Collusion: glimmers of collusion

Collusion spent most of its life on the design backburner, by which I mean that I'd take it out, work on it, find that what I tried didn't work, and put it back onto the backburner for a couple of years until my next great idea.

In reasonably short order from the early stages documented in the last post, game-development-wise (not calendar-wise), some core design ideas emerged.  The game needed a proper scoring system, and it was mostly built around the core concepts that animate the current scoring system:  players are given some "schemes" representing game states they want to achieve when the game ends, and then you get points for controlling baronies and for forming marriage alliances.  

In these early stages, most of the actions snapped into place as well.  There were 9 factions, and each had an action you could take: grow a barony, add a faction to the board, move the king, form a marriage alliance, and so on.  Some of these actions persist into the final version.

What took many years to figure out was a sensible way to put interesting obstacles in the player's path.  For too long, that obstacle was cost.  It was supposed to be hard to do what you wanted, because actions have a cost, and you have to be able to pay that cost.  In fairness this is how almost every other game works so it's an understandable mistake.  

At first this cost was explicit.  There were resources, and you had to pay resources to use a faction's power.  The more it was used, the more expensive it became, and each faction had a preferred resource.  Except! As players constructed alliances between the factions, you could pay the resource that faction A accepts to use the ability of faction B, but you have to pay extra based on the number of 'hops' required to get from A to B.  There were a few ways to do this, but the idea was largely about having a sort of power network that you could hop into and out of en route to paying for actions.  Additionally I introduced an idea of 'loyalty'; factions were either loyal or disloyal to the crown.  Early on this was helpful because the idea of factions being in alliances quickly merged with the idea of factions being loyal or disloyal, such that there was a loyal faction alliance and a disloyal faction alliance.  

Thus, one of the things you could do was manipulate the alliance landscape, to switch a faction from one alliance to the other.  This had some benefits to you, since you yourself were loyal or disloyal, but mostly it was a ways-and-means thing, it let you use factions less expensively if you could get the alliance landscape right.  And then in addition, you could influence factions yourself, and using a faction you influenced, or one of its allies, also gave you a discount.

A new wave of playtesters bravely braved this wave of changes, and once again we played a few games that didn't get halfway to completion before the players gave up.  They were good sports, but again, it was just too indirect to go between resources I have access to to actions I want to take to schemes I want to complete.  

The solution to this, I decided, was not to streamline the action and cost system, but rather to try to find ways to make visualization of the costs easier.  Of course this led to some streamlining for the nonce, and the first to fall were the resources themselves.  Instead, paying for an action required 'power' (ooh!), with all the previous discount concepts being ported over to the power system.  

But we also added a system that I truly liked and that, though it's since been cut, may find use in another game someday.  The idea was this: you have a rondel with power discs on it, with each rondel space representing a season.  When you pay 'power' from the current season, your power boost is given by the number of discs in the stack, and then you discard the topmost disc on the stack.  Any unused discs are added to the next season's stack.

Now as you can readily see, this does two nice things.  First, it means that the longer you wait to act -- i.e. the more seasons you let elapse -- the more impactful your discs become.  If you have, say, three discs total, and you use one action per season, you'll take three actions of power 1, but if you wait to take those actions till season three, you take three actions of power 3, 2, and 1, a big advantage.  (But, there's also a limited number of actions of each type available, so waiting has consequences).  Second, it means that power discs now become a tradable currency, and if you give me a disc for my use, it goes to the bottom of my stack, and comes back to you when it floats back to the top.  Thus there's a positive-sum interaction in making deals -- colluding, I daresay -- but also time ramifications.

Now this system was actually pretty good.  The trouble was all of the other stuff, the nine actions, the discounts, and so on.  The idea was that a faction's use cost depended on the target of its action, but factions targeted different things, and so each faction had a different cost structure.  For example, a faction that lets you build a building has its cost determined by the presence of the faction whose building you're going to build, whereas a faction that is going to grow a barony has its cost determined by the size of the barony it will expand.  Now this makes logical sense:  a strong faction should cost more to build, a big barony should cost more to expand.  But in practice, it meant that there's a pretty big matrix of costs to consider (what faction will I use, and what is its target?) and then the discount rules manipulate those costs, and it's just a lot to parse.

