Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Political themed Area Control idea

Last Friday I was thinking about Area Control mechanics, and a game idea snuck into my head. I just re-read it, and here's a couple things that snuck in this time...

There could be some sort of Motion cards - representing an effect or event. A committee would vote on whether or not it would come into play. There could be different categories of Motion, and for each there'd be a different committee. When it comes time to vote, players would choose PASS/FAIL simultaneously, and when revealed the vote would be tallied. Each member of the committee would vote according to how his controlling lobbyist (player) indicated. Perhaps players would get some victory points at that time as well if their members voted in the majority - I could see someone putting a member in the committee at the last minute, not necessarily to influence the outcome, but to sneak a few points if they can manage to vote right.

I could see these Motion cards indicating a time value, which is the number of rounds until the vote occurs. A die or counter could be placed on the card, and each round it could be incremented (or decremented, whatever) until vote time, then the vote occurs and another Motion comes up (or doesn't until next 'term')

A 'term' could be a number of rounds. Actually, maybe better a 'term' is made up of 2 'years' - and a 'year' is made up of several rounds of play. congressmen could advance from level 1 (newbie) in their first year, to level 2 in their second year (worth 1.5 influence perhaps). Then they'd either go away or get re-elected. Maybe better they are level 1 (weak) in their first term, and become stronger if they get reelected.

I had mentioned that the congressmen might be able to be reelected, so they either go away or don't, and maybe you don't know for sure which it'll be. Players could take actions to improve the chances of their congressmen getting reelected... a simple way might be that the general rule is:

Roll 1d6 for each congressman, on a 6 they are reelected, otherwise remove them from the board.

Then via some actions, players could gain +1 modifiers to that die roll, probably for all of their congressmen as opposed to individual ones (just because of the scope of the game). In other words, through some investment, players could end up with Influence that sticks around for a second term, and maybe they carry more clout (are worth more influence) at that point.

1 comment:

Seth Jaffee said...

Re-reading 2 years later...

Idea for re-election mechanism. Presumably there will be a handful of Congressmen for each player. So, to see how many get re-elected, maybe instead of rolling dice so that it's random there's just a straight percentage of congressmen that get re-elected, and by investing in campaigning, you can increase that number.

So normally, 1 in every 3 of your congressmen get re-elected (and upgraded if this puts them in their 2nd term). Round in your favor. With 1 'unit' of Campaign Funds (having invested in it) that increases to 1 in every 2 congressmen. Invest some more and maybe it becomes 2 in every 3... always rounding in your favor.

Maybe those levels apply to the new (young) congressmen, and maybe the older, more powerful congressmen are 1 step behind - meaning they normally never get re-elected, but if you invest then then 1/3 of them get re-elected, etc.

That would make it more calculable rather than rolling dice to see if you maintain your influence, I suspect certain people would prefer that. Rolling dice might be a neat way to do it too, though with more chance involved.