Rodeo Drive

[This is an old post which I never published. I don't like having those around, so I have edited and published it.]

Rodeo Drive was at one time the title of a work in progress using the Bluff Auction mechanism I've been discussing recently. Here's one of the early posts from late 2007 describing how the game was coming together.

I think the basic structure will be to the effect of...

Some items will be "up for bid", and each person will roll some color dice (like the ones used in Wizard's Tower or Carolus Magnus). You won't know what your opponents rolled, only what you rolled. Then players will bid on the different items, which will effectively have some cost. The bid will be, in effect, how many times you think the cost is represented among all the dice people have rolled. For a simple example, suppose the item cost 1 Blue. If I thought there were 3 blues rolled among all players I might bid 3 blue on the item. If you wanted the item, and thought there were more than 3 blue, you might bid 4 blue on it. Then I could either pass, thinking you have overbid (or 'bluffed'), or I can rebid. On my turn if I'm winning the bid, I must pass. As soon as everyone passes, dice are revealed and the item is awarded to the player who bid closest to the correct number without going over.

I think the way it will work is that there will be more than 1 item up for bid, and players will probably bid on more than 1 item at a time.

So far there are 3 ways we've thought about going with this...

1. Straight scoring - as you win, say, Blue, you get better at winning blue, but each subsequent Blue is worth less and less points. So you are stronger to win future Blue things, but you'd rather win Red or Yellow because they're worth more points to you.

2. Special powers/emergent strategy a la Puerto Rico or Caylus - the item you win is like a building in Puerto Rico that gives you some ability or resource. Then you use the buildings you get to purchase things, convert resources to points, etc.

3. Area control/area placement - when winning, say, Blue, you put your house on the board in the Blue region. There would be maybe 8 spaces in each region, and the spaces would be connected by a web of roads, a la Thurn and Taxis or Web of Power/China. You'd score points per region (as mentioned, each successive house in a region is worth less points to you than the last), and you'd score points for chains of houses. The more houses in a chain, the higher the score for that chain.

That's where we're at currently, mulling over these options. We tested the Liar's Dice mechanic and it definitely seemed to work for a multiple item auction.

So comment on this post with what you think a good direction for this game would be, the simple, sort of abstract game, the divergent, multiple power building route, or the area control/placement scoring.

As to theme, we were racking our brains trying to think of something that works that way - something that is rewarded for "bidding" as much as possible without going over a certain number. So far the thing we thought of that best represents that is someone who is very rich, who will always buy the most expensive thing he can afford. So the dice represent different shoppers (each color is a different shopper), and the number of their color that comes up is their 'credit limit' - they're looking to buy the most expansive thing they can afford, and players are offering them things at a particular price (and for some gamey reason you can't offer the same price as your competitor). I'm not sure how that would fit into any of the 3 listed structures above, but it at least fits the Liar's Dice mechanic.

[edit 5/2011]
Since this post was composed, I have revamped the game and changed the theme (twice). For a while the Bluff Auction was a time travel mechanism, and players were going back in time to collect artifacts which were (until now) lost, damaged, or destroyed in history. Recently that theme has changed to one in which you're simply bidding for actual items with actual money (more recognizable), but if you bid 'too much' then your funding won't come through and you'll have to rescind your bid.

Now the items up for bid have abilities/bonuses on them, which are in effect until you Exhibit them, thereby scoring them.

Another month, another post...

I had resolved to post once a month on this thing, but I've clearly been slacking in that regard. So what's new in Seth's gaming life?

Recent Gaming
In the last month or so I played a lot of games, 66 in June, and 19 so far in July. So what have I been playing?

In Seattle I played a lot of Dominion with Jeremy and Aaron. I haven't played in a while, and it's fun - especially against those guys for some reason. I also played 2 games of Lost Cities: the Board Game (which I like better than Keltis for sure, but it's still mostly luck) with them and Amelia and Emily, a game of Citadels, and 2 games of Masters of Venice.

I picked up Masters of Venice knowing very little about it, but I thought Jeremy and Aaron might like it, I wanted to try it, and hey - at least it was only $35! After buying it I read some stuff online, all of which was mediocre and said the game was very fiddly. I'm happy to report that we liked it pretty well, had a good time talking about it and thinking about it after the first game, and for the most part our play improved in the second game. It is a little annoying to have to adjust a price every time a cube comes into the game, but it's actually not that bad - at least all the tracking makes sense with regard to supply and demand.

The game is one in which you can buy and sell shares of stock in companies, as well as bu, sell, or cash in resource cubes in order to make money or fulfill 'orders' - selling and fulfilling orders increases the value of the stock in the associated companies (there's 1 company per type of resource cube). The idea is to make the most money. There seems to be a lot of ways to go about that, so I think the game could be really interesting. I'd have to play it a few more times to know weather or not it has any kind of staying power, but it's certainly worth a few plays at least.

