The List - revisited

It's been a while since I've given any thought to old game design ideas. Last night I had the opportunity to recount some of them to a friend, and it reminded me how awesome some of them are! So I thought I'd revisit The List:

Old Standbys - games which have been around, 1/2 done and untouched, for years:
- 8/7 Central
- Hot & Fresh
- Dynasty
- Odysseus: Winds of Fate
- Kilauea
- Reading Railroad

Old Ideas that Haven't gone Anywhere Yet, But Probably Should - some of these have been getting stale as well:
- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Dating Game
- Ticket Please
- Moctezuma's Revenge

I have lots of ideas for several of these games, so many that I think I'm overwhelmed and am not making any progress on any of them! The good news is that I have at least made SOME progress on my games, like Exhibit, Alter Ego, and The Knights Templar.

I think the best of the bunch are:

Dynasty: The Spread of Culture in Ancient China
Build villages and learn advances, assimilating opponents' cultures as you go. Your villages give you access to resources to spend on things like advances. If you cannot afford what you want, you can "trade" with an opponent (they cannot say no) - but if you do then you must take one of their Culture Chits onto your player board. This is both good and bad, as filling up your player board gives you benefits, but each of those Culture Chits represents scoring for your opponents. The first player to fully fill their board becomes the Emperor (and scores a small bonus), but it's the player who's culture is best represented who is the real winner!

Hot & Fresh
Delivering pizza can be frantic work! Plan your route and push your luck with the traffic laws to make deliveries and earn tips. There is a simple set of traffic laws, and the more laws you break, the more likely you will get busted. Driving safe for a while will turn the heat down, but your tips decrease over time so you're encouraged to press your luck at least a little bit. Originally the routes were intended to change as traffic lights turn from green to yellow to red - a newer development involves placing tiles between the main roads to represent shortcuts that you know about but your opponents do not.


Red Colony
Players build colonies on Mars, first by claiming property (building tubes and domes), then constructing various buildings under those domes. Income is customizable and ranges from early game building materials to late game higher level materials, to people. You'll have to spend time and effort to modify income over the course of the game. The goal will be to house as many people as possible in your Colony by the end of the game. A lot of the ideas for this game came directly from The Case For Mars.


Alter Ego
Cooperative deck building game of vigilante heroism. Save the city from Arch Villains - but as you become a stronger hero, you'll need to neglect some aspect of your Alter Ego life. In the early game you start with Family, Job, and Community cards which each give you some benefit. Each turn you must take another card, either another Alter Ego card or a Hero card. You'll need Hero cards to defeat henchmen, but you can only play so many cards per turn... so playing more Hero cards necessarily means playing fewer Alter Ego cards! This game will have a Cooperative mode, and possibly a Competitive mode as well where each player has a personal Nemesis in addition to the Arch Villains.

The Knights Templar
After hearing about Trajan's Rond-cala mechanism I had a guess as to how it would work. I was wrong, but I thought my idea might make an equally good game, so I combined that main mechanism with an older idea I had for a Knights Templar theme. In this game you'll Move your knights, Crusade against Moors and other enemies, Erect buildings, and spread the Influence of the Order of the Temple. But when the Order gets strong enough, King Philip will become nervous and issue arrest orders for the Templars! Race to Portugal (and maybe Scotland) where you'll be safe while a wave of destruction radiates from Paris, destroying buildings as it goes. When a building is destroyed, players with that type of building still standing earn some points, so it could matter which buildings you erect and where you erect them.

I'm such a slacker!

I have been seriously slacking where it comes to game design lately. The Hippodice (game design contest) deadline is approaching, and I'm not sure which game - if any - is in good enough shape to submit!

