits instead of one, so the games you can create for it are also rather novel. But the cards also have really neat, quirky and evocative illustrations, and I've never seen a game utilize these as part of the gameplay. Thus I conceived a word game, in which you lay out a set of cards and must compose a line of poetry using those illustrations. The rule is that each card must provide exactly one word for the poem. The game gives you freebies -- pronouns, articles, prepositions, etc. but the main words come from the illustrations and your imagination. There are similarities with Dixit, but Dixit is an association/mind-reading game of the Apples to Apples variety. This game is a language game; it's about getting words and putting them together in semantically meaningful combinations, but since it's poetry there's plenty of scope for creativity.
I struggled with a scoring system, but happily P.D. tested the game and came up with a system that works very well. In a 4p game, each player composes three lines, using 6 cards each. Thus there are four total sets of 6 cards. Everyone is given 4 cubes and must distribute them to the other players, however they wish, for "best overall poem". Then each player receives 2 cubes and must distribute them to the other players for 'best line', for the 6 cards that the player did not himself use. Finally, each player gets 6 cubes and distributes them for 'best word' for each card in that line.
So this encourages you to write a poem that makes sense overall (not at all easy), but also to try to come up with clever and creative uses of the illustrations. An illustration that includes a sword can be used woodenly as "sword", but thinking more creatively can lead you to "sharp" or "pierce" or even "divide" or "draw". It's up to your creativity and the needs of your poem.
The Decktet version of the game is currently entitled "Unlock Yourself", in honor of the best line of poetry we've heard the game produce so far: "Gentlemen stab through clutter -- unlock yourself!"
But I think the game could be played with non-Decktet illustrations as well; for example you could probably play with Dixit cards. To explore this I'm hoping to also add in something that's not easy to include in the Decktet: additional 'goals' for the players, in the form of poetic devices. I think there would be 6-10 cards, and you reveal one or two each game, and it awards points for each use of that device. Things like rhyme, alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, etc. Not sure if this is a variant or a core ruleset, but I think this would be the main difference between "Unlock Yourself" and the more pretentiously-entitled "Ars Poetica". I think these can live as separate games and that the latter could be a standalone game with its own illustrations, if a publisher wanted to do that. I do think the scoring system is probably a little involved for a family game, but it really is essential for getting all aspects of the composition process to shine through so I don't think it can easily be simplified.
I guess this shares with Ultimatum my interest lately in trying to come up with elements that haven't been used in games previously. There are word-assembly games but I've not seen a game in which you have to assemble words into a composition like this, and I like the way this shows through in the poems that players compose. It's not just about their creativity, but also about their approach to language and how they think about language. It's very different from strategy games but players have responded well to it so far so I hope that the broader gaming world might as well.
P.D. Magnus is a good friend of mine, and I'm a huge fan of his creation, The Decktet. The Decktet is a game system, so P.D. and many others have designed games for it. It's a deck with a novel mathematical structure, whereby each card has two suits instead of one, so the games you can create for it are also rather novel. But the cards also have really neat, quirky and evocative illustrations, and I've never seen a game utilize these as part of the gameplay. Thus I conceived a word game, in which you lay out a set of cards and must compose a line of poetry using those illustrations. The rule is that each card must provide exactly one word for the poem. The game gives you freebies -- pronouns, articles, prepositions, etc. but the main words come from the illustrations and your imagination. There are similarities with Dixit, but Dixit is an association/mind-reading game of the Apples to Apples variety. This game is a language game; it's about getting words and putting them together in semantically meaningful combinations, but since it's poetry there's plenty of scope for creativity.
I struggled with a scoring system, but happily P.D. tested the game and came up with a system that works very well. In a 4p game, each player composes three lines, using 6 cards each. Thus there are four total sets of 6 cards. Everyone is given 4 cubes and must distribute them to the other players, however they wish, for "best overall poem". Then each player receives 2 cubes and must distribute them to the other players for 'best line', for the 6 cards that the player did not himself use. Finally, each player gets 6 cubes and distributes them for 'best word' for each card in that line.
So this encourages you to write a poem that makes sense overall (not at all easy), but also to try to come up with clever and creative uses of the illustrations. An illustration that includes a sword can be used woodenly as "sword", but thinking more creatively can lead you to "sharp" or "pierce" or even "divide" or "draw". It's up to your creativity and the needs of your poem.
The Decktet version of the game is currently entitled "Unlock Yourself", in honor of the best line of poetry we've heard the game produce so far: "Gentlemen stab through clutter -- unlock yourself!"
But I think the game could be played with non-Decktet illustrations as well; for example you could probably play with Dixit cards. To explore this I'm hoping to also add in something that's not easy to include in the Decktet: additional 'goals' for the players, in the form of poetic devices. I think there would be 6-10 cards, and you reveal one or two each game, and it awards points for each use of that device. Things like rhyme, alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, etc. Not sure if this is a variant or a core ruleset, but I think this would be the main difference between "Unlock Yourself" and the more pretentiously-entitled "Ars Poetica". I think these can live as separate games and that the latter could be a standalone game with its own illustrations, if a publisher wanted to do that. I do think the scoring system is probably a little involved for a family game, but it really is essential for getting all aspects of the composition process to shine through so I don't think it can easily be simplified.
I guess this shares with Ultimatum my interest lately in trying to come up with elements that haven't been used in games previously. There are word-assembly games but I've not seen a game in which you have to assemble words into a composition like this, and I like the way this shows through in the poems that players compose. It's not just about their creativity, but also about their approach to language and how they think about language. It's very different from strategy games but players have responded well to it so far so I hope that the broader gaming world might as well.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Dino Resort
In keeping with the theme of the previous post, of trying to mine defunct games for their neat mechanics, I had a game called Selectman that was extensively playtested and worked pretty well but was never quite perfect. The idea was that we were building a city, tile by tile, on a 6x6 grid. You'd roll two dice, which would give your build site, and then the other players would each present a building for your approval. You picked the one you wanted, paid for it (the proposing player got half the money), and put your marker on it. The problem with the game was really that it was too complicated, I think -- different types of buildings, different spatial relationships. It was manageable but cerebral in the not-so-good way.
