Sidetracked!

I SHOULD be working on EmDo expansions, Alter Ego, Kings of Air and Steam, Exhibit, Dice Works, etc...

Meanwhile though, I have been distracting myself with yet another deck building game idea. I thought of another game using deck building - this one was going to be a more typical style deck builder at first, but when it came down to the details, I could not bring myself to copy Dominion. So instead it's more like the Research mechanism from Eminent Domain broken out on its own.

Skyline
The game is called Skyline, and in it you use deck building to add cards to your deck, collect sets of cards in your hand, and use them to put those cards into play as buildings. The idea mostly came from the visual concept of the cards with silhouettes of a building on them, so when stacks of these cards are splayed side by side, it would look like a downtown skyline.

Here's a rundown of the game in its current form (obviously subject to change, as I have not tried it yet!):

Game turn:
Architect Phase: Play a card for it's effect, or draw 1 card.
Bid Phase: Play cards to purchase a card from the display, or draw 1 card.
Construction Phase: Play a card onto your tableau (pay by discarding cards), or draw 1 card.
Design Phase: Draw 1 card

In each phase you can EITHER play cards, OR draw a card (obviously in the Design Phase you just draw a card). This is instead of refilling your hand at the end of the turn. I don't know if that will work, but it sounded like a neat change to me.

Cards in the display will be from 5 face down stacks - one each for 0-cost, 2-cost, 3-cost, 4-cost, and 5-cost. Each stack has cards in some number of colors (5 or 6 probably). The more expensive the card, the more VP it's worth and the better the effect on it. The cost is the number of cards of that color which must be discarded to purchase the card, or to play the card to the table. Currently I'm thinking that except for the 0-cost pile (building bases, what you need to start a building), the stacks will each be shuffled and the top card revealed and available for purchase. there might need to be more cards available, I'm not sure yet.

That's the idea anyway. I hope to create some cards and give it a try soon. I'm sure you'll hear more about it at some point.

Aaaaaand another one...

Skyline has not been my only distraction. Just today I was inspired while reading the review of Funkenschlag: The First Spark on Opinionated Gamers. I thought of a resource gathering mechanism (which is completely unrelated to Funkenschlag). Tonight I created some hex tiles and sorted some meeples and wooden discs to give it a try.

The basic idea in this one is that you lay out an array of hexes, each with radial lines dividing the hex into 6 'spaces,' and a circle of color in the center. When joined, these lines create spaces for meeple placement, each touching 2 of the circles. After a few rounds of worker placement, players use the resources (colored circles) their meeples are touching to build some "technology" or "building". Also, each circle could have a token on it, maybe a 1-shot resource of a particular type (like the resource cubes in Olympos), or maybe 1-shot abilities (like the tiles in Hansa Teutonica).

That's about as far as I've got on this idea. Who knows if it will get anywhere.