In the Fairy Forest

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!)