This summer, I entered the Haba contest. They shipped you some wooden bits from games of theirs, and you had to make a game using those bits. I got some dinosaurs and some dice with dino-related icons (egg, bone, dino head), and came up with a silly little game about building a resort for dinos. But the key inspiration was a suggestion my wife made: that a game ostensibly for kids should introduce kids to some concept of gaming. For example, Candy Land isn't supposed to be teaching kids how to strategize: it's teaching them how to take turns, follow the rules, and move a piece on a board. It's a preparatory game, not a real game. Viewed that way, what gaming skill could dino resort impart?
I settled on the skill of deal-making, but there are probably about a zillion ways for a negotiation game among kids to implode. So my thoughts turned back to Selectman and I had the thought that this system provides a structured context for deal-making which could be perfect for new gamers. On your turn, we're all going to offer you something, and you have to pick the thing you like best. But there's also some subtlety here that even experienced gamers will appreciate. I want to offer you something that I think you're actually going to pick, because I get a boost if you pick my offer. But, I also want to offer you the worst possible thing I can, because I don't want you to win.
The way the game worked was simple. On your turn, you roll the five dino dice, and each other player offers you a card that has dino symbols that match the dice. Cards have between 2 and 5 symbols, so the 5ers are obviously harder to match. There are five types of dinos you're trying to cater to, and cards also have icons for some number of those; unsurprisingly, cards with more dice symbols have more dino symbols as well.
After you choose a card, the player who gave you the card gets coins equal to the number of dice symbols on the card you picked, and then you spend money (which you've previously acquired on other players' turns) to buy cards into your hand, and to increase the value of the different types of dinos. At the end you get points for the dino types that you had the most symbols for, in an amount equal to the value of those dinos. And there's a tie-breaker mechanic whereby if we tie for most dino symbols, we get the value of the next space on that track -- so ties are better than sympathetic in this game.
This didn't go anywhere in the Haba contest -- maybe it was a bit too complex, although it's really quite simple to play. But untethered from the contest, I'm inclined to keep working on the game. Perhaps it can get a re-theme at some point but that's not too important for now.
What I might want to add are some ideas that emerged late in the design process of Selectman: namely, that you're also competing for elected offices. The idea there was that you could invest money to campaign for various offices, and then every so often there was an election for one of those offices and if you got it you received a special power.
That could work here as well: maybe there are, say, six offices arranged in a row, and when a certain die is triggered, the election for that office is held, and the person with the most investment in that election gains the office, and the ability it confers, and that office goes to the back of the line. I think there's also an effect whereby every turn, the dice select one of the offices, and the person whose card is selected automatically gets to place a cube on that office. This feels a bit like an advanced variant but I think it helps give you something else to do with your money other than just buying cards, which you're only going to give to other players in exchange for more money.
The one 'problem' with the game that I have seen is that, if the dice determine what you can offer, well, you don't always have a card that matches the dice, or don't always have something good to offer that matches the dice. So maybe the dice need to go away, or maybe there need to be some ways of circumventing the limitations of the dice. For example, maybe you can offer ANY card, but you only get paid for the dice symbols that you match. This might actually lead to some interesting decisions. Maybe I paid 2 coins for this card with 4 symbols on it. On player X's turn, the dice only match two of the symbols on this card, but I know that X really wants it -- so do I offer it anyway and hope to break even, or do I offer this other card that only has 2 symbols, but the dice match both of those, so I'm still making a 'profit' and am giving him a less-good card, except what if he doesn't pick it because someone else offers something better?
Of this flurry of new ideas, this is the one that actually has a prototype so will probably be the first to see testing! My attempt at incorporating this mechanic in a complex game didn’t work out, and I’m not sure it can carry the weight of a full game on its own (this was Joe Huber’s concern when he played), but perhaps in a simple 30 min game it can hold up.
This summer, I entered the Haba contest. They shipped you some wooden bits from games of theirs, and you had to make a game using those bits. I got some dinosaurs and some dice with dino-related icons (egg, bone, dino head), and came up with a silly little game about building a resort for dinos. But the key inspiration was a suggestion my wife made: that a game ostensibly for kids should introduce kids to some concept of gaming. For example, Candy Land isn't supposed to be teaching kids how to strategize: it's teaching them how to take turns, follow the rules, and move a piece on a board. It's a preparatory game, not a real game. Viewed that way, what gaming skill could dino resort impart?
I settled on the skill of deal-making, but there are probably about a zillion ways for a negotiation game among kids to implode. So my thoughts turned back to Selectman and I had the thought that this system provides a structured context for deal-making which could be perfect for new gamers. On your turn, we're all going to offer you something, and you have to pick the thing you like best. But there's also some subtlety here that even experienced gamers will appreciate. I want to offer you something that I think you're actually going to pick, because I get a boost if you pick my offer. But, I also want to offer you the worst possible thing I can, because I don't want you to win.
The way the game worked was simple. On your turn, you roll the five dino dice, and each other player offers you a card that has dino symbols that match the dice. Cards have between 2 and 5 symbols, so the 5ers are obviously harder to match. There are five types of dinos you're trying to cater to, and cards also have icons for some number of those; unsurprisingly, cards with more dice symbols have more dino symbols as well.
After you choose a card, the player who gave you the card gets coins equal to the number of dice symbols on the card you picked, and then you spend money (which you've previously acquired on other players' turns) to buy cards into your hand, and to increase the value of the different types of dinos. At the end you get points for the dino types that you had the most symbols for, in an amount equal to the value of those dinos. And there's a tie-breaker mechanic whereby if we tie for most dino symbols, we get the value of the next space on that track -- so ties are better than sympathetic in this game.
This didn't go anywhere in the Haba contest -- maybe it was a bit too complex, although it's really quite simple to play. But untethered from the contest, I'm inclined to keep working on the game. Perhaps it can get a re-theme at some point but that's not too important for now.
What I might want to add are some ideas that emerged late in the design process of Selectman: namely, that you're also competing for elected offices. The idea there was that you could invest money to campaign for various offices, and then every so often there was an election for one of those offices and if you got it you received a special power.
