What ever happened to that Mars themed game?

I've heard of a number of Mars themed games coming out soon, and I've even heard of a few other Mars themed prototypes in the design community. Some have said that 2016 is going to be the year of the Mars game, like 2010 was the year of the wine game.

Every time I see something about a new Mars game, it reminds me of the thoughts I've had in the past about my own game about colonizing mars. Makes me want to re-read my old blog posts on the topic and see where I left that one.

Maybe the recent popularity of Mars (combined with the discovery of water last fall?) will give me some impetus to actually prototype that game and try it out!

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.

Red Colony... revisited

I've been revisiting my old idea for a game about colonizing Mars in a realistic way, according to the Mars Direct project or The Case For Mars. I would like to work on this game and see if I can't get a ruleset and maybe a prototype of it going.

Today in BGDF Chat I was talking about this idea, and Scott Slomiany had some suggestions on the topic. Some of his suggestions would really take the game in a different direction that I wanted to go, but one of them seemed very interesting. His main point was that the game should focus on the time involved getting things to and from Mars. Now, my vision for the game does not revolve around that, however it does include that aspect because in my game one of the major concerns is what resources you will be receiving from your rocket each turn, which automatically makes trips between Earth and Mars... these trips do take time, and a major aspect of the game is supposed to be configuring your ship so it brings you the right stuff, such that you have to change that configuration (and you will have to change more than once) as few times as possible. This is related to the time and effort it takes to get back and forth between the 2 planets, but it's fairly peripheral.

Scott suggested also that the game be about the political machinations involved in getting such a project going. Maybe you need a country's government to support your project, and over time that country's interest in it will wane, which would be bad - so you have to keep them interested over time. Now a variation of this idea I could see fitting nicely into my game as it comes together. Here's how I think it could work...

I mentioned resources that your rocket will cart up to Mars for you on a regular basis. I expect there will be several resources (7 or 8 maybe), and at any given time you'll only be able to bring up 3 or 4 different types (and some limited number of each). Perhaps those resources cost money, and you have investors who are funding your project. So your investors' interest in your project is directly related to your resource income. Over time, as the investors start to lose interest in the project, their investment lessens - either they give you less money with which to bu resources each round, or you simply get to take fewer units of resources (abstracting the money out) each round. In order to re-invigorate your investors' interest in the project, you have to hit certain milestones... Oh look! You've finished the Terraformer and have successfully started to warm the planet! Oh, now you've begun to grow crops on a Martian farm! Hey, you've successfully mined some Deuterium — an extremely expensive but essential fuel for the nuclear power industry! Whatever. When you achieve these milestones, whatever they are, then your investors reset to full value, allowing you to collect more resources each round to use.

To complicate matters for the player, to some extent I expect there to be something of a race to upgrade your operation and start hauling people up to the colony. However with the way the investors work, you may not really want to hit several milestones all in a row. Doing so may 'waste' the investors' interest, and later in the game you might take so long to hit another milestone that you will be resource starved for a while. So in order to maintain an efficient resource income, you might need to pace milestones - but at the same time, you might be racing your opponents.

Hmm, I just thought of something else to add to this - perhaps the Milestones are a first-come, first-served sort of thing, so you are literally racing your opponents to the Milestones, while also trying to pace them out to maintain your income.

One last piece of this puzzle that I think would fit well is this...
"Mars may be a profitable place... it may contain concentrated supplies of metals of equal or greater value to silver which have not been subjected to millennia of human scavenging and may be sold on Earth for profit"
That quote from the wikipedia article I linked earlier implies that perhaps a player could invest in mining these metals, which wouldn't otherwise help his position, but the profits from those metals would insulate that player from the ill effects of losing investors.

Ok, this just popped into my head, and might be worthwhile or might be garbage:
Suppose each player begins the game with maybe 4 investor tiles. Each investor allows a player to collect 1 type of resource, and their individual interest level indicates how much of that resource you can collect. I suspect the types would not be directly connected to the investors, just that each player can collect 1 type of resource per investor.

Let's say there are 7 or 8 different investors, and each player has 4 at random, so some will overlap. Each investor could have an Interest Meter track or dial, and over time it will slowly go down turn by turn. Each investor could have it's own preferred Milestones that will reset the track for that investor - therefore some but not all players will be interested in any given Milestone! Also, this ought to get players' incomes to be nicely differentiated. It also showcases the desires of 'interested parties' (Scott didn't want "investors" in his view of the game) as well as the main milestones it would take to actually build a martian colony.

I really like this idea, and will wrap it into my thoughts on this game - which I hope will materialize in physical form before too long!

