A couple of years ago, a Discord server I am in had an 18-card game design jam, and I made a couple of games for it. One of those turned out to be pretty good, I think - though I don't know how marketable a 2-player only Press-Your-Luck microgame with no theme really is.
Right now, that Discord server (KBGAMES), and another server I'm in (Decision Space) are both having an 18-card game design jam (details here, and here)! I had no intention of working on any 18-card games for either one, but wouldn't you know... ideas crept into my head, and now I've got a game for each jam!
Last time my games were all a little bit of a cheat with respect to the 18 card limit. This time, both are legit, only 18 cards, and on one case, a couple of dice.
Just like 2 years ago, I appear to have one game that seems good, and the rest are nothing to write home about. here's a quick description of my current 18-card games:
Tic-Tac-DOH!
The bad one this time is a game where you place and move your three pieces (a square, a circle, and a triangle) on a 3x3 grid of cards in an effort to get (and hold) 3-in-a-row, and you do so by using 6 Action cards, of which only ~2 are available to you each turn (based on a 2d6 roll). So you roll, choose one of the two results (if doubles, you may choose to roll again if you wish), and resolve the action card in that slot. Then you flip the action card to the other side, changing the actions that are available a little bit. The idea here was that you would be able to see what actions are possible, but you won't necessarily have access to the ones you want most, and your opponent could potentially even have a game winning action out there, leaving you anxious to see if they roll it or not.
When you move your piece onto a space, you also get to use the effect of that space, which should give you more agency. And finally, there is a special ability for each of your pieces that's different each game.
I played a first draft of this game a couple of times, and I think it kind of works. For next time I intend to revamp the board effects (make them more straightforward, and mostly about moving pieces around), tweak the Action cards, and try an idea my friend had about how to add +/-1 effects (like the workers in Castles of Burgundy) - print +/-1 on each of your pieces, and let you 'spend' them (by flipping the piece), with very few ways (if any) to get them back.
18-card Point Salad
There's a recent (2019) game called Point Salad that I've never actually played, but I've heard nothing but good things about. In it, each card can either be a scoring condition, or something that would help you score off of those scoring conditions. This was an inspiration to my other 18-card jam game - the one that I think has potential to be pretty good.
In my game, you and your opponent will use the old Merchants of Amsterdam/Biblios mechanism to draw 3 cards, one at a time, and assign one to KEEP, one to SCORE, and one to DISCARD. You do this simultaneously, card by card, until all three cards are assigned, then you draw 3 more and do it again. IN the first "Age," you'll do this 3 times before the deck runs out, then you'll score some points. After scoring, you'll shuffle the SCORE and DISCARD cards back together (the cards you kept stay in your tableau), and start a new Age. The 2nd age will only have 2 rounds of card distribution, then scoring, and finally the 3rd Age will only have 1 round.
When it's time to score, each player examines the cards in their own tableau and scores points based on the scoring conditions on each card in the SCORE row:
My latest thought is to reward best-of-three rounds, rather than total score, so that a player who gets a lucky draw and dominates one round will win that round, but not necessarily the whole game.
Design Contest on BGG
Soon after I had this 18-card Point Salad game, a post went up on BoardGameGeek about someone running a design/development contest for an 18-card game they'd like to use as a companion game with their urbanist book about the city design of Tokyo. That contest is kind of weird in that they have some parts of a game, so it' smore of a development contest -- though they seem open to alternate ideas as well.
It occurred to me that I could consider the card colors in my design to be the districts, and the shapes to be features (such as zoos, hotels, restaurants, etc), and then the players could be building up their proposed rail line (with a station in this Modern Tokyo neighborhood near a touristy resort, and another station near a mom & pop restaurant in a Traditional neighborhood), while the scoring row could represent the demands/desires of the public. With that mindset, I could pitch this game to that contest, and it could fit pretty well, with the possible exceptions that (a) it eschews their tile laying aspect (which they claim is OK, but might count against my game in the judging), and (b) my game is for players, while they want a solo game. I think 1-2 players would be OK, maybe even 1-4 (I have some thoughts on doubling the deck and playing with up to 4 players, but the setup/format at each player count might have to be different) could work if they don't mind doubling the card count... but will it work solo?
Well, I have been doing some solo testing by simply dealing out cards at random for the opponent, and that works alright -- maybe that could be adapted into a proper solo mode.
So that's what I've been up to lately. Those two games, Division of Labor, and prototyping a simplified version of Keeping Up With The Joneses to see how that works.
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