That could work here as well: maybe there are, say, six offices arranged in a row, and when a certain die is triggered, the election for that office is held, and the person with the most investment in that election gains the office, and the ability it confers, and that office goes to the back of the line. I think there's also an effect whereby every turn, the dice select one of the offices, and the person whose card is selected automatically gets to place a cube on that office. This feels a bit like an advanced variant but I think it helps give you something else to do with your money other than just buying cards, which you're only going to give to other players in exchange for more money.
The one 'problem' with the game that I have seen is that, if the dice determine what you can offer, well, you don't always have a card that matches the dice, or don't always have something good to offer that matches the dice. So maybe the dice need to go away, or maybe there need to be some ways of circumventing the limitations of the dice. For example, maybe you can offer ANY card, but you only get paid for the dice symbols that you match. This might actually lead to some interesting decisions. Maybe I paid 2 coins for this card with 4 symbols on it. On player X's turn, the dice only match two of the symbols on this card, but I know that X really wants it -- so do I offer it anyway and hope to break even, or do I offer this other card that only has 2 symbols, but the dice match both of those, so I'm still making a 'profit' and am giving him a less-good card, except what if he doesn't pick it because someone else offers something better?
Of this flurry of new ideas, this is the one that actually has a prototype so will probably be the first to see testing! My attempt at incorporating this mechanic in a complex game didn’t work out, and I’m not sure it can carry the weight of a full game on its own (this was Joe Huber’s concern when he played), but perhaps in a simple 30 min game it can hold up.
The Mission
Back when I was contemplating starting a publishing company, a game I really, really wanted to develop and release was a rebuild of Puerto Rico in the setting of the great Jeremy Irons/Robert De Niro film "The Mission". Sadly, I reached out to alea, RGG, and the designer and they weren't interested in this. I've never done anything more with the idea but in the spirit of brainstorming new ideas this week, I'll take a brief stab at this one as well.
What resuscitated my interest in this idea this week was a brief look back in time at some of the mechanics I've come up with that I felt were original to me. This is not an incredibly long list, but still, these are ideas that I liked enough to build games around. These mostly live in games that I'm not actively working on, and so my thought was, could these be moved to other games so that they can still perhaps see the light of day?
One of these ideas emerged in my development of Collusion, which is another game I've been working on for years and that's currently a bit stuck. I'm trying to figure out how to revamp that one, but one of the things I think will end up getting cut out is the 'power discs' mechanic -- or even if it doesn't it could be useful elsewhere. The idea is that you arrange your power discs in even stacks going around a rondel, and each turn, you can either take an action, which costs a disc, or pass and move the stack from the current area to the top of the stack in the next area. But the 'power' of the action you take is given by the size of the stack. And, actions are limited. So you want to act early if you can, so as not to get closed out; but you want to act late so that your action is more powerful. This is a simple but effective source of tension.
So my thought was to ask how could this mechanic be used differently? For example: forget the rondel and just grow the stack by some prescribed amount each turn. Maybe add a disc each turn, or maybe double the size of the current stack, or whatever. But the focal point could be the same: act early, or act later. Except, if we divorced this from the idea of a fixed 'year', then it would just be a continuous flow of turns, and the decision would be to act NOW or act later.
I realized that this could provide a twist on a role selection system. One player picks a role, and then everyone may choose to use that role or pass. If you use the role, your 'power' for the action is given by the number of discs in your current stack, which you then expunge.
Why must these be discs instead of just having a 'power track'? Actually I'm not sure -- in the Collusion mechanic you could loan discs to other players in exchange for boosts, and your disc came back to you when it floated to the top of the other player's stack. So maybe that could come into play here. For example, I want to use role X, and have available power of 4 but only need power 2; I must spend all my discs, so, hey, does anyone want these 2 power discs for their stack, and what am I offered in exchange for them?
With regard to the action of the game, this isn't a direct port of PR but some of the concepts would be similar. I think the idea is that we're different orders running missions in the Paraguayan jungle, helping to cultivate the land and care for the native people, the Guarini. I think that we're situated along a river, and so the idea would be that role selection represents "we're bringing this particular personage up the river to assist our missions", and we can use that person's ability in seat order. Maybe within this construct there's a draft for each available action -- for example, the builder only has the materials to build certain buildings. I think we each have an area in which to place tiles, but it's more like Cuba than PR, in that the same area will contain crops and buildings. And I think that the boat also flows back down the river, so we need to load it up with crops or finished goods to sell in exchange for money.
The movie has an added political layer to it. The territory occupied by the Jesuit missions is Spanish, in which slavery is outlawed, but it’s being transferred to Portugal, where slaving is legal. The Jesuits want the Vatican to protect the missions against the Portuguese but the Vatican wants to preserve catholic unity in Europe. These aspects should affect the game st some level, with players having very limited ability to control them. But I think they should make the game very difficult — both mechanically, because it’s an uphill climb to resist the Portuguese influence, and emotionally, because the game’s ending should the Portuguese prevail is very sad. It remains to be seen whether this comes through in the player experience. What it at least points to is that the scoring system has to be built around the perceptions of the Guarini - did they perceive that your mission was a net good for their people?
Lots of vague ideas so far but I think the mechanical core is the role selection coupled with the timing mechanism. Do you act frequently, but inefficiently, or do you bide your time to take actions that are more impactful?
What resuscitated my interest in this idea this week was a brief look back in time at some of the mechanics I've come up with that I felt were original to me. This is not an incredibly long list, but still, these are ideas that I liked enough to build games around. These mostly live in games that I'm not actively working on, and so my thought was, could these be moved to other games so that they can still perhaps see the light of day?
One of these ideas emerged in my development of Collusion, which is another game I've been working on for years and that's currently a bit stuck. I'm trying to figure out how to revamp that one, but one of the things I think will end up getting cut out is the 'power discs' mechanic -- or even if it doesn't it could be useful elsewhere. The idea is that you arrange your power discs in even stacks going around a rondel, and each turn, you can either take an action, which costs a disc, or pass and move the stack from the current area to the top of the stack in the next area. But the 'power' of the action you take is given by the size of the stack. And, actions are limited. So you want to act early if you can, so as not to get closed out; but you want to act late so that your action is more powerful. This is a simple but effective source of tension.