Undeterred, I kept charging ahead with different board layouts to permit easier visualization of the cost landscape, and when even these failed, I did away with the subjective action costs and just gave each faction its own cost, irrespective of its target.  Even this didn't help, because trying to visualize the discount structure was still a huge pain.  It depended on alliances and various things, but every time something changed, your entire discount matrix changed with it.  A real mess, and more importantly, it just wasn't fun.  Players couldn't connect their actions to their goals because they were so preoccupied with trying to connect their discounts to their actions.  And too many actions revolved around manipulating those costs, too few around manipulating the goals.

Collusion: origin story

I guess I'll start using this blog to document ongoing progress with my latest "big" game, Collusion, which I think/hope is nearing completion.  I've thought/hoped that about other projects in the past and had those thoughts/hopes dashed, so it's possible that will happen here as well!

I mentioned a year or so ago that Collusion had just turned 10, which means that now it's about 11, but a lot has happened in this last year.  It's almost night-and-day different in many respects.  I'll spend a couple of posts talking about those first 10 years -- its childhood, I guess you could say -- and then in a separate post I'll say a bit more about this adolescent phase it has just gone through.

As I have said previously, Collusion was my attempt at a really heavy game, which in hindsight I realize to have been silly and misguided.  At the point that I started Collusion, Sands of Time had not yet reached its apex of complexity, and so I was not quite aware that I was already working on a very complex game.  Moreover, really complex games were still something of a rare breed at that point, but 11 years later, the complexity creep in the hobby has given way to a complexity flood, and games are incredibly complex, cluttered with ideas and systems and icons and components and all sorts of things.  I don't think this has been an entirely good thing and have disavowed complexity as an animating design philosophy in my own projects, which has had interesting ramifications for Collusion as we'll discuss.  But let's look at how it got started.

At around this time, I was an active participant at the Board Game Designer's Forum, having spent most of my formative years as a designer hashing out ideas about design in that community.  One of the designers there was Rene Wiersma, designer of Gheos, and he was talking at that time about a new design of his, his "magnum opus", which was going to pull together all of the things he had learned about design into a single game.  (I don't know for sure whether he ever finished the project though!)  This got me to thinking about embarking on a similar project, or at least a project of a similar scope, and I started with, more or less, two main ideas.  First, the title, "Collusion", and second, that it would have area control but not area majority.

The premise was that we were nobles in some fictitious realm.  Fictitious realms in games always seem to have kings on death's door, but in this game's case, we weren't trying to succeed the king or even impress him; rather, we were trying to use him as a pawn in the great game we were all playing for the supremacy in our behind-the-scenes scheming.  The kingdom had a bunch of territories, each with a characteristic resource that it produced.  The game had seasons, and each type of resource only produced in one or two of the three (?) seasons.  The realm had roads, which were only passable in some of the seasons.  It had estates, which we could claim.  And it had baronies, groups of territories that could grow and shrink. 

Most of all it had factions.  Factions each had a characteristic building, which could be placed into certain special spaces on the board.  And they had cards representing their members.  This was important because we each had a mat, which specified our heirs and with spaces for advisors.  Thus we could claim cards from certain factions and marry them to our heirs (actually, this was a two-step process, betrothal and then marriage) and we could hire them as advisors, by placing the cards onto the corresponding space on the mat. 

But each card also had a special action it could perform.  Thus the turn mechanic was actually quite simple: take a card, and either do its action or attach it to your mat as a betrothal or advisor.  Each faction's actions were associated with the kinds of things that you'd think thematically that faction could do.  The church performed marriages, the merchants converted resources, and so on. 

Each year, the king took a royal tour around the realm, following the paths that were open in whatever season it happened to be.  You wanted to steer the king to your estates so you could entertain him, by throwing a festival in which you expended resources.  Each season had a set of appropriate festival types -- i.e. a resource-to-points conversion -- and we tracked the quality of the festivals we each threw, with the person who threw the best festival getting some reward at year's end.  And then there were also baronial elections, whereby you gained control of the baronies. 