Random Red Colony and Dynasty thoughts

I have been wanting to revisit some old designs, and in fact, I have put together another copy of All For One (sort of) since the copy I had got sent to Z-man, then on to Jackson Pope in England, and then to the co-designer David Brain - where I understand most of the bits have gone missing :(

Sadly, I had made changes by hand to the board and cards, and I'm not certain what all of them were. I guess I'll just have to rediscover them.

In addition, I have been putting more thought into Dynasty - probably my most ridiculously neglected game considering how simple it ought to be to try it! My friend Steve is living at my house for the time being, and I have decided that while I've got the chance I should really bounce ideas off of him and get some of these ideas progressed!

RED COLONY
I briefly described Red Colony to Steve, and in doing so I thought of an idea which might be good. I'd always imagined things in Red Colony being built under a network of protective domes. So it follows that the early game building you do in the game is to build some domes connected by tubes. This could be a sort of land-grab in the early game where players build tubes and domes in order to reserve land for themselves in order to build buildings.

The domes and tubes would of course require some resources, which the players would obviously start the game collecting. At some point they will be done with those resources and will need to switch their income to some different type of resources in order to construct the buildings they want in their domes - Farms, Factories, Habitats, whatever.

So the crux of the new idea is that you begin with an area enclosure type of thing, and go from there. Admittedly I have not reviewed my posts on the game, and I don't necessarily remember exactly how I thought the game would work, so I don't know how this new idea would fit in exactly, but it sounded interesting.

DYNASTY
In re-examining Dynasty I read some of my more recent posts, and in one of those I detailed an alternate method to deal with military aspects in that game. Since discussing it with Steve, I have done some more thinking about how the military part could work, and I think I have refined it further.

First of all, I think players should be able to purchase Leaders. I don't think there needs to be a distinction between Political and Military leaders either, just Leaders. The cost should be some set thing, and they would be purchased just like Discoveries are purchased - you'd have to have access to all the resources needed, or else trade with someone. Since I like the idea of Leaders really affecting the game after Cities exist, maybe the cost would include some special resource that you can only get from a City, so nobody can build a new leader until SOMEONE obtains a city.

The rule I currently think might be a winner for attacking is this... in order to conquer a Village, you have to have 2 more Leaders in the area than the defender. As long as that's true, you can remove 2 Leaders from the board and take the Village (maybe the Leaders set up shop in the Village and don't move around the board anymore). For a city, same thing, but it costs 3 Leaders to take a City. So if you have a city and a Leader in a territory, I would have to have 4 Leaders in the territory in order to Attack the city, in which case I would remove 3 of them and take over the city.

I chose 2 and 3 for the numbers so that there could be a Discovery (gunpowder?) which allows you to take a Village or City with 1 fewer Leader.

Steve and I talked about some other aspects of the game. I should probably list some of them here so I don't forget. In no particular order:

* I have always considered that there would be 8 different resources. Suppose instead there were 9, 3 of which are represented twice each on the board, 5 are represented once each, and 1 is not represented on the board at all. Now consider that each city tile has one of the 5 rarer resources on it. When upgrading a Village to a City, you gain access to the listed resource. Thus, in the early game, there would be 3 resources which are in abundance (easy to gain access to), and 5 which one player will own and others will have to trade for. Then, as cities come into play, the rare resources will become more common as cities pop up showing their symbol. In addition, the 6th city tile would bear that 9th resource, which is not represented on the board (Gold?). the only way to gain access to that one would be for someone to upgrade that city.

Steve suggested that when you place Village tiles, they must be face down, so you don't know which one has which resource on the back. That's an interesting idea, but I don't know if it's better than being able to decide which resource you want access to.

* I don't think I like the previous posted idea for founding Villages - starting with a leader in play, and moving them around to found Villages wherever you want. I think it would be cooler if you had to deal with the resources near your starting territory, and trade for the rest. So I think Founding a Village in a Territory adjacent to one of your other ones sounds better to me. Steve and I briefly discussed the possibility of only being able to found a Village in a territory adjacent to one containing ONLY your own Village/City... so you couldn't spread through another player's territory, just create a border. I don't think that idea is very good though.

* Steve mentioned that perhaps instead of trading for anything from anyone at any time, perhaps you could only trade for the resources that are available in Territories containing or adjacent to your own Villages. So if you need access to Wood, and you aren't at least adjacent to Wood, then you will have to found a Village first to get closer - even if 3 opponents all have access to wood. I don't know if I like that or not. I thin it would make some differentiations in who can get which Discovery, which might differentiate strategic paths (or "player postures")... but I expect that to sort of happen organically based on the scoring system. if you trade willy-nilly for resources to bu whatever Discovery you want, then you will be giving points away left and right. I hope that players will be judicious in how much trading they do, and attempt to be as self sufficient as possible, trading minimally when necessary. In other words, if your desired strategy requires a lot of blue and red resources, and some brown and gold as well, ten you should probably try and gain your own personal access to red and blue, and maybe 1 of brown or gold and only trade for the one you need, and of course for the odd orange or yellow resource as needed as well.