So my thought was to ask how could this mechanic be used differently? For example: forget the rondel and just grow the stack by some prescribed amount each turn. Maybe add a disc each turn, or maybe double the size of the current stack, or whatever. But the focal point could be the same: act early, or act later. Except, if we divorced this from the idea of a fixed 'year', then it would just be a continuous flow of turns, and the decision would be to act NOW or act later.
I realized that this could provide a twist on a role selection system. One player picks a role, and then everyone may choose to use that role or pass. If you use the role, your 'power' for the action is given by the number of discs in your current stack, which you then expunge.
Why must these be discs instead of just having a 'power track'? Actually I'm not sure -- in the Collusion mechanic you could loan discs to other players in exchange for boosts, and your disc came back to you when it floated to the top of the other player's stack. So maybe that could come into play here. For example, I want to use role X, and have available power of 4 but only need power 2; I must spend all my discs, so, hey, does anyone want these 2 power discs for their stack, and what am I offered in exchange for them?
With regard to the action of the game, this isn't a direct port of PR but some of the concepts would be similar. I think the idea is that we're different orders running missions in the Paraguayan jungle, helping to cultivate the land and care for the native people, the Guarini. I think that we're situated along a river, and so the idea would be that role selection represents "we're bringing this particular personage up the river to assist our missions", and we can use that person's ability in seat order. Maybe within this construct there's a draft for each available action -- for example, the builder only has the materials to build certain buildings. I think we each have an area in which to place tiles, but it's more like Cuba than PR, in that the same area will contain crops and buildings. And I think that the boat also flows back down the river, so we need to load it up with crops or finished goods to sell in exchange for money.
The movie has an added political layer to it. The territory occupied by the Jesuit missions is Spanish, in which slavery is outlawed, but it’s being transferred to Portugal, where slaving is legal. The Jesuits want the Vatican to protect the missions against the Portuguese but the Vatican wants to preserve catholic unity in Europe. These aspects should affect the game st some level, with players having very limited ability to control them. But I think they should make the game very difficult — both mechanically, because it’s an uphill climb to resist the Portuguese influence, and emotionally, because the game’s ending should the Portuguese prevail is very sad. It remains to be seen whether this comes through in the player experience. What it at least points to is that the scoring system has to be built around the perceptions of the Guarini - did they perceive that your mission was a net good for their people?
Lots of vague ideas so far but I think the mechanical core is the role selection coupled with the timing mechanism. Do you act frequently, but inefficiently, or do you bide your time to take actions that are more impactful?
Ultimatums
Our family has had fun over the years with Chinatown; everyone seems to really like the haggling and negotiation. My wife adopts an especially, shall we say, confrontational style to negotiation, with lots of threats and ultimatums and cajoling. It's kind of entertaining. But it got me to thinking several years ago about a game based on this concept -- a game whose central action revolved around issuing ultimatums to the other players. It would be a game nastier than Diplomacy, a game nastier than intrigue-rich backstabbing games -- it would be a game about stabbing people in the chest.
My first take on this was a territorial game a la Risk but with a diplomatic layer involving an obligatory issuance of an ultimatum to another player each turn. It never made it to testing, but I don't think it was quite what I was looking for. For one thing, our family doesn't play that kind of game, so it's not clear it would have been all that well received, and for another, having the ultimatums be something you must do, as opposed to something you can do, seems beside the point.
Nevertheless the core premise of a territorial game seems appropriate -- you're the ruler of some country and are trying to prop up your failing regime by appearing to be louder than your neighboring countries. So there are silly currencies like your country's disgruntledness and bluster tokens and so on. But the central absurdity of the game has to come from the ultimatums themselves.
Hence my next idea was/is that you're tracking several aspects of your nation -- its arts, its innovations, its public works, etc. There are cards that you acquire to promote these, and each has an intrinsic value but also an icon or two, which, when combo'd with other cards, gives more points. So there's something you're aiming for.
If you're going to issue an ultimatum, there has to be something you're going to threaten to do, so maybe each card has an associated failure mode, and you can play a failure mode to destroy someone's card, possibly taking out that card or all cards in the set with that mode or all cards in that set period.
Let's talk for a second about an ultimatum. It is, to my understanding, something that conforms to this construct: "Do X, or else I will do Y". It's not "Do NOT do X, or else I will do Y". That's a threat. It's not "If you do X, then I will do Y". That's a promise. It's not "Do X, AND I will do Y". That's a deal. The key principle that this encapsulates is that you are commanding the player to do something specific, that they are permitted under the rules to do, and if they fail to do it, you are going to take the threatened course of action.
Immediately then we see a few things. First, it's essential that the thing you're asking them to do has to be something they can do immediately. It can't be something that ordinarily requires a turn action or that involves doing something to a third party; otherwise we need to track ultimatums that were issued and whether they were fulfilled or not. Second, it's essential that the thing you're threatening to do is also something that it's theoretically possible for you to do on your turn, but the other player should not know for certain whether you can or will actually do it. This suggests that those attack cards should be secret.
With these things in place, what I realized is that this game is actually technically a deal-making game, but it's a game about making negative deals: you are crafting two unpleasant options for your opponent and banking on their choosing the one that costs you nothing as opposed to the one that requires a turn action to execute. You want destructive actions to be difficult enough to set up that the other player isn't quite sure if you can follow through on it, although the opportunity cost of an action spent following through should be high enough that sometimes you'll choose not to follow through even though you're able to.
There are a few implications of this. First, it means that there has to be enough variety to your holdings that there's some scope for creativity. Again, you're crafting deals here. If it's simply "give me that card, or I'll blow it up!" that won't be very fun for very long. You want to be able to cook up more varied and creative schemes than that. So in addition to cards, the game may need a spatial layer and possibly an economy. The spatial layer can be quite simple -- perhaps each pair of players has a row of three tiles between them, and a marker showing the 'front' between them. You should want to push the front forward for some reason. The economy can be similarly simple, maybe you simply have to provide some amount of support for the tiles you control or must pay to acquire cards or something like that.
