Isle of Trains follow-up: Isle of Adventure?

Dranda Games, the new publisher for Isle of Trains, told me that they had a great Essen, and that people loved their new edition of Isle of Trains: All Aboard - which is great news!

I asked the Dranda guys if they'd be interested in Dana and I revisiting our ideas for an Isle of Trains boardgame, one version of which was a fairly simple rondel game, but they said they'd be more interested in another small-box card game, with multi-use cards, the had similar positive player interaction (like the IoT load thing)

They even floated some ideas they'd had:

* Isle of New York - building skyscrapers with lots of cards then selling them for a profit

* Isle of London - building the subway (I think Isle of New York would be a better start and London would be a good sequel)

* Isle of Taxis - picking up passengers. Like a Crazy Taxi card game 😂

* Isle of Dragons - don't know what to do with that but fantasy games sell well!

I know Dan had made a pirate hunting game based on the IoT mechanism called Queen Anne's Revenge, which got honorable mention in the Hippodice game design contest, and even had publisher interest I believe, but I don't know what ever became of it. I suggested to Dan that perhaps we could distill that down to a small-box card Isle of Pirates card game, which could be doable.

Then I had a new idea that sounded interesting to me. After a days brainstorming, this is what I have so far, and the Dranda guys like the sound of it:

Isle of Adventure

Play as a party leader, recruiting and equipping adventurers to delve the local dungeon looking for treasure!

Each card in your hand could be an adventurer (Warrior, Mage, Cleric, Thief), or equipment (Bolt, Scroll, Potion, Pick?), or can be used as coin to hire new adventurers or train them up.

A dungeon is laid out on the table, built of face down tiles. Players will move their parties through the dungeon, racing to loot it of valuable treasure! On your turn you will do 2 of the following actions:

* Draw a card (search the room? Go to town?)

* Recruit an adventurer to join your party

* Train an adventurer (they level up)

* Equip an adventurer (yours or an opponent's)

* Delve into the dungeon (facing its challenges)

When equipping an adventurer, you tuck the proper equipment card under them. If you equip your own adventurer, you get nothing but the equipment. If you equip an opponent's adventurer, you get paid in cards, gold (virtual cards to spend), and actions:

* Party Leader: Delve/Explore the Dungeon

* Warrior: Recruit/Train

* Mage: Gain and cast spells, giving you ongoing abilities

* Cleric: Heal damage from party members

* Thief: Equip

Your party leader would have a green "Fleet of foot" value - this is the capacity of your party, and also helps you move in the dungeon. Each adventurer would have a number of red foot icons (never to exceed your leader's green foot value) - the bigger the party, the slower they move through the dungeon. When you Delve (explore), you will be able to move through face up tiles, and flip up a face down tile using your remaining green foot icons - and discarding cards to gain feet for the turn. When you flip up a tile, you get a chance to pay the required equipment (and maybe take the required wounds) in order to gain the benefit printed on the tile.

(Wounds reduce the effectiveness of your adventurers - they won't be able to take new equipment until they are healed by a cleric)

Some tiles have Boss Encounters on them -- chances to gain lots of treasure if you have the right assortment of equipment

That's all I have so far, but it sounds promising to me, and slightly more than a straight re-skin if the spells and the dungeon tiles work out well.

Keeping Up With The Joneses

 In my last post I teased a new game I'm working on. It's not really a secret, I just haven't had a chance to sit down and write out a post about it.

I haven't played on that TTS mod yet, but it looks like I'm going to have to update it, because I've done 2 live playtests and a few solo tests as well (something I rarely do), and I've made some adjustments here and there. But for the most part, the game works just like I envisioned it, which is always a promising sign :)

Keeping Up With The Joneses

One-up your neighbors in 6 different aspects of life, while trying to keep up with the Joneses up the street, who really seem to have everything together!

In this rondel game, each space on the rondel has a track representing a life aspect you can compete in: Job, Home, Kids, Cars, Charity, and Social. When you land on a space, you advance that track. Occasionally, an aspect will score in a majority fashion (farthest up the track gets 1st reward, etc), but if you are too far behind the Jones marker, then you don't score any status. 

JOB: whenever you pass or land here, collect income based on your position on the Job track. When scored, you'll earn Status points for having the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd best job.