Of the games on the list, there are several which are (still) partially prototyped, and I'm spinning my gears trying to decide what version of rules to use. The list is only getting longer, here's an updated list:

Old Standbys - games which have been around, 1/2 done and untouched, some of them going on 3 years now:
- 8/7 Central
- Hot & Fresh
- Dynasty
- Odysseus: Winds of Fate
- Kilauea
- Reading Railroad
- Rodeo Drive

Old Ideas that Haven't gone Anywhere Yet, But Probably Should - some of these have been getting stale as well:
- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Knights Templar

New Ideas that Haven't gone Anywhere Yet, But Probably Should:
- Dating Game

New Ideas that I've started actually prototyping or testing:
- Ticket Please
- Moctezuma's Revenge

I have lots of ideas for several of these games, so many that I think I'm overwhelmed and am not making any progress on any of them!

The List

Viable game ideas to work on in 2008 (and what needs doing on them). Not all of these will be finished, or even looked at, but this is the current list of stuff I've got in mind. In no particular order:

Hot and Fresh
- Create board
- Create Order cards
- Test rules as-is
- Redesign Order mechanics and End Game conditions
- Revisit rules after testing

Dynasty
- Create list of Tech Upgrades with costs made up of 8 different resources
- Create game board dividing China into probably 16 regions, 2 associated with each resource
- Test rules as-is
- Re-examine Leader actions
- Revisit rules after testing

Time is Money
- Consider theme and scope of game
- This is more a mechanic/structure at the moment, not a complete game. Maybe find a complement game in which to use this system.

Kilauea
- Test again as-is
- Superimpose square grid on Hawaii map
- Revisit rules after testing
- Enter in KublaContest this year?

Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Create Lead and Follow-up cards of each category
- Test rules as-is
- Revisit rules after testing

8/7 Central
- Dust off and test again
- Revisit rules after testing
- Redesign auction mechanic

Red Colony
- Consider theme and scope of game
- Write rules

Rodeo Drive
- Test more
- Revisit rules after testing
- Re-examine board placement/scoring

Reading Railroad
- Decide if it's worth pursuing (see if Scott wants to pursue it)
- Write rules
- Prototype and test
Edit: I did pursue this with Scott, I entered it in the KublaCon design contest - it didn't fare too well. It could use finishing touches, but I rather like the game. I think the cross section of people who would be interested in this might be small though.

Clash of the Kingpins
- Re-imagine the game as a non-CCG
- Discuss with Tom Lehmann, see if he's interested in working on it with me (he mentioned he might be, that would be cool)

I'd like to design a "bigger" game

I've noticed that all the games I've designed or worked on are "quick fillers" or "medium weight" games. I like to play medium weight games, so it stands to reason that my designs might fall into that category. But I found myself thinking recently that I'd really like to make a game that is heavier and deeper.

I'm not really sure how to go about that. A friend of mine designed Homesteaders, which I find to be pretty deep, lots of emergent strategy. Not really any luck element. That's a really good game, and it's the kind of thing I'm talking about - but I didn't have anything to do with that. I wasn't even involved in playtesting until the game was already mostly finished.

I don't know if any of my current ideas would make for a good heavy game or not - my guess is no, as they are all from before I started thinking about it, and therefore were probably conceived with a 1 hour time frame and "middle weight" in mind. Maybe the Time = Money idea could be interesting enough to warrant a heavyweight game built around it.

I'll have to give it some thought and figure out what exactly I mean by "bigger" or "deeper" or "heavy weight as opposed to medium weight" - then decide how to go about it.

Time = Money: Specific mechanic

I have been considering the ideas I posted back in April about the cash value of your time... and I have come up with what I think may be a good way to represent it.

Each round you will get your income, a static number of Action chips (A), and some number of Money chips ($) based on your current $ income (which will change over the course of the game).

Then, different actions in the game will cost some total number of chips. Each will require 1 A and 1 $, and the balance of chips can be any combination of A and $ that you want. So at the beginning you might be spending AAA$ because you are low on cash, while for the same action later you might spend AA$$ because you have more cash and want to do other things with those action chips. In the endgame you may well spend A$$$ for that action because you can afford it and that extra Action chip will become more valuable.

In fact, looking at the cash value of your Action chips, you'd have to compare them to the number of $ chips you also get each turn. If you make a lot of money, then your A chips (actions) will be much more valuable than if you make very little.