Second, it means that building the game around card acquisition would be misplaced. If I can acquire cards in some peaceful way or in an aggressive way, there are a lot of players who will choose the peaceful option despite the boisterous theme of the game. The game has to incentivize confrontational play. So maybe instead it's that we each have a randomly-dealt set of cards, which we allocate to our different cultural aspects. Surrendering or losing any of these is harmful in that it increases our disgruntledness, but it will nevertheless be the case that the set we're given at the start is random and other players will have cards that we'd like to acquire to form better combos for more points. So we want to craft ultimatums that get us better cards, and to be able to issue potential consequences that are harmful enough that they're likely to be accepted.
Of course there has to be the opportunity for petty diplomacy and retaliation, and maybe this gives a possible role for direct threats as a way of escalating in the case of an ultimatum -- you can say "no, you can't have X, but if you do Y, I will do Z!" Again this requires some tracking so it isn't great, but I like the idea of an aggressive action triggering a chain of aggression.
I haven't mentioned some of the other silly ideas like a turn action that lets you insult another player's country to gain some 'bluster' tokens, or the ability to use a free action to declare war on another player, which has no gameplay effect.
The game would of course need to place some boundaries on what you can ask for and what you can threaten as a consequence. It wouldn't make sense to be able to say "Give me X, or else I will do [an action that causes you no harm]".
I think this game has the potential to provide quite a different experience from other games, but my hope is that it can be substantive enough that it has more staying power than just a play-through or two for the silly experience of shouting at each other. It's not intended to be super-thinky but it should at least have some substance.
Alternatively the core idea of ultimatum-issuing could be used in some sort of truth-or-dare-esque party game, or could perhaps be used in a game like Gauntlet of Fools where we're going to run some sort of simultaneous gauntlet or race and the ultimatums are about handicapping ourselves as a result of ultimatums issued. But neither of these styles of games personally appeal to me so that's not currently the direction I'm taking this in, although it may end up there in the end.
My first take on this was a territorial game a la Risk but with a diplomatic layer involving an obligatory issuance of an ultimatum to another player each turn. It never made it to testing, but I don't think it was quite what I was looking for. For one thing, our family doesn't play that kind of game, so it's not clear it would have been all that well received, and for another, having the ultimatums be something you must do, as opposed to something you can do, seems beside the point.
Nevertheless the core premise of a territorial game seems appropriate -- you're the ruler of some country and are trying to prop up your failing regime by appearing to be louder than your neighboring countries. So there are silly currencies like your country's disgruntledness and bluster tokens and so on. But the central absurdity of the game has to come from the ultimatums themselves.
Hence my next idea was/is that you're tracking several aspects of your nation -- its arts, its innovations, its public works, etc. There are cards that you acquire to promote these, and each has an intrinsic value but also an icon or two, which, when combo'd with other cards, gives more points. So there's something you're aiming for.
If you're going to issue an ultimatum, there has to be something you're going to threaten to do, so maybe each card has an associated failure mode, and you can play a failure mode to destroy someone's card, possibly taking out that card or all cards in the set with that mode or all cards in that set period.
Let's talk for a second about an ultimatum. It is, to my understanding, something that conforms to this construct: "Do X, or else I will do Y". It's not "Do NOT do X, or else I will do Y". That's a threat. It's not "If you do X, then I will do Y". That's a promise. It's not "Do X, AND I will do Y". That's a deal. The key principle that this encapsulates is that you are commanding the player to do something specific, that they are permitted under the rules to do, and if they fail to do it, you are going to take the threatened course of action.
Immediately then we see a few things. First, it's essential that the thing you're asking them to do has to be something they can do immediately. It can't be something that ordinarily requires a turn action or that involves doing something to a third party; otherwise we need to track ultimatums that were issued and whether they were fulfilled or not. Second, it's essential that the thing you're threatening to do is also something that it's theoretically possible for you to do on your turn, but the other player should not know for certain whether you can or will actually do it. This suggests that those attack cards should be secret.
With these things in place, what I realized is that this game is actually technically a deal-making game, but it's a game about making negative deals: you are crafting two unpleasant options for your opponent and banking on their choosing the one that costs you nothing as opposed to the one that requires a turn action to execute. You want destructive actions to be difficult enough to set up that the other player isn't quite sure if you can follow through on it, although the opportunity cost of an action spent following through should be high enough that sometimes you'll choose not to follow through even though you're able to.
There are a few implications of this. First, it means that there has to be enough variety to your holdings that there's some scope for creativity. Again, you're crafting deals here. If it's simply "give me that card, or I'll blow it up!" that won't be very fun for very long. You want to be able to cook up more varied and creative schemes than that. So in addition to cards, the game may need a spatial layer and possibly an economy. The spatial layer can be quite simple -- perhaps each pair of players has a row of three tiles between them, and a marker showing the 'front' between them. You should want to push the front forward for some reason. The economy can be similarly simple, maybe you simply have to provide some amount of support for the tiles you control or must pay to acquire cards or something like that.
Second, it means that building the game around card acquisition would be misplaced. If I can acquire cards in some peaceful way or in an aggressive way, there are a lot of players who will choose the peaceful option despite the boisterous theme of the game. The game has to incentivize confrontational play. So maybe instead it's that we each have a randomly-dealt set of cards, which we allocate to our different cultural aspects. Surrendering or losing any of these is harmful in that it increases our disgruntledness, but it will nevertheless be the case that the set we're given at the start is random and other players will have cards that we'd like to acquire to form better combos for more points. So we want to craft ultimatums that get us better cards, and to be able to issue potential consequences that are harmful enough that they're likely to be accepted.
Of course there has to be the opportunity for petty diplomacy and retaliation, and maybe this gives a possible role for direct threats as a way of escalating in the case of an ultimatum -- you can say "no, you can't have X, but if you do Y, I will do Z!" Again this requires some tracking so it isn't great, but I like the idea of an aggressive action triggering a chain of aggression.
