The Hunt for ... something other than the Hunt for the Ring

Many years ago I had an idea for a chase-the-fugitive game in the spirit of Scotland Yard or Fury of Dracula, about the pursuit of the Frodo by the Nazgul.  But there was a twist:  this would be a three player game, with the third player taking the role of Gollum.  Gollum knows where the ring is at all times, but the Nazgul know where Gollum is at all times, so he has to carefully dance between leading the Nazgul right to it and staying so far away that Frodo is able to easily avoid him.


More recently I had the thought that you could implement this with a new kind of physical component:  a circular board with three screens, emanating from the center of the board to the edge, at 120 degree angles to one another.  So, each pair of screens gives a view of a section that is 1/3 of the total "pie".  But these 'pie slices' you can see are all redundant.  However, you only place your pieces on the slice that you view.  We're all moving on our own pie slice, and we don't know where the other people are.  Except that, at certain times, or perhaps in perpetuity, the board rotates by 60 degrees, such that each player has information about one other player's position.  So in the LotR, Gollum sees himself and Frodo, Frodo sees himself and the Nazgul, the Nazgul see themselves and Gollum.


Of course, a new Hunt for the Ring game just came out so my take on this idea will never go anywhere.  But could the idea be used in some other way?  I don't know but maybe it's worth thinking about.  Divorced from the original restriction of the LotR theme,  I like the idea of a divided circular board that can be rotated by 60 degrees in either direction, so you can get information about what either of your opponents are up to.  Call it the "lazy susan" mechanic. 


The thing is, a cat and mouse game has two participants, so the third participant has to have a well defined role that makes thematic sense, and by which that player can win outright; he/she doesn't simply choose to take the side of one or the other.  This would also seem to preclude a three-sided game.  For example, maybe it's a heist or caper game, and we're the crew, but we don't trust each other so we can 'use the building's security camera' (rotate the lazy susan) to see what the others are really up to.  This is an ok idea perhaps, but there's nothing intrinsically three-player about it.  But maybe that's ok.


A totally weird idea that just popped into my head was Hamlet, with the three players being Hamlet, Claudius, and King Hamlet's Ghost.  This isn't a perfect three-sided game because Hamlet and the ghost are nominally on the same side, but perhaps victory conditions could be defined that let them technically function independently. 


Another different idea could be that the three pie slice sections aren't redundant, but in fact the board is all one big board and we're only seeing (and acting in) parts of it at any one time.  In such a case part of the game would be controlling the 'rotation speed' of the lazy susan; you'd be trying to keep the other players from being able to interfere too much with the things that you set up in that other part of the board there.  The biggest problem with a game like that, I think, is probably memory.


Yet another weird idea, in this case a deduction game.  Say we spilt the board into quarters or fifths, however many suspects there are.  Each pie slice is a redundant map of the manor, and you use each slice to track the actions of ONE suspect.  There are a set of discs, in each character's color, that represent the whereabouts in the mansion of each character at a given hour of the night.  Additionally there are cards that correspond to rooms and times.  We are detectives who perform interviews (get cards) which authorize us to learn the whereabouts of the interviewee by placing a token on the map in that person's slice of the board.  You can rotate the board to get information about different people's whereabouts as well as to interview suspects and be authorized to place additional tokens.  Obviously as more and more tokens are placed the picture becomes more and more complete. Taken comprehensively you are trying to piece together the crime.  Who was in the room, alone, with the victim, when?  And who else did that person talk to, and might those people have been accomplices?  And whom can you place in the room that originally, or subsequently, contained the murder weapon?  It's not certain that this idea strictly requires the lazy susan but maybe it provides a useful framework to think about a mystery from the standpoint of reconstructing it from the testimony of the suspects.

Collusion turns 10

I don't exactly finish designs very quickly.  In particular, I have three games that I've actively worked on for more than ten years.  One is Sands of Time (2003-2015), a second is Lost Adventures (2005-present).  The third is Collusion, which this year at some point will become 10 years old.


This one has a silly origin story.  alea spiele's games all have a "complexity rating" from 1-10.  Puerto Rico is a 7, Princes of Florence a 6; I wondered, what would a 10 look like?  Obviously there are plenty of complex games that would rate a "10" on Alea's scale, but to design a game that could be a 10 and also conform to the other criteria that make an Alea game (i.e. componentry that could fit into one of their boxes, etc), seemed to be an interesting challenge.




My early iterations at this project were rather unfocused, but the design over the last few years clarified a bit into a game of flexible power.  You have a set of power discs and you can deploy these to give you permanent upgrades toward certain actions, or can hold them back to retain flexibility.  Some of your discs are deployed to a rondel, and each season you either take an action, using the power from the current season on the rondel, or pass and move this season's discs to the top of the next season's stack, giving you more power later in the year.  But actions can close out so you don't want to wait too long on the things you most want to do.  Why do you need power?  Because the actions have a varying cost and so having enough power to execute them is important.  But, you can form marriage alliances and call on your allies to provide you with power boosts in exchange for loaning them some of your discs.

Just because it should work doesn't mean it will

So here's where we hit the wrong turn.  We want actions to require power, and moreover to have a varying cost?  Let's then say that the power is indexed to the strength or quality of the thing you're trying to act on.  For example, you want to expand a barony?  The power needed is the size of that barony.  You want to add a faction tile to the board?  The power needed is the presence of that faction on the board already.  You want to add an estate?  The power needed is your presence on the board.  In some ways this isn't as bad as it sounds, but with 9 different factions, you need to track your intrinsic power in each faction AND the power needed for the target of each faction.  I came up with a few schemes to make this easier this via clever board layout but crucially, it never made the leap for some players from "I am thinking about what I can do" to "I am thinking about what I want to do". 


