Yangi x3! 3-Lane game jam, Card/Dice drafting, and a Kid's car race

I've been doing some freelance development lately, so not much I feel right talking about on my blog.. but I have had a few ideas of my own as well... I'll make a separate, more in-depth post about each, but here are my 3 latest game ideas (since the recent 18 card game jam):

1. 3 Lane Game Jam - Kingdom Realms

Man, that title sounds like it was created by an AI ChatBot, doesn't it? 

Kingdom Realms was my submission to a little 2-week game jam. Here's the description of the jam criteria, though it was made clear they were more like suggestions:

Games where there are 3 areas in which you can play cards, and you have to "win" two of the areas in some sense. Of course, if your game needs 4 or 5 lanes, that's okay too, but try and keep the "win 2/3" (or 3/5) lanes idea in there somehow if you can. There's no limitation on the number of cards or other components

Taking inspiration from Animal Kingdoms and Rolling Realms, I made a game where you turn up 3 Realm cards, each with a rule governing play in that lane, and a win condition, governing who wins that lane. Then you deal some cards into a supply, and take turns drafting a card and placing it in one of the realms on your side. In the end, I added effects that occur upon playing the cards as well. Once you get through the deck, you check each Realm's win condition and see who wins 2 out of 3.

To be honest, I'm much less thrilled with this game than I have been with some of my other games, but it does seem to work alright. I generally think I'm not very into lane combat games, Riftforce being an exception.

2. Card + Dice drafting

This second idea hasn't got a title, it was inspired by a conversation which was initially about how to do an autobattler in a tabletop game. Someone suggested a dice drafting game with an autobattler sort of flavor, and that got me thinking "what if you drafted a die and played a card to a programmed row, then you rolled the dice and resolved the first card on your row vs the opponent, or the top card of a deck or something"

From there I quickly formulated a game structure - no theme or anything, so I'm probably stuck until I figure out a theme. I'll post the details in a fresh post, but it's got entangled decisions, cards+dice drafting, and programmed card play.

3. Kid's car race

My 4.5 year old son LOOOVES vehicles. No idea why, I'm not a "car guy" by any means, but he's just fascinated by cars, trucks, tractor-trailers, vehicle transports, excavators, etc, etc, etc. He especially likes sporty cars (with spoilers), and he "oohs" and "ahhs" every time we see a Camero in traffic.

I thought this might be a good way to get him interested in playing games with me. We have a copy of Monza, and he plays that (he tolerates it, doesn't get as excited about it as I thought he might), and he understands the rules - including a house rule we use.

I recently saw a new game called HEAT: Pedal to the Metal, and started looking into it a little bit to see if I thought my son could handle a simplified version of that game (I don't really think so).

What he has been excited to play lately is War. He loves playing War, and he tolerates Monza... so I thought maybe I could make a game similar to Monza that used cards like War. In the end I came up with something that is NOT like War at all.

In this ide, you use the cars, board, and Dice from Monza, but instead of rolling the dice to move forward on the board, you play a card (value 1-3), and move that number of spaces. Then, whatever color you land on, you look at the dice and move 1 more space forward for each die showing that same color, then you reroll those dice. 

I tried playing 2-handed solo a few times, and it seems to work alright! So I tried to get my son to play it with me... no luck (at least not yet)