You'll notice I haven't said anything about collusion, because at that stage there wasn't any.  It would have been more accurate to call the game "Scheming"; I toyed with a name switch to "Levers of Power", but always stuck with Collusion, and now it's a more fitting title for the game.

We played the game once.  Or rather, I taught the game over the course of an hour to two patient souls (one of them was my brother) who attempted to discern just what in the world I was talking about.  Then they heroically attempted to play the thing, we may have made it through a year, and then ended in confusion.  Ending the game early is going to be a common theme in this.  And for comparison, the latest version, I can teach in about 10 minutes. 

I've talked about how in the process of designing Sands I came to realize that a game should have a core idea, but that realization came late in Sands' development and I certainly hadn't made it by the early years of Collusion, although I now know what the idea of Collusion is.  At the early stage, it turns out it was just a kind of generic and not especially focused power-acquisition game, with the intent that there were a lot of different things you had to think about.  I guess that my intent, though I never fully realized it, was that there was a 'levers of power' construct, in that there were different systems in the game, and you couldn't interact with all of them, so the point was to choose how to compartmentalize your participation into just those systems that you were going to emphasize in your strategy.  It wasn't that the game's turn mechanic was complicated, but just that there were so many different layers to what went on during the game. 

As I said, the game was hardly even playable early on, much less memorable.  I think in its current form it may be something special.  I'll talk in the next post about the intervening years and how it made this journey.

En Arche: tile removal and dice allocation

Way back in 2011, I had an email conversation with Jeff Allers in which he told me about his game Heartland.  It's a tile-laying game with a farming theme, with the twist that tiles are placed on top of other tries to simulate replanting a field of one crop with a different type.  It's just been reworked into a feudal Japan theme and published by Renegade as "Gunkimono".


Anyway, what this discussion sparked for me was the awareness that tile-laying games don't have to strictly remain two-dimensional.  And thinking in a third dimension led quickly to the thought of a 3D game in which you start with a stack of tiles and remove them progressively to uncover what's underneath.  This obviously suggests an archaeology theme, and that's obviously where I went with it.


For some reason, I decided that because worker placement games were becoming the popular thing at that time, I needed an elaborate WP system to give you a lot of different things you could do.  It actually probably could have worked, but digging was very swingy, in that you were rewarded for whatever you uncovered as you removed tiles, and also the game was a bit dry.  So it got shelved.


Last week I had an idea for a mechanic that I haven't seen previously:  roll dice and assign them to different actions, and then resolve actions in die order.  Thus there needs to be some reason why you want to go early in some actions, but also that there's an advantage to going late.  I quickly whisked through all of my design ideas for which I've hit a snag and thought about whether this could possibly unsnag any of those games.  And luckily, I think for the archaeology game, there's a potential fit.


The idea is this:  the stack of tiles is laid out in a 4 by 4 grid, with tiles having 1, 2, or 3 squares.  (All tiles in a layer are functionally the same)  At the start of each turn, randomly activate three sites in the grid (e.g. C3, A2, B1).  Then each player rolls dice and assigns one die to each active site.  Then, resolve actions in die order.  (If two players pick the same die on the same site, just use a 'tiebreaker track' to settle who goes first).


Each tile, when it's first uncovered, receives a number of cubes, randomly drawn, in an amount equal to the level on which the tile is found.  These come in four colors, representing different kinds of finds:  artifacts, inscriptions, human remains, and structures.


There are five different actions you can take when your turn comes up:  (1) remove the tile at that site (costs money), (2) sell one of the cubes for money, (3) pick one of the cubes and increase your "knowledge track" in  that color, (4) publish a book about one of the cube colors, or (5) announce a Major Discovery that includes one or two of the cube colors.


Here's the twist:  for options 2-5, the 'value' of the action you're taking is buffed by the number of dice on the tile.  So if you're first to act on the tile and (for example) choose to sell, you'll have your choice of which color to sell but won't get much money for it.  Whereas if you act later, there will be more dice on the tile and thus selling a cube will be worth more, but the cube selection may be more limited at that point. 


