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.

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.