I think this mechanic is a good representation of the idea, and one of these days I'll be writing up some rules and finding a theme for this game idea. I've sort of got one cooking, which has to do with building a mansion for a wealthy client, or perhaps more like building houses on a larger scale. We'll see where this goes...

Long time no post... long time no design!

It's been a couple weeks since my last post, and I still haven't gotten to some of the things I said I'd post about... like those Strategy and Tactics articles Oh well, such is life. Here's what has been going on:

Playtesting: I've finally gotten a playtest group started, we meet at my house on Sundays from 11ish until frisbee time. The core has proven to be myself, Aric Jack (shrike on BGDF), and Eric Flood, with a few others who've been once or twice each. So far we've been testing several of Aric's card games, as well as All For One, Blockade Runner, and a game of Eric's as well.

Gaming: I went to PhoenixConGames last week - it was mediocre relative to KublaCon and BGG.con, but it was worth the trip. I played a handful of board games, mostly with people I play with at home anyway. I did meet a couple guys from Phoenix, and a couple of Bo's friends as well, and hang out wih my friend Chris who lives in Phoenix as well. At RTeam game club I've gotten to try Notre Dame finally. I was disappointed at first by some aspects of the card drafting mechanism, but the game is growing on me.

Game Design: I haven't done much with design lately. I had decided to postpone new design ideas and work on "finishing" some of the many I have already. I had resolved at New Years to get All For One "in line to be published" this year. Blockade Runner is allegedly going to be published by Shifting Skies games, working on contacting people about a license right now. Wizard's Tower got 2nd place in the KublaContest (it's not actually called "KublaContest", but it ought to be ;) ) and both the contest director Julie Haehn and Aldie from BGG wanted a copy. Julie said she knows an up and coming publisher, and wants to show them Wizard's Tower and All For One, and Derk and Aldie said I should submit Wizard's Tower to Z-man games... I guess that's a step in the right direction! I have been agonizing over a way to combine my current "ID" version of All For One with David's current "Story" version in a way that accomplishes the goals of the story version but maintains the good aspects of the ID version... and I think I've finally done it. I need to get that finished up and sent off to Julie so she can show her publisher friend! I also told her she could have a copy of the game, since she likes it so much - I just have to make another prototype now...

Aside from the All For One version stuff, I haven't done any real design work at all in the last who-knows-how-long. I've all but forgotten about that Time is money thing, which may be my next project when I get back to designing. Either that, Kilauea, Dynasty, or Hot and Fresh.

Time is money!

A couple posts ago I had begun thinking about the value of time. The balance between what things are worth and what your time is worth. I've expanded on those ideas as they relate to a game, and here's what I've got so far. You may notice a conspicuous lack of theme, or even title, but the important bits are the mechanics and the ideas behind them at the moment...

The basic structure of the game would be that each player has a set number of Action Points each turn - a constant Action income, if you will. They will also have some $ income, which will start out as a small number, but will grow over the course of the game as players build their income up. So in the beginning of the game, all players are cash-poor, and they all have the same number of actions (let's say 5 of them).

There would be at least 4 different things you could do with your action points:
Step 1) Shop for resources
Step 2) Upgrade your operation
Step 3) Process resources
Step 4) Profit!
The basic premise of the game is that in each step there is a trade-off of what amounts to money vs action points. In general you can spend money (or VPs) in order to conserve action points, or vice versa.

In greater detail:
Step 1) Shop for resources: As described 2 posts ago, the basic idea is that you can "spend time hunting for a bargain" by spending more action points to draw cards to choose from, and then only paying $1 per card you want to buy. These cards would have raw materials or resources that would be turned into something worth VPs later in the turn (step 3).

The current mechanic is that you can spend 1 action point to draw 1 card then decide if you want to buy it for $1. Or, you can spend 1 action point to draw 2 cards, then decide if you want to by either or both of them for $2 apiece. Finally, you could spend 1 action point to draw 3 cards, then decide if you want to by any or all of them for $3 each.