I also played a game or 2 of Race for the Galaxy while in Seattle... for the first time in ages. I don't like that game too much anymore, but it was still fun to play vs Jeremy. Race and Dominion have fallen by the wayside for me because I think Glory to Rome is simply a better game of the same scope. I got Jeremy to play a couple games of it, but he didn't like it too much. that surprised me, because I thought my Magic friends would really like GtR and take to it more easily than they did. Tyler and Mike like it, but they didn't grasp it as easily as I thought they would. Jeremy really didn't seem to like it that much at all - I think he prefers Race and Dominion.

At KublaCon in May I played a game of Small World, the remake of Vinci. I liked Vinci a lot, and played a bunch online a while back on Ludagora.net. In Seattle I played Small World 4 times... it's good, and fun - I keep going back and forth on weather I like it better than Vinci or not. Some parts yes, some parts no. I think the graphic design is pretty bad, but some of the other changes are good for the game. I don't think it's something i need to run out and buy, and if i were buying, I'd probably rather own Vinci (though I may not believe that as much as I used to).

I played a few other games here and there, but the main thing I've been playing has been unpublished prototypes. As head of development for Tasty Minstrel, as well as a game designer myself, it follows that I would play a lot of prototypes - and if you've ever read my blog before this should be no surprise. This is, after all, a game design blog!

Prototypes
It's been a long time since I have worked on any of my own games. I spent some time in June thinking about two games which I grabbed out of the KublaCon game design contest - one was called Streets of Cairo, which was like a heavy Carcassonne, and the other was called Tomes of Knowledge, which had a really neat theme but was in effect a "Take That!" style card game which I didn't think fit the theme (or at least, didn't fit the theme the way I thought it would and wanted it to). I wrote up a lot of comments on Tomes of Knowledge, more or less completely redesigning it the way I might go about it, and sent those comments off to the designers to use or not use as they see fit. If they update the game and want me to look at it again, I'll be happy to, but until then there's really no reason for me to think about it anymore.

That's especially true since Tasty Minstrel has 2 games "on the list" for next year which I have prototypes of and need to work on...

Cow Tipping is a rummy variant which, currently, has a sort of disconnect between complexity of scoring and complexity of game. It's a very cute them, and the designer has done a beautiful job with the prototype (and would be doing his own art for the game, I believe). I'm also exploring ways to make it feel more like you have the opportunity to build a set - that may or may not pan out.

Belfort is a Worker Placement / Area Control game which is really good and also has a really cute theme. Well, the theme itself isn't anything unusual, but the characters in the game are super-cute :) My main challenge there is to make sure that a certain part of the game (a part that is different every time and therefore makes for a fun, replayable game) works right and is all balanced and everything, and maybe (though it's not clear if it's necessary) to make sure the worker placement portion of the game is strong enough... or at least that the different parts of the game are appropriately involved and interesting, and anything uninteresting gets cut or streamlined out of the way so as not to drag the game length out.

I feel really good about Belfort, as it's the kind of game I like to play, and it's a solid design that is fun and not just like other games out there. I've played it twice since Friday, and I've been giving it a lot of thought and corresponding with the designers. It feels good!

Publishing
Th art is almost done for Terra Prime, and frankly I can't wait to see it! I want to get some posted on the Tasty Minstrel website as soon as possible. The art for Homesteaders is largely complete, and I think Ariel did a fantastic job with it. After the TP art is done, there's not much to do except sit and wait for the manufacturers to do their thing... I'm getting a little antsy!

Recent Gaming: Merchants of Amsterdam

At KublaCon last month I played a game called Merchants of Amsterdam, an auction game by Reiner Knizia (who'd have though..?) which is also an Area Majority game - with 12 different areas to gain majority in! When you gain influence, you get it in 2 of the 12 areas, and there are bonuses for spreading out your influence as well.

In Merchants of Amsterdam players take turns drawing 3 cards off the deck. One they'll keep, using the action themselves, one they'll discard, and one they'll auction off. The auction used in this game is a Dutch Auction - an Auction Clock is started which counts down from 200 to 0 (by 10s), the first player to speak up with a bid wins the auction, and their bid must be the amount indicated by the Auction Clock at the time of the bid. It's a neat, different system which is a little more tense than a regular turn order auction. A similar method could be to use a blind bid, but then there would have to be some system to break ties. I guess one could argue that in the Dutch Auction system there could be ties as well, but it hasn't come up in the couple games I've played so far.

The 12 areas where you can gain influence are divided into 3 sets of 4 areas - Colonies, Districts in Amsterdam, and Commodities. Scoring of a set of areas occurs on occasion, and when it does, the areas in the set are first ordered highest to lowest with regard to total amount of player influence. Then in each area, the players with the 1st and 2nd majority score some points - more for the 'largest' overall area and fewer for the 'smallest'.

Bonuses are earned when a player has presence in each of the 4 areas in a set. This influence is put on the board as a result of the cards you are drawing and auctioning for. Each card allows you to place an influence marker in either a colony or a district in Amsterdam, and then advance one of the commodity tracks. Each card either tells you specifically which track to move (and gives you more flexibility as to where to put the influence marker), or lets you choose (and gives you less flexibility in where to place the marker).

I find the game very clever, and I'm glad I traded for it.

Board for Airport game

I was thinking about what the board would look like today, so I printed out something and started sketching it out.