 
HOME: either maintain your home (mow the lawn), make improvements, or pay extra money to do both. You compete with your neighbors and score based on your improvements, but you get a multiplier on that score based on your maintenance (it doesn't matter how many garden gnomes you have if your landscaping is too overgrown and unkempt). If you pass here without stopping, your maintenance track goes DOWN a space as your home falls into disrepair.

KIDS: Compete in 3 areas where your kids can excel: Grades, Sports, and Popularity. You'll score in each of those, and you'll get a multiplier for evenly advancing all three.

CARS: Every couple of steps on the Cars track will earn you a new car, which comes with an ability:

* Sports cars are flashy, they earn you Status points each time you collect income

* Minivans are convenient, they allow you to add 1 to your rondel move, making you more flexible

* SUVs are powerful, but expensive, they allow you to pay money to make additional track advances

* Hybrids are efficient, they give you extra money each time you collect income [or maybe a $1 discount any time you spend money to advance a track?]

CHARITY: either decrement your marker on that track to get a little money, or you pay (more and more) money to advance on the Charity track, and maybe collect a few Status points for doing so.

SOCIAL: advance on the Social track, then you may buy Status points for $1 apiece a certain number of times according to your position on the Social track.

On your turn, you'll first draft a card from a display with three slots labeled 1, 2, and 3. You'll resolve the card's effect, and then move your rondel pawn a number of spaces based on the slot it was in. Finally, you'll replace the card from the deck, then reference a number printed on the back of the new top-of-deck card. Move the Jones pawn that number of steps around the Jones track - the Joneses take 3 or 4 steps (based on player count) for each rondel space, and they advance a Jones marker on the track where they land. You must be within N spaces of that marker during scoring to qualify for any points at all (where N is the number of players in the game).

When the Joneses complete a lap on their rondel track, 2 areas will score. When they complete another lap, 2 more areas will score. After their 3rd lap, the remaining 2 areas will score, and after their 4th lap, the game ends and every area scores one more time.

The playtests so far

So far the game has been working well, just how I imagined it would. Sure, I'm finding lots of little details and balance issues to change, but the overall structure of entangling the rondel movement with a card draft (I expect to make a blog post about entangled decisions sometime soon) works well, and the majority scoring while needing to be "close enough" to the Joneses seems to be working out in 2 player games-it remains to be seen if it holds up at higher player counts.

Here are some of the things I've cut, followed by some of the changes I've made that have worked already or that seem promising:

I struggled at first coming up with enough interesting content to scrape together a test copy of the game, and I had a couple of effects that let you move the Jones rondel marker backwards or forwards. The idea was to control the speed of the game a little bit, and possibly also influence the scoring of different areas at different times. However, it simply wasn't very useful or desirable, so I took all of those effects out.

I was worried the Joneses would be too easy to keep up with, so I started out bumping their tracks when revealing which ones will score (at the beginning of a lap, giving you a few turns to act before those areas score). It turned out in my first test that that might have been premature. I reversed the decision, and it seems like the Joneses do a good enough job on their own. At least in my 2p tests so far.

For simplicity, I started with all the tracks scoring the same amount of points: 5/3/2 for 1st/2nd/3rd place. However the Kids track has 3 separate tracks in it, and each of them scores... AND you get a multiplier for even advancement that applies to each of those tracks. That was way too lucrative, especially in conjunction with too much money floating around, so I reduced the scoring to 3/2/1.

In the first couple of games, the money seemed a little too plentiful, which may have contributed to the ease of dominating the Kids tracks. I reduced the income a bit on the Job track to try and make the whole game a little more tight.

Originally, I had the Maintenance track drop when you get income (when you pass the Job space), in an attempt to keep all the bureaucracy clumped together at the same time. However, I did not like the dynamic that created, so I switched to a more thematic (and I think more interesting) method in which you only drop your maintenance if you fail to stop on the Home space, which is the space here that track resides. Now when you stop at Home, you can either advance your Improvement track or your Maintenance track, or pay money to advance both, and if you skip the space, then your maintenance track goes down 1 (reducing your multiplier).

I thought it would be interesting to have more cross-track effects, so I added some specific home improvements that you could get as you ascend the Home track (a 3-car garage, which advances your Cars track, for example). However, I think that was overloading that track, which already had a mechanism associated with it... so I took that back out for now. That kind of thing can come from the cards, I think.