Thematically, when you can afford it you might be willing to pay more money for your resources, because you've got better things to do with your time than bargain hunting.

Step 2) Upgrade your operation: The game needs to have ways to change the resources from step 1 into something worth points in step 4 (via the processing in step 3). In Step 2 you'd spend some action points and some money (if you want) to purchase some form of upgrade - hire craftsmen, buy machines, build buildings, whatever. The net effect is that what you buy in step 2 will give you some abilities, income, or make step 3 more efficient in some cases (like if you hire a better carpenter, then you could do a better job of turning wood into furniture). I imagine the things you'd get in this part of the game would be on par with buildings in Puerto Rico, or Craftsmen in Pillars of the Earth.

Like step 1, the more action points you put into this action, then less money you'll need to spend.

Step 3) Process resources: Through this action you convert the resources from step 1 into something you can sell for money or victory points, using the upgrades from step 2. In this step, spending more action points (putting more time/effort into the conversion process) will yield a greater return per unit input. So if you take 1 Wood resource input, and rush through or do a bad job, you get 1 unit of Furniture. However, if you hired a better carpenter, maybe it takes him longer, but you end up with 2 units of furniture without any additional Wood resource input (like he makes a table, and a chair, instead of a table and a bunch of scrap).

I'm pretty sure the upgrades would have to indicate outputs per input, like the Carpenter could say:
1 ap: 1 Wood -> 1 Furniture
2 ap: 2 Wood -> 3 Furniture

Step 4) Profit!: Finally, you want to profit off of the work you've done so far. In this game there are 2 ways to profit: Money, and Victory Points. Depending on what you have done with your resources, you'd sell the products for money, or VPs, or some combination thereof. It seems logical to keep the same kind of game mechanic wherein you could spend extra time/effort (action points) in order to get a better deal (more money/vp per unit sold).

In the end, the player with the most victory points would win, and I think it would be much better to separate VPs from Money in this case. If it were just all about making money I think it would lose a dimension and be less interesting. I like games where you need to build money income, but eventually have to start generating VPs to win - if you just keep pumping up your income, you'll be rich, but you won't have won the game. I think it's far more interesting that way.

Value of money - Rich vs Poor

I was looking through a Family Dollar today and wondering about the difference between people for whom that's the grocery store, and people who can't be bothered to go to a place like that for a few cheap items and then to a supermarket for the rest, even if they pay a few dollars more. It got me thinking about the mechanics of the phenomenon from a game design point of view: why would anyone pay more for the same item? Why does your definition of frivolous change depending on how much money you have?

The reason is that people's time and effort have intrinsic value. I could go to Family Dollar and get 3 or 4 items for about $1 cheaper than at Safeway, but they don't have all the stuff I want, and I'd have to go out of my way to save that money. If I couldn't afford to spend the extra couple of dollars to buy everything at Safeway, then maybe I'd spend the time and energy (resources I did have) in order to save the resource I didn't have.

So how could this be applied to a board game? This is what I came up with so far...

Suppose in a game, each player gets a set number of action points each turn, the same number all game. Players also get some income each turn, and at the beginning of the game that income is small. Over the course of the game, players' incomes will grow such that later in the game they are making a significant amount more than at the beginning. In this game there's a deck of "stuff" that you can purchase by going to a store, and there are 3 stores characterized as follows:

Lower Class store: spend 1 action point to draw 1 card from the "stuff" deck, and then pay $1 per card you want to keep.

Middle Class store: spend 1 action point to draw 2 cards from the "stuff" deck, and then pay $2 per card you want to keep.

Upper Class store: spend 1 action point to draw 3 cards from the "stuff" deck, and then pay $3 per card you want to keep.

Thus as you get richer, you may be willing to pay more money for the same items if you can do so more action efficiently. In effect, you're buying more actions with that extra money you're spending, and in most games, extra actions is a good thing. Of course players would spend those actions (and "stuff") on things that get them points or increase their income, or whatever else the game does.