I haven't mentioned some of the other silly ideas like a turn action that lets you insult another player's country to gain some 'bluster' tokens, or the ability to use a free action to declare war on another player, which has no gameplay effect.
The game would of course need to place some boundaries on what you can ask for and what you can threaten as a consequence. It wouldn't make sense to be able to say "Give me X, or else I will do [an action that causes you no harm]".
I think this game has the potential to provide quite a different experience from other games, but my hope is that it can be substantive enough that it has more staying power than just a play-through or two for the silly experience of shouting at each other. It's not intended to be super-thinky but it should at least have some substance.
Alternatively the core idea of ultimatum-issuing could be used in some sort of truth-or-dare-esque party game, or could perhaps be used in a game like Gauntlet of Fools where we're going to run some sort of simultaneous gauntlet or race and the ultimatums are about handicapping ourselves as a result of ultimatums issued. But neither of these styles of games personally appeal to me so that's not currently the direction I'm taking this in, although it may end up there in the end.
Friday, February 16, 2018
Theme park-themed TCG (!?!?!?)
I've never played Magic or any other collectible/trading card game (CCG/TCG). However, I recently visited a well-known amusement park and had the idea that the park could provide a good context for a CCG to be played by attendees during their visit, with the following motivations:
- You have to wait in line a lot. What if there was a quick game you could play to spend some of that time?
- An app is the obvious thing here, but people spend way too much time on their phones already. A tactile experience could offer something more interpersonal and fun than yet another screen-based experience.
- Moreover, people from all over the world are at the park. It might be neat to be given the opportunity to meet a couple of these people. It's awkward to strike up a conversation with strangers but perhaps playing a short game with them creates a context for a brief social interaction. Maybe the game comes with a lanyard, so you know who the potential players of the game are if they're carrying the lanyard.
- The park's variety of attractions, and their associated gift shops, provide an obvious CCG tie-in -- each gift shop could sell booster-packs that are specifically associated with that attraction.
Ok, so this provides a possible motivation. What constraints do these set on the game itself?
1. It must be quick. A minute or so, maybe 2 minutes tops.
2. It must be simple. People who buy the starter kit have to be able to learn the game quickly, maybe while waiting in line for their first attraction. The gameplay has to be easy so that non-gamers can easily pick it up.
3. It must be language independent. That creates a problem for the rules document, but the game itself can't have text-based effects. Numbers and icons only, and the icon language has to be very simple.
4. It must be playable without a table. This is the hard one.
5. It would be nice if it could have some skill, or decisions, or deck-building. If you are supposed to acquire cards from different attractions, it would be nice if these offer something other than variety.
My first idea is to emulate something like one of my favorite childhood games, Slapshot. This is a hockey manager game where you draft player cards, and then play "games" against opponents in a simple fashion: you arrange your six players in order, then reveal one card at a time, simultaneously. If your number is higher than theirs, you get a goal. Most goals wins the game. Winning the most games wins you the season. It's simple and fun, and there's some doublethink involved in arranging your cards based on what you know the other person has.
Something like this meets all of the above criteria reasonably well. Maybe it's that we're going to play five cards and compare their numbers, and whichever of us plays the higher number 'wins' that point, first to three points wins the match. But this doesn't have much depth or promote much deck-building. Thus a better deck always wins and that's boring.
So, perhaps we add in a couple of simple combo effects. One could be that each card has one or several icons, and maybe icons from previous cards you played 'buff' the current card if it shares that icon, perhaps if they're all in a chain. Another could be that some cards have a 'react' power, which can be played straight out of your hand after both players have revealed their number card (or maybe it's that a previously-played card's 'react' power can be triggered at any time). Again, simplicity is key so there are only a couple of powers and they're extremely simple: something like "remove the opponent's card from play", "block the opponent's card (i.e. cancel its number)", or "steal all matching icons from your opponent and apply them to your own card", all simple things that can be communicated with an icon.
With simple rules like these, you can achieve the kinds of things one wants from a game like this. Namely, you want some multi-card synergies, and the ability to construct decks that potentially work together. But you also want this to be somewhat fragile, such that your deck can't just be on autopilot every play. You want every card to be potentially useful in the right situation or deck, and you want some of the combos to be emergent; i.e. you want there to be room for some player creativity in putting together interesting decks.
And most importantly there are in-game decisions to be made. Maybe you get your icon-heavy cards out early so they can boost the later cards, but they may themselves lose points. Maybe your best 'react' abilities are on cards that are also high number cards, so do you play them for their number or hold back for their react ability? Or if instead it's that previously-played cards' react powers are actionable, it's the same consideration as with the icons -- do you get those react powers down early to put the other player on edge? This, relatedly, may shake up your own play -- maybe you were going to play a run of three "magic wand icon" cards, but your opponent's second play was an icon stealer, so maybe you have to go in a different direction.
============================
It's hard to imagine how to get a theme park to buy in to this concept or to even get them to hear the pitch, but as a thought experiment it's interesting. So instead, maybe this is a tabletop game that simulates the experience of going to a theme park, acquiring cards, and playing matches against opponents along the way, such that each 'win' you achieve is a point and you win the overall game by winning X matches. Maybe there's an added 'time' economy whereby each attraction has a certain time cost associated with it, such that getting the attractions with better 'booster' packs eats up more time. Or maybe each area has cards on display and they can be drafted with the Vinci "draft cost" construct. Perhaps just walking around the park eats up time as well, so criss-crossing the park to get the best cards would be time consuming.
Actually, this table-top game sounds like a mix of two of my favorite childhood games, the aforementioned Slapshot and Fun City. Hmm...
- You have to wait in line a lot. What if there was a quick game you could play to spend some of that time?
- An app is the obvious thing here, but people spend way too much time on their phones already. A tactile experience could offer something more interpersonal and fun than yet another screen-based experience.
- Moreover, people from all over the world are at the park. It might be neat to be given the opportunity to meet a couple of these people. It's awkward to strike up a conversation with strangers but perhaps playing a short game with them creates a context for a brief social interaction. Maybe the game comes with a lanyard, so you know who the potential players of the game are if they're carrying the lanyard.