I had originally started the kids track off with a multiplier of 0, meaning to get any points at all from that track, you had to advance each of the sub-tracks at least once. I didn't like that dynamic, and it became especially obvious when Kids was one of the first areas to score -- it was too easy for nobody to be able to get any points at all. I had thought I should either have a minimum multiplier of x1, or else keep it as-is, but start the players 1 step up the track, allowing for the possibility of going down to a 0 multiplier. But the more I thought of it, the more I disliked the idea of regression anyway, and so I adjusted the cost of advancing on those tracks so that you get 1 track for free, and you never drop, and I can just start the multiplier at x1.

I put a lot of thought and math into the distribution of numbers on the card backs which control how many steps the Jones marker takes each turn, aiming for +/-5 player turns per lap. In the end I decided on a distribution that should give an average of about 1.6 steps per turn, and a longer track for 3 and 4 players than for 2. I think that should yield a good number of turns (maybe only 4/player at 4p, hope that's enough) per lap. I was hesitant to go to 4 steps per rondel space for the Joneses because it seems like at that rate, they can really shoot up the tracks if they move just 1-2 spaces a couple turns in a row. So I figured out a way to avoid that eventuality -- I put a "no advance" icon on one of the steps in each space, so every once in a while the Joneses won't advance a track.

I've got some other tweaks to make, and I really would like to play with 3 or 4 players to see how that goes. Time to update my Tabletop Simulator prototype!

Again with the mechanics first -- I more and more think "theme-first" is the way to go! (Also, YANGI)

Some time ago (over 3 years!) I posted some thoughts on Mechanics-First vs Theme-First design, as well as an idea I'd had that was a mechanical game, completely devoid of theme.

Since then, a theme has emerged -- a theme that even seems pretty good -- and yet I have never gotten back to the game.

I'm starting to believe that Theme-First is the way to go, as it seems much easier and much more likely to maintain interest in the game, and to make progress with it.

That said, here is Yet Another New Game Idea (TM) which is, again, completely mechanical and devoid of theme. As a side note, I see a pattern: when I don't have an idea for a theme, I appear to gravitate toward color mixing as a place holder... basic resources of red, blue, and yellow combine into higher level resources of purple, orange, and green. As I said in my previous post, this just makes for easy grokking of the conversions in the game. It's tedious to memorize some chart of X+Y=A and X+Z=B, but everyone knows that Yellow and Blue make Green.

Worker Replacement game idea

I was listening to the Game Designers of North Carolina podcast last month, and they had an episode about turning a mechanism into a game. On the show they brainstormed a few mechanisms, and how they might build a game around them. The whole exercise kind of ties right in to what I was talking about above, and as I recall, after bringing up a mechanism, they immediately jumped to a theme to use with it. One of those mechanisms sounded like it had some potential, so I filed it away in the back of my mind to think about later.

Last week I started thinking about how that mechanism could work, and then this week on a plane trip, as I often do in that situation, I jotted down some notes and sketched out a game using that mechanism. As I said however, this is just mechanical rules, no theme to integrate, and as such it's pretty generic. Here's what I've got so far, let me know in the comments if you think it's any good, or what theme might fit...

As a player, you will be gathering resources, combining them into products, and trading in resources and products for money, points, or upgrades.

Each player will start with a neutral pawn in hand, and a board of 6 spaces will be seeded with 6 colored pawns. Each space on the board will be associated with an action. On your turn you will take the pawn in your hand, swap it with the pawn in one of the action spaces, then resolve that action -- and most of the time there will be a bonus available based on the color of the pawn in that space. So you will be making choices based on which action effect you want, as well as which color pawn you want for next turn.

As a placeholder for these actions I have put the following:
* Gather Raw Materials: Gain 1 red, yellow, or blue cube. Gain an additional cube of that color if the pawn matches that color.

* Refine Raw Materials: Combine 2 different raw material cubes into a product disc. Combine a second set of raw materials if the action pawn matches that color (same combination? any combination? Not sure)
** Red + Yellow = Orange
** Red + Blue = Purple
** Yellow + Blue = Green

* Buy Raw Materials and Products at Market: Buy any number of raw material cubes or product discs at the market prices (market is kinda like Glen More). If the action pawn matches color, then get a better deal or something.

* Sell Resources: Sell raw materials or products at market prices. Resources sell for money, products sell for money plus VP. If the action pawn matches color, get a better deal or something.

