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.