- The park's variety of attractions, and their associated gift shops, provide an obvious CCG tie-in -- each gift shop could sell booster-packs that are specifically associated with that attraction.
Ok, so this provides a possible motivation. What constraints do these set on the game itself?
1. It must be quick. A minute or so, maybe 2 minutes tops.
2. It must be simple. People who buy the starter kit have to be able to learn the game quickly, maybe while waiting in line for their first attraction. The gameplay has to be easy so that non-gamers can easily pick it up.
3. It must be language independent. That creates a problem for the rules document, but the game itself can't have text-based effects. Numbers and icons only, and the icon language has to be very simple.
4. It must be playable without a table. This is the hard one.
5. It would be nice if it could have some skill, or decisions, or deck-building. If you are supposed to acquire cards from different attractions, it would be nice if these offer something other than variety.
My first idea is to emulate something like one of my favorite childhood games, Slapshot. This is a hockey manager game where you draft player cards, and then play "games" against opponents in a simple fashion: you arrange your six players in order, then reveal one card at a time, simultaneously. If your number is higher than theirs, you get a goal. Most goals wins the game. Winning the most games wins you the season. It's simple and fun, and there's some doublethink involved in arranging your cards based on what you know the other person has.
Something like this meets all of the above criteria reasonably well. Maybe it's that we're going to play five cards and compare their numbers, and whichever of us plays the higher number 'wins' that point, first to three points wins the match. But this doesn't have much depth or promote much deck-building. Thus a better deck always wins and that's boring.
So, perhaps we add in a couple of simple combo effects. One could be that each card has one or several icons, and maybe icons from previous cards you played 'buff' the current card if it shares that icon, perhaps if they're all in a chain. Another could be that some cards have a 'react' power, which can be played straight out of your hand after both players have revealed their number card (or maybe it's that a previously-played card's 'react' power can be triggered at any time). Again, simplicity is key so there are only a couple of powers and they're extremely simple: something like "remove the opponent's card from play", "block the opponent's card (i.e. cancel its number)", or "steal all matching icons from your opponent and apply them to your own card", all simple things that can be communicated with an icon.
With simple rules like these, you can achieve the kinds of things one wants from a game like this. Namely, you want some multi-card synergies, and the ability to construct decks that potentially work together. But you also want this to be somewhat fragile, such that your deck can't just be on autopilot every play. You want every card to be potentially useful in the right situation or deck, and you want some of the combos to be emergent; i.e. you want there to be room for some player creativity in putting together interesting decks.
And most importantly there are in-game decisions to be made. Maybe you get your icon-heavy cards out early so they can boost the later cards, but they may themselves lose points. Maybe your best 'react' abilities are on cards that are also high number cards, so do you play them for their number or hold back for their react ability? Or if instead it's that previously-played cards' react powers are actionable, it's the same consideration as with the icons -- do you get those react powers down early to put the other player on edge? This, relatedly, may shake up your own play -- maybe you were going to play a run of three "magic wand icon" cards, but your opponent's second play was an icon stealer, so maybe you have to go in a different direction.
============================
It's hard to imagine how to get a theme park to buy in to this concept or to even get them to hear the pitch, but as a thought experiment it's interesting. So instead, maybe this is a tabletop game that simulates the experience of going to a theme park, acquiring cards, and playing matches against opponents along the way, such that each 'win' you achieve is a point and you win the overall game by winning X matches. Maybe there's an added 'time' economy whereby each attraction has a certain time cost associated with it, such that getting the attractions with better 'booster' packs eats up more time. Or maybe each area has cards on display and they can be drafted with the Vinci "draft cost" construct. Perhaps just walking around the park eats up time as well, so criss-crossing the park to get the best cards would be time consuming.
Actually, this table-top game sounds like a mix of two of my favorite childhood games, the aforementioned Slapshot and Fun City. Hmm...
Thursday, February 15, 2018
The Palace of Dreams
Sands of Time is now available for preorder, and I've become a bit stuck on my other main project, Lost Adventures, so to get a bit of a break I'm brainstorming some new ideas. I'll fire off a few posts about those mostly to capture some ideas about them and perhaps motivate myself to see at least some of them through.
I just re-read The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, and realized that lying behind the story is a potentially interesting game concept. The book tells the story of Mark-Alem, a 20-something member of a powerful family in a 'vast but fragile' Balkan empire. Mark receives a post in the Palace of Dreams. In the belief that dreams may hold clues to the future, the empire mandates that all of its people submit their dreams for review by the Palace of Dreams, which sifts through them trying to find the "Master Dream" to submit to the Sultan each week, for clues on possible future events or guidance on how to run the empire. The Palace is a bureaucracy on steroids but it wields considerable influence in the state. The story is about how Mark progresses through the bureaucratic levels of the palace and some events that transpire during his time there.
But what's interesting is the machinations that happen off camera, that we only get brief glimpses of. The Sultan treats the Palace of Dreams with utmost seriousness, which means that whatever it identifies as the 'master dream' is extremely influential. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is wrangling that goes on between the key factions (the bank, the foreign ministry, the church, etc) to shape the output of the Palace. The details of this are vague and aren't specified in the text, but it suggests the idea of rival factions trying to manipulate the palace so as to control the state. There is also the sense that the palace can be weaponized as a means for a faction to take out a rival faction.
All of this seems to provide a promising set-up for a political game. I had the vague thought that the game might include a quirky partnership system, such that the game is won by exactly two players. The twist is that there are two factions that you are notionally allied with and one that you oppose. So you can potentially win with either of your allies but must pick one or the other in the end. I don't know what winning means yet but have some vague sense of some climactic event-driven ending whereby two factions make a victory attempt, the other factions attempt to repel it, and if it succeeds that's that. Or perhaps it's something like Dune, whereby if an alliance is in place that meets the victory condition at round's end, the game ends.
I might also like to add a layer of indirection, namely that your faction's identity is a secret. So you know what people are doing and you know which factions you're potentially open to allying with but you must work out which person is affiliated with which faction. This isn't part of the story and would only make sense as a way of heightening suspense and uncertainty and mistrust.