* Collect Money: Collect some money according to the color of the pawn placed (red, yellow, and blue pawns yield a little money, orange, green, and purple pawns yield more money. Neutral pawns yield a middling amount of money)

* Upgrade: Pay products/raw materials for cards with permanent abilities and VPs on them. Maybe there are 3 slots (color coded red, yellow, and blue), and if you use a red pawn, then you can take the card from the red slot, and if you use a purple pawn, you can take either the card in the red slot or the one in the blue slot.

That's all I've got so far. Maybe I'll make some more progress on the flight back home tomorrow. Let me know what you think!

London, Paris, Deities, Demigods, Stained Glass, and Rock & Roll

LONDON

I just returned from a 12 day trip to Europe. An old online friend, Sebastian Bleasdale, got married in London, and he was kind enough to send me an invite. I suspect he didn't think I would come, but I called his bluff! I had a really good time at his wedding, and though I didn't get too much time to catch up with the busy groom, I was able to get some quality time in with a number of UK designers that I rarely see such as Matthew Dunstan, Tony Boydell, Brett Gilbert, Ian Vincent, and even caught a glimpse of big names such as Reiner Knizia and Richard Breese!

A gathering with so many designers would be nothing without a little playtesting and prototypes. I was able to play upcoming TMG title Pioneer Days (something like an Oregon Trail themed board game) with one of the designers (Matthew Dunstan), as well as test a drafting game by Tony Boydell, play an excellent mancala-rondel game by Sebastian and Ian based on my Crusaders rondel mechanism, see an interesting deck building (ish) game by Matthew, and even get my latest Deities & Demigods to the table.

DEITIES & DEMIGODS

I had some good discussion about Deities & Demigods with Matthew, who has expressed interest in co-designing that one with me, and I decided on some BIG changes -- some of which have been hanging around waiting to be tried, and some new ideas that came u in those conversations. The big changes include cutting out Hera, Poseidon, and boats altogether, and attaching the the manipulation of the Olympus deck to the initiative track itself. The original initiative track was intended to be for turn order, and there was supposed to be incentive to care about turn order. We decided that it may be easier to just have clockwise turn order from a start player, and we could reassign start player at the end of each cycle based on the initiative track. The new version has a few rewards that you get as you advance up the initiative track, and then the markers reset for the next cycle. Without Poseidon, there are simply troops that navigate the board. When we get the game working better we can add texture by saying things like "moving over water costs extra" or something. These changes worked out pretty well, as you'll see if you read on...

PARIS

After the wedding, I headed to Paris where I saw a number of touristy things including Notre Dame, the exterior of the Louvre, Ferris Wheel, Arc de Triumph, Eiffel Tower, and even Euro Disney. I enjoyed each (well, the Eiffel Tower was disappointing), even Disneyland was more fun than I expected. But I enjoyed Notre Dame most of all. In fact, looking at the stained glass windows, I came up with a new game idea... and in the following days I have pieced together a new game design, ready to be prototyped and tested! The game is a simple set collection game about building attractive stained glass windows. Watch for a future blog post about that one.

ETOURVY

When I found out that Bruno Faidutti was having a gathering during the time I'd be in France, I was excited at the prospect of attending. Bruno was kind enough to invite me, so I took a quick trip by train and got to see people like Ignacy Trzewiczek, Bruno Faidutti, Bruno Cathala, as well as other French gamers and industry folk. At the event I got a chance to play Crusaders with some folks, as well as Deities & Demigods with all the new changes. The players were great sports as I stumbled through the playtest with brand new rules, and they said they enjoyed the game a lot. The changes worked out alright, but were a little wonky, so when I got home I made a few adjustments, and managed to get two 2-player tests in on Tuesday which went very well.

ROCK & ROLL

In Etourvy I also played a pirate themed press-your-luck dice game which someone thought TMG might be interested in, and then I pulled out my press-your-luck dice game, Rock & Roll. The latest version of Rock & Roll (with changes based on Game Design Attack #4) has players rolling dice to play songs and satisfy the crowd. I had been allowing players to lock in more than 1 die at a time where possible, but there was something unsatisfying about that... after this test comments implied that a better format might be to allow players to lock in only 1 die at a time. So every time you roll the dice, you first lock all Gaffes, then you must be able to lock the next die in the song or else you bust. Even if you have more matching dice, you can only lock 1 into the song, then you must either stop and score, or roll again.

This new format makes a lot more sense, and if the songs are designed such that they start fairly flexibly then they'll naturally get harder and harder as dice get locked. Players may press their lock going for more crowd tokens, completion bonuses, and making it harder for opponents to "outperform" the song. Or they can play it safe and stop early, risking that another player outperform their song and take the card away from them.