Also, with regard to theme, perhaps this ought to really be a game about Travel Agents. Players are Travel Agents who can get access to seats on planes (doesn't matter what airline) - and they do so to satisfy the "tickets" representing trips passengers wish to take.

In this case it doesn't make sense for players to pay to upgrade their planes to fly farther, so maybe the game would be in 3 rounds... in the first, all planes can only use the "1 distance" routes, in the 2nd phase of the game, plans can use the 1 and 2 distance routes, and in the final phase players can move passengers across any route. Each round/phase might end once all tickets have been exhausted?

Airline game

I've given some more thought to the ideas I'd had about an airline game, and I think I've come up with a basic structure of a game themed on the airline industry - specifically routing passengers from Origin to Destination in an efficient manner. On the down side, it doesn't incorporate my favorite part of the initial thoughts: the Rush and Cheap passenger types... but on the up side I think it could be simple and elegant.

The game is something of an area control or area influence thing, where you gain influence in different airports in order to complete tickets. Tickets have an Origin airport and a Destination airport, and when you play one, you score some number of VPs and some amount of income. The VPs will probably be static and dependent on the ticket (i.e. printed on the card), while the income will be variable. There will be a maximum value, and the player will receive less for any extra stops or layovers the passenger would have to make.

The board would look like an airline Route Map, with a simple web of routes to and from a couple of 'hub' locations and several other airports. Each route would have a circled number along it relating to the 'distance' - 1/2/3 unit (roughly relating to hours of travel). There would also be an Income track like in Brass (or potentially a score track tied to it, as in Railroad Tycoon), and a Plane Level track indicating what size route your planes can use and how much it costs to improve them.

Turns would be pretty simple, along the lines of Ticket to Ride: Either you buy influence in an airport, you upgrade your planes, or you complete a ticket. Buying influence in an airport means placing a cube in a column of boxes by that airport on the game board, or if you already have a cube there, bumping it up a level relative to other cubes. This 'stack' of player cubes acts like a line where the player 'on top' of the stack has priority. It would probably cost a unit of money (or 2) to place a cube in an airport, and a unit of money to bump your cube up the line. Perhaps in one turn you are allowed to buy influence in 2 different airports, or three, or maybe you get 2 (3?) units of influence to spend wherever you like...

The upgrade action is simple - pay the indicated amount of money and move your marker to the next space in the Plane Level track.

Playing tickets is where the points are made. I imagine tickets with a printed value X on them. Income for playing the ticket would be equal to that value X, less the "cost" of the trip, where "cost" is the sum total of all Distances on routes used, as well as any Layovers (1 unit for your cube at the airport, and 1 unit for each cube ahead of yours in line). After a ticket is played, the player's cube at each airport used is either moved to the bottom of the queue, or removed from the board entirely.

I feel like the cost description wasn't clear, so here's an example or two:
I have a ticket which has origin LAX and Destination PHX. There is a route between L.A. and Phoenix which is distance 1 (has a 1 in the Distance circle). My cube is 2nd from the top at LAX and at the top in PHX. The "cost" is 2 (at LAX) + 1 (Dist) + 1 (at PHX) = 4. Perhaps the printed value (which I was calling X) on the ticket was 6... I'd earn income of 6-4=2, so I would move my marker 2 spaces on the income track. The minimum possible cost for that trip would be 3, if my cube were on top at both airports. In that case I'd increase my income by 3.

I'm not sure this is a complete game as is, but as a main mechanic I think it might be solid. I'd like to think about it some more and see what else could go into the game. I feel like there ought to be more to it, but then when I look at what games are popular coming out right now - Stone Age, Ming Dynasty, Aquaretto... I see simplistic games, not complicated ones. So I'm trying not to get too complicated with the design of this one. To me, Stone Age is a "light filler" type of game. To a lot of people it's a "meaty strategy" game. I have to remember to keep that in mind when considering a design...

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.

Area Control mechanics

I was thinking about Reiner Kinizia's upcoming release Municipium (which I don't know much about) and an old favorite of mine In the Shadow of the Emperor. Both are Area Control games where you move your influence around the board. In ItSotE your influence also "ages" and falls off the board, which I find a very interesting twist.

I was wondering how I would go about an Area Control game, and with the thoughts of those other two in mind, the following popped into my head:

Players are lobbyists for special interest groups, with congressmen in their pockets. 'Assign' your congressmen to various committees in an attempt to control them, and earn the benefit of the committee while you control it. Over time Congressmen's terms come up and they go away, or maybe they have some chance of being reelected so they only MAYBE go away.

Regarding committees... maybe each congressman gets a vote, and you might want the same thing out of the committee as one of your opponents, so you don't need majority control of a committee all by yourself yourself to get what you want. I imagine the committees would be in charge of making some kind of decision which would affect the game state, so players would have a stake in what their 'decision' will be.

These were just some thoughts I had, so I thought I'd jot them down in case I ever want to pursue the idea further. for the time being I'm working on Reading Railroad for the KublaContest, and on getting Homesteaders (and Terra Prime?) published.