The center of the game has to be the palace itself, but I don't entirely know how it should work. The game could simply be a control game where you place and promote members of your faction in the various layers of the palace, giving you influence over its decisions. But because of the nature of the palace's work -- the interpretation of dreams -- I feel that dreams themselves must come into play somehow, as a way of steering the game's action. Something vaguely Dixit-like could work, where you have dreams represented as illustrations that are open to interpretation. And maybe you try to connect events with dreams, with accurate 'predictions' earning you something. Or maybe it's that you are presenting predictions to the Sultan and these cause him to variously gain or lose trust in the various factions. Maybe it's even that winning isn't something you attain, but rather it's subtractive -- i.e. when only two factions are left standing in the government, they have won.
The problem this presents is that it introduces a subjective element into the game that may be incompatible with the expectations of strategy gamers. I don't know for sure how to reconcile this but I don't want to rule it out as a possibility a priori either. Exploiting the subjectivity and ambiguity of dreams is the centerpiece of the novel and should be the centerpiece of the game, but setting boundaries on this so that it can't be manipulated unfairly by players not looking to play in the spirit of the game will be a concern.
I don't have a clear picture for how the mechanics should work but in the book the palace has a selection department, an interpretation department, and a master-dream department (among many others). So it could be that having personnel in the selection department lets you look at some dream cards and choose which to send along. Then these get shuffled and given to people with personnel in the interpretation department, who must decide what the dreams mean. Maybe they write it out or maybe there are a few scripted explanations, like "war", "economic collapse", "insurrection", "corruption", etc. Then the master-dream department takes these, picks one, and presents it to the Sultan. Perhaps the palace is a pyramid such that fewer and fewer players can place people in the various layers, with perhaps only two players eligible to be in the master-dream office. But those people still have to work with what they're given.
The action in the game should be relatively simple, so as to give maximal scope to the interplayer interactions. It's an influence game at the core but you're trying to gain influence indirectly, because the path to influence flows through the palace. This combined with the novel alliance system might make for something unique and interesting, perhaps.
I just re-read The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, and realized that lying behind the story is a potentially interesting game concept. The book tells the story of Mark-Alem, a 20-something member of a powerful family in a 'vast but fragile' Balkan empire. Mark receives a post in the Palace of Dreams. In the belief that dreams may hold clues to the future, the empire mandates that all of its people submit their dreams for review by the Palace of Dreams, which sifts through them trying to find the "Master Dream" to submit to the Sultan each week, for clues on possible future events or guidance on how to run the empire. The Palace is a bureaucracy on steroids but it wields considerable influence in the state. The story is about how Mark progresses through the bureaucratic levels of the palace and some events that transpire during his time there.
But what's interesting is the machinations that happen off camera, that we only get brief glimpses of. The Sultan treats the Palace of Dreams with utmost seriousness, which means that whatever it identifies as the 'master dream' is extremely influential. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is wrangling that goes on between the key factions (the bank, the foreign ministry, the church, etc) to shape the output of the Palace. The details of this are vague and aren't specified in the text, but it suggests the idea of rival factions trying to manipulate the palace so as to control the state. There is also the sense that the palace can be weaponized as a means for a faction to take out a rival faction.
All of this seems to provide a promising set-up for a political game. I had the vague thought that the game might include a quirky partnership system, such that the game is won by exactly two players. The twist is that there are two factions that you are notionally allied with and one that you oppose. So you can potentially win with either of your allies but must pick one or the other in the end. I don't know what winning means yet but have some vague sense of some climactic event-driven ending whereby two factions make a victory attempt, the other factions attempt to repel it, and if it succeeds that's that. Or perhaps it's something like Dune, whereby if an alliance is in place that meets the victory condition at round's end, the game ends.
I might also like to add a layer of indirection, namely that your faction's identity is a secret. So you know what people are doing and you know which factions you're potentially open to allying with but you must work out which person is affiliated with which faction. This isn't part of the story and would only make sense as a way of heightening suspense and uncertainty and mistrust.
The center of the game has to be the palace itself, but I don't entirely know how it should work. The game could simply be a control game where you place and promote members of your faction in the various layers of the palace, giving you influence over its decisions. But because of the nature of the palace's work -- the interpretation of dreams -- I feel that dreams themselves must come into play somehow, as a way of steering the game's action. Something vaguely Dixit-like could work, where you have dreams represented as illustrations that are open to interpretation. And maybe you try to connect events with dreams, with accurate 'predictions' earning you something. Or maybe it's that you are presenting predictions to the Sultan and these cause him to variously gain or lose trust in the various factions. Maybe it's even that winning isn't something you attain, but rather it's subtractive -- i.e. when only two factions are left standing in the government, they have won.
The problem this presents is that it introduces a subjective element into the game that may be incompatible with the expectations of strategy gamers. I don't know for sure how to reconcile this but I don't want to rule it out as a possibility a priori either. Exploiting the subjectivity and ambiguity of dreams is the centerpiece of the novel and should be the centerpiece of the game, but setting boundaries on this so that it can't be manipulated unfairly by players not looking to play in the spirit of the game will be a concern.
I don't have a clear picture for how the mechanics should work but in the book the palace has a selection department, an interpretation department, and a master-dream department (among many others). So it could be that having personnel in the selection department lets you look at some dream cards and choose which to send along. Then these get shuffled and given to people with personnel in the interpretation department, who must decide what the dreams mean. Maybe they write it out or maybe there are a few scripted explanations, like "war", "economic collapse", "insurrection", "corruption", etc. Then the master-dream department takes these, picks one, and presents it to the Sultan. Perhaps the palace is a pyramid such that fewer and fewer players can place people in the various layers, with perhaps only two players eligible to be in the master-dream office. But those people still have to work with what they're given.
The action in the game should be relatively simple, so as to give maximal scope to the interplayer interactions. It's an influence game at the core but you're trying to gain influence indirectly, because the path to influence flows through the palace. This combined with the novel alliance system might make for something unique and interesting, perhaps.
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