Manhattan Project dice game contest

Our friend James Matthe over at Minion games has published a number of games, including a few that I really like, such as Grave Business, by Andy Van Zandt (developer at TMG), Battle Merchants, by Gil Hova (owner of Formal Ferret Games), as well as The Manhattan Project, by Brandon Tibbetts (I don't know that guy), and the follow up Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, by Luke Laurie and Tom Jolly (members of The League of Gamemakers), and many others.

I'm a big fan of The Manhattan Project, and an even bigger fan of Energy Empire, so needless to say that Manhattan Project 2: Minutes to Midnight (I can't NOT read that as "Manhattan Project: 2 Minutes to Midnight") is on my radar, and it has recently launched on kickstarter.

In an effort to promote that campaign, and to find fodder for the MP brand, James has decided to hold a contest to find a dice game set in the Manhattan Project universe. He's looking for a dice game that has the thematic feel of the Manhattan Project games, but will play in about an hour, for 1-4 players. That's right, it must include a solo mode. Boo! I've got nothing against solo modes, but I also don't think designers should be required to provide them.

Anyway, I have plenty of my own projects to work on, such as Joan of Arc: Maid of Orleans, Deities & Demigods, Eminent Domain Origins, as well as TMG stuff, and any new ideas that creep into my head in the meantime. So I don't really have time or inclination to create a game for a contest, and for a non-TMG publisher no less.

But after skimming the post about the contest, wouldn't you know it... I had an idea for a dice game about The Manhattan Project.

I haven't put a lot of thought into it, but I think there are two obvious ways to go with the custom dice required by the contest: either put different game resources on each side, or put different worker types on each side. While TMP had 3 types of workers, Energy Empire had a whole host of diverse worker images, even though in that game they were equivalent. My first thought was to put a different type of worker on each face of the die, and then make them different from each other so it mattered which ones were rolled.

However, that thought didn't immediately go anywhere in my mind. My second thought, however, sort of did. Suppose the dice had different game resources on each side, including laborers, engineers, and scientists. Now suppose there were a dice pool of about N+1 of these dice. You'd roll all the dice, then take turns drafting them, but as a role selection mechanism ("roll selection"?). If you pick a die showing coins, maybe you get 4 coins while everyone else gets 1. You get 3 yellow cake while everyone else gets 1. You get your choice of engineer or scientist while everyone else gets a laborer. Etc.

The point would be to build up resources to do various different things. Enough yellow cake and a scientist and you can make plutonium. Enough plutonium, a scientist, and a coin, and you can make uranium. Enough uranium and an engineer and you can make a bomb. There could also be buildings you can buy with coins (or perhaps with steel and plastic, like in Energy Empire), which could make you better at certain things. And there could be achievements (also like MP:EE), which give you game end bonuses based on certain criteria. You would score points for bombs made, achievements met, and your ability to clean up your environment... You see, certain things could give you pollution (building certain buildings, testing bombs for bonus points, etc), and there could be a "clean up" die face to help get rid of it. A certain number of the dice in the pool would be black, and those would pollute when you draft them

When thinking about the components it would take to track all this, it occurred to me that perhaps roll & write could be a good format for this game. Like Roll Through the Ages, you could mark off boxes as you make progress toward various goals. All you'd really need is a handful of custom dice and some score sheets, and I'm sure that would fit James' vision for the budget of the game (or might even be "too small").

I don't know if I'll give this any more thought, but I wanted to preserve the idea here in case I care to revisit it later. For those of you entering James' contest, good luck!