This is a pretty simple turn mechanic so I'm optimistic that it could work well, and certainly it's an enormous improvement over the bloated complexity of the WP conception of the game.  Possible concerns include that the randomly-assigned dig sites will be too restrictive, that the die-rolling will inject too little player control, and that the game won't play equally well at all player counts.  But we'll leave it to playtesting to determine which of these concerns materialize and how to address them.  A bigger concern might be that the earlier concern, that the game was rather dry, may still exist:  there isn't exactly an element of removing a tile and finding something really great underneath it.  Instead it's about positioning yourself to benefit from whatever is uncovered, and to decide which sites to prioritize each round.  I think it will be fun but definitely not the "thrill of discovery" fun of Thebes for example.


For now, I like that both the physical arrangement of the tiles and the turn mechanic have not yet, as far as I know, been done previously, but both should make pretty good intuitive sense so hopefully the game is easy to learn and play.

Red 5

For several years I've been working on Downhill Racer, a game about the Olympic downhill.  It's a dice game whose central skill  is risk management.  You want to increase your speed to boost your score, but speed puts you at more risk of crashing.   The downhill course is represented by a series of cards, and each card shows you a "skier's eye view" perspective of the part of the course you're currently on, and you must make a single decision on each card.  This captures the feel of the downhill and I think it's very successful.

I had always thought of this as a solo game, but at the suggestion of John Velonis we tried a 2p variant years ago, and it has tested so well that I now think of it as the primary way of playing the game.  It's fun to try to stay upright as you race down the course, but even more fun when the other player is a little ahead of you and you're being pulled to speed up even if it's risky to do so.

But this had me wondering whether this same framework -- a two-player game, first person perspective, quick simple decisions -- could work in any other setting as well, and my first thought was the death star trench run scene.

Like the downhill game, each card will show a first person perspective of a section of the trench, with some gun turrets.  (Additional neat thing, visually, the cards are arranged in a pile, so the back-printing of the next card will show what's coming further down the trench, viewed from further away, then when you flip it you see it up close).

Unlike the downhill game, this one is asymmetric.  One player is the rebels (i.e. Luke) and the other is the imperial defenses and Vader.

In the downhill game, there are three skills, each card tests one of them, and you roll dice to see how many 'hits' you get of that card's skill.  In this game I think it will be more that you roll dice and pick the skill you want to use for that card.  For the rebels, I think it will be "fire", "shields", and "maneuver".  The idea is that if you can take out all the gun turrets on the present card, you can speed up, and speed makes you harder to hit as well as necessary for the final shot (it's a kinetic weapon or something like that).  But if you can't take out the turrets, maybe instead you direct energy to your shields, or you maneuver.

Why would you need to do that?  Because the Vader player also has three things he can do, fire the gun turrets, maneuver his tie fighter, or shoot.  Vader has a little card that shows his "targeting computer", and for him, maneuvering lets him move a marker closer to the center, and the closer it is the fewer successes he needs to hit you when he fires.  Thus, by you maneuvering, it moves that marker away from center and/or perhaps there's also a left-right thing that you can dance around to also make yourself harder to hit.  But when he has a clean shot and hits it, you lose one of your three X-wings.

Overall then it's something of a cat-and-mouse game.  My sense is that the climax should of course be the exhaust port, and obviously you should have to roll "fire" results to hit that.  Maybe as you get closer and closer the odds of hitting it go up, but the longer you wait the more you're risking getting blown up before you have a chance to fire.

Of course there are three things that the game wouldn't feel complete without, and I don't yet know how to include them:  R2, Han, and Obi-Wan/The Force.  My only idea here is that you have a special die that has an R2 face, a Millennium Falcon face, and one or two "The Force" faces.  Maybe you're limited when you can roll it or how many times, but if you do, R2 lets you regain a shield, Han takes out a Tie Fighter, and the Force gives you +1 to your shot at the exhaust port.

Lots to think about here and the key will be balancing it in such a way that, generally speaking, you're down to your last x-wing and Vader is close to targeting you and about to pull the trigger when you fire off your proton torpedoes.  But there's a lot to put in place before getting to the balancing!

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.