* Based on my idea above for removing leaders from the board to do things, I think the leaders would have to be fairly easy to replace. Maybe the standard action could be "get 1 leader for XXX cost, or 2 for XXXYY cost." There could be a discovery that gives you +1 Leader perhaps, or make it cheaper. If attacking removes leaders from the board, then upgrading a Village to a City should probably remove 1 Leader as well.

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!

I just had an idea for Red Colony...

Since the game is about exploring and colonizing (hmm... where have I seen that before? heh) - I'm imagining a board covered with face down tiles. Probably square tiles, as opposed to hexes, but that remains to be determined. The tiles could have some kind of terrain or features on them. When you build a "building," you do so without knowing what's on the tile - you flip the tile face up and place your building marker or whatever on it. The terrain or features might be symbiotic or amenable to that particular building, or they might not. I don't imagine there'd ever be a huge penalty, maybe some additional cost, or sub par efficiency (depending on what the building does).

Then there could be an Assay action, which could cost some time/effort/resources, and would allow you to peek at a face down tile.

Thus, in general you build whatever buildings you want to pursue your strategy, and you do it wherever it's convenient. Or, if you prefer, you can spend the extra time and cost up front to find better places to build each building, and maybe your better placement will yield more efficient results or VPs or whatever.

it's not a particularly deep thought about the game, but I think I like the idea and wanted to get it posted somewhere before I forgot :)

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)

Mars in a new light

As mentioned in the previous post, there may be a better way to go about Red Colony - from a plausible point of view rather than a fantastical one. In looking into it I was turned onto this Wikipedia entry (thanks Dylan!) which sounds to me like a lot of really good structure for a game about colonizing Mars!

To paraphrase:

The attractiveness of Mars Direct does not rest on a single cost-effective mission. Envision a series of regular Martian missions with the ultimate goal of colonization. As initial explorers leave habitat structures on the planet, subsequent missions become easier to undertake.

Large subsurface, pressurized habitats would be the first step toward human settlement; they can be built as Roman-style atria underground with easily produced Martian brick. During and after this initial phase of habitat construction, hard-plastic radiation- and abrasion-resistant geodesic domes could be deployed on the surface for eventual habitation and crop growth. Nascent industry would begin using indigenous resources: the manufacture of plastics, ceramics and glass.

The larger work of terraforming requires an initial phase of global warming to release atmosphere from the regolith and to create a water-cycle. Three methods of global warming are best deployed in tandem: orbital mirrors to heat the surface; factories on the surface to pump halocarbons into the atmosphere; and the seeding of bacteria which can metabolize water, nitrogen and carbon to produce ammonia and methane (these would aid in global warming). While the work of warming Mars is on-going, true colonization can begin.

Any Martian colony will be partially Earth-dependent for centuries. However, Mars may be a profitable place for two reasons. First, it may contain concentrated supplies of metals of equal or greater value to silver which have not been subjected to millennia of human scavenging and may be sold on Earth for profit. Secondly, the concentration of deuterium — an extremely expensive but essential fuel for the nuclear power industry — is five times greater on Mars. Humans emigrating to Mars thus have an assured industry and the planet will be a magnet for settlers as wage costs will be high.

It feels almost as if like that article wrote the game for me! I'm going to ponder it a bit, and see if I can build an interesting game system based on the the basic idea of The Case for Mars (the book that article is about).

On the down side, this might play havoc with the original idea of the game, which was to customize your income stream while exploring and building up your colony. But I think a more plausible premise might make for a better product overall, and I'm not sure the basic ideas would have to change all that much.

Maybe this Mars game isn't a bad idea at all...

I was informed that perhaps a game about the possibility of colonizing Mars would actually be very marketable, as NASA is interested in educating people about Mars in order to keep interest up and maintain funding for their projects.

That might be really cool - I'd like to look into what's known about Mars, and if the game could be fairly plausible then I think that could work!

Red Colony

I've decided that until a better name comes along, the Mars thing will be called Red Colony.