As a last attempt, I tried to rip out the target-based cost for the actions and just had a single cost for each faction that scales the more it's used.  Still nope.  The problem, it turned out, was 50% due to the cost thing, but also 50% due to the confusion of keeping track of your power in each faction.  It just didn't work.


Moreover, the game didn't have much collusion in it, truth to tell.  So, back to the drawing board.  But the upshot from the last failed go-around was that I had ordered little "aspirin pill" pieces in five colors for tracking your power in each faction, and so, can we use them for something else?


My latest idea is to streamline the actions and (for now) give each the same power cost.  That cost is high enough that you won't usually have that much power, so other players have to contribute 'influence' to support your chosen actions, and that's what the pills are now used for.  You have a limited supply per year.  Thus, you want to select actions that support your secret goals, but that are congruent with the interests of the other players, so they will invest support in your actions.  So there's "cut-throat cooperation".


Collusion




A few words about collusion are in order.  Each player has secret goal cards; maybe one says "Barony X is the biggest barony", another says "The Builders control 2 cities".  Additionally there's scoring for control of the baronies, based on the size of those baronies.  So your first instinct in playing a game like this is to try to find a way to achieve synergy between all of the goals you were dealt, and with grabbing the best baronies.  But in this game, the intent is actually that you will try to seek synergy with the goals of other players.  This comes through even more now that you need the players to directly invest in your actions to pull them off.  So if I have a "Barony X" goal, and I want to expand that barony, I can probably do that more easily if someone else is the baron and thus it's in their interest to help me.  This isn't technically the dictionary definition of collusion, but the idea is to find ways to create mutual interests of this sort, and I think there are a few layers on which you can do it.  I think the fact that scoring occurs only at the end also promotes this.

Actions in a sensible framework

I just bought alea's "In the Year of the Dragon" and realized that in many cases, what makes an alea game an alea game is a simple and unified action selection framework.  Their games (generally) don't have turns with a lot of phases or menus of turn actions that are wildly divergent in their effects.  This clarified for me the direction that the action system needs to go:  each 'season', one of the five 'baronies' is active, and each player is going to propose one action.  Each action will take place in one of the barony's territories, which means by implication that every action has to specifically perform an operation that can be associated with a territory or the stuff that's in a territory.  So some of the possible actions needed to be thrown out, because they don't fit this framework.




I think that the game that results is self-contained, although whether it's good is still TBD based on playtesting. 




Rules document here:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NU6VRy81rBpUar71Vp8R8c0ctO8kY6oh1ZtA2NR8yx4/edit?usp=sharing

Dungeon Temp Agency

This week we had a playtest of Dino Resort that went pretty well.  The main action in the game -- proposing cards that you think the active player will like -- works well in the sense that you're torn between offering them something good, which will also pay you well, and offering something poor, which won't help them but also they probably won't pick it.  The economy is a bit too tight -- players could benefit from more money to spend and an easier time acquiring cards to have more options to propose.  It might also not hurt to have a bit more diversity in what the cards do -- maybe some offer income, others offer simple bonuses or discounts or something like that.  Still it's off to a good start.


This week I revisited an idea I had recently that frankly I'm surprised no one else has already come up with.     Players represent employment agencies trying to find workers gainful employment, but these workers aren't looking for office jobs:  rather, they're adventurers looking for interesting quests to join.

I think there would be a deck of cards representing the different adventurers, which you draw and which you then have to assign to different quests; I suppose there are several quests available at any time.  Other players will be proposing cards to those same spots.  There needs to be some simple way of evaluating whose proposed card(s) is/are the 'best'.  When the adventure is full the quest begins, dice are rolled and we see whether the quest succeeded or not.  If it did, you get a share of the loot, if it failed...something bad happens.

To me the toughest thing about this design is that it's probably supposed to be a bit of a send-up, but I'm not nearly well enough acquainted with or affectionate toward D&D to be able to pull this off very well.  So the game might end up being functional but not very funny.  On the other hand, Munchkin already exists so there's no need for a game that's just a box full of jokes.

I guess the idea should be that each quest should be represented with a card and should say something about the skills that it requires and the difficulty it will take to pass it.  So you want to propose cards to complement the skills that are already represented by the cards in the party.  But where do those cards come from?  Instead maybe everyone is putting forward one member of each party and so you're deciding which quests to really invest in and which ones you think are likely to tank. Maybe there are, say, 6 quests open at any time, and a quest runs when it gets 5 members, and then a new quest is put in its place.  So each turn would consist of placing a card from your hand onto one of the quests.  (Maybe there's also a way that 'NPCs' are added via a random die roll).  This would mean that the rewards for the quest are divided asymmetrically based on the number of cards each player invested, and perhaps on the quality of those cards as well.

Of course it's a dungeon game so you have to roll dice to see whether a quest succeeded or failed.  Maybe it's as simple as there are a few types of icons, and each icon on a character card means a die that character gets to roll of that type against the dungeon/foe.  But some skills aren't useful against certain foes.  Roll the dice and compare against the required level for that skill, and then if it succeeds pay out rewards, but perhaps the dungeon also can deal out damage or something.

Obviously like all of these ideas this needs more thought but I think there's a simple and perhaps slightly silly game in here somewhere.