I had had some ideas, lots of different ideas actually, about how different parts of the game might work. Then I was reminded of this blog post my friend Scott made back in July, and I realized that what I really ought to do is take the base concept of what I wanted to try (managing your income stream) and make the simplest game possible out of that. So after a little thought along those lines on my way to lunch, here's what I came up with:

Players should get 1 Ship action and 1 Pawn action each turn:
Ship actions are...
(a) Get a cube (number limited by total capacity of ship, and type limited by ship configuration)
(b) Move the ship from Earth to Mars or vice versa. Clearly you can't get a cube if the ship is at Mars, and I think the idea is that you can't change the configuration unless your pawn is at Earth.
Pawn actions are...
(a) Move to any explored tile connected to your 'base'
(b) Move to and explore any tile adjacent to an explored tile connected to your base
(c) Build a Building on an explored tile (probably have to connect back to your base)
(d) Update ship configuration (must be on Earth to do this)
(e) possibly Get a cube (if at Earth)
(f) Move people around (in the case that buildings require people to operate)

You can bring your pawn to Earth with you if it's at your base when the ship goes from Mars to Earth, and of course you can bring your pawn with you when the ship goes from Earth to Mars (and I imagine you would always do the latter, not necessarily the former)

Another option might be to allow players to simply do any 2 of those each turn, so if you wanted to you could get 2 cubes, at the expense of not exploring or building that turn... I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

More on this Mars idea

I was contemplating this "exploration and colonization of Mars" idea a bit, and here are some of the ideas floating around - starting to come together...

There could exist several different types of resources, we'll call them cubes, which can be gathered on Earth and sent to Mars to help you explore and build. Different actions on mars will require (cost) different cubes.

Each player will have a ship that travels back and forth between Earth and Mars, carrying these cubes. The ships can be configured to carry only 2 or 3 types of cubes at a time out of the 5 or more different types that exist. While on Earth, players will set the type and quantity of cubes they want their ship to carry. Then it will go on autopilot delivering those cubes to Mars as scheduled while the player does actions on Mars. Over the course of the game, players will need a different mix of resources, which means they have to take time to travel to Earth and adjust the configuration of their ship.

For example, in the mid game maybe a player will have constructed the means to mine one of the early game resources on Mars, so they will not need to collect it from Earth anymore. then they'd rather reconfigure the ship to bring more useful cubes.

One of the types of cubes will represent people, which will be used in 2 different ways - operating certain buildings (which will then produce some in-game bonus), and simply living in residential buildings (which will earn points). In order to have people living and working in the colony though, there needs to be enough living quarters and feeding capacity to support them.

Player Differentiation
What will differentiate the players so they won't all just do the same thing all the time? Well, this game is about Exploration as well as colonization, so I envisions a grid of face down square tiles, which a player can explore, some of which are better suited to certain types of buildings than others. For example, maybe a plot adjacent to a canal would make a desirable place to live, so it might add to the value of living quarters built on it. Other tiles might lend themselves better to certain types of production buildings. Maybe some tiles aren't suitable for building on.

I think it might be neat to have a building that allows you to peek at nearby plots to see if you want to explore them. I also like the idea of an Assay Office, like in the old video game M.U.L.E. - where you have to go to see how well suited your plot is for various types of production.

That's about all I've got so far. djnkirk from BGDF suggested a Moon board as well, where one could build a sort of substation, thus requiring less travel time then going all the way back to Earth. That's a neat idea, but I'm not sure it really works to well. I really like the idea of investing in a sub-base for potential future efficiency though.

New game idea, perhaps

I was looking at a post-it note on my desk on which I wrote some potential game themes people said they'd like to see in a thread either on BGDF or on BGG. One of them is "Colonizing Mars"...

Suppose a game about colonizing Mars were structured as follows... There's an Earth board on which players can adjust amounts of various resources which will be needed to explore mars and build he colony and there's a mars board where players oversee the exploration and colonization of Mars the crux of the game would be that based on what you find and what you want to build on Mars, you need different resources from earth, and to adjust your production on earth you need to travel there. Of course to supervise the Mars action you need to travel there. Traveling back and forth costs time.

So there'd be some actions you can do when your pawn is on the Earth board, mostly regarding income and preparation, and there'd be actions you can do when your pawn is on the Mars board, to do with exploring, assaying, and colonizing Mars.

I'll mull this over a bit and see if anything comes of it. I envision some private information, like maybe you can take a land tile to the "assayers office" (like in M.U.L.E.) and see what type of building that plot would be suited for, then you can build a building on it that would produce some resource - or you can build without assaying first just to get whatever building you want in play.

I also envision a variety of buildings, perhaps production buildings which can start producing some of the resources needed, to save you trips to Earth, buildings which support population (this is a colonization effort after all), and who knows what else.