I suspect this is the correct format for the game. All that remains now is to tweak the cards to fit the new format, redesign the songs, and see if it's really any fun :)

Idea for solitaire card game, made multiplayer by first drafting the cards you play solo with

To be frank, I don't care much for them, and I don't play them much. there have been a few I've found interesting or impressive - namely Friday, by Friedemann Friese, and Pocket Civ, by BGDF'er Scott Slomiany (for which I contributed a resource mechanism). But for the most part, they're just not my thing.

I worked on the solo variant for TMG's Harbour a bit, and I worked on development for Dungeon Roll as well, which is basically solitaire. Not being a fan or a player of solo games, I'm not sure if my work in those areas really went in the right direction or not.

I've never really been interested in making a 1-player only game, or working on solo modes for my multiplayer games. If a fan is interested in making a bot to play Eminent Domain against, or a solo variant that doesn't require a "dummy" player, then more power to them!

But for some reason I was thinking about solitaire game the other day. I was thinking about a deck of cards that you would shuffle and hold in one hand like Flip City, and like Flip City you would look at the information on the back of the top card and decide whether to play it or not. More specifically, you would decide HOW to play it.

Since it's apparently my thing, I decided to use planets, resources, and upgrades... though this time I sort of had Terra Prime in mind rather than Eminent Domain -- maybe because I've been thinking of Terra Prime's upcoming return as Eminent Domain Origins :)

So you would look at the top card of your deck and you would decide whether to play that card as an upgrade (to make use of the upgrade text), or load it as cargo onto your ship somehow to be delivered to another planet, or flip it over and place it planet-side up in your row or network of planets -- like exploring, only it would probably tell you what type of planet it is on the info side of the card.

The idea would be that you're building some kind of network, and then shipping cargo of some kind through that network. Originally I thought the network could grow like a lattice -- in many directions, making a sort of hex grid out of cards. But maybe a simpler version is that your network is simply a line of cards from left to right.

Rather than actually having a pawn that traverses the network, perhaps what you're doing is trying to set up a line that will score well, and what you score is the cards you've saved for cargo (rather than put into play). In a way this scoring lines in an array of cards is similar to Arboretum, which I played once, and was reminded of last night when I saw some folks playing it. In that respect maybe a lattice-style network would make more sense, and I could use a scoring system reminiscent to (but hopefully less byzantine than) Arboretum's.

I figure that the planets should have types that are important, rather than needing to take a delivery to a specific planet, thereby making things a bit more flexible. In addition, I figure some cards would have hostile aliens rather than planets, which you would fight in a way similar to Terra Prime. Rather than adding dice to the game however, I would simply put a die icon on each card with some value, so looking at the top card of the deck you'd see the current "roll" value, and if I wanted to generate a new value, I could instruct the player to cycle that card tot he bottom of the deck and reference the new roll value on the new top card. I tried to utilize this type of roll aspect in a different game I never got around to finishing, and I always liked the idea of it...

So as you play your cards, one at a time, you would choose whether to use them as upgrades, or cargo, or to build your network. Some cards may have a cost, which could be paid by removing the next card in your deck from the game - thus that card would never get played... so paying a lot of costs would reduce your potential score, as well as deny you access to those particular cards.

Maybe a simple way to score would be to do it all at the end (like Arboretum), so a player need not record timing or order of cards played. Maybe any cards remaining in your deck count as cargo, and each one scores based on how you've built your network.

I started off by saying that I'm not fond of solo games. If this idea turns out to work, and be a fun and relatively simple to play solo game, perhaps it could be made multiplayer simply by adding a drafting phase in front of the solo game play -- so 2-4 players draft cards from the entire stock into their personal, then run through their decks making their own decisions as to how to play their cards. Perhaps there's just 1 big draft and then players play out their cards until they're done, or perhaps it's an iterative thing, where cards not played are set aside than hen mixed in with the new cards obtained in the next draft phase.

It's an interesting idea, and I'll let you know if I put any more thought into it.

Skye Frontier - a mashup (also, a word about fake variability)

A year or so ago I was introduced to The King of Frontier, which is a sort of mashup of Carcassonne and Puerto Rico - a role selection game where the roles allow you to draw and place tiles on your player board, produce goods on those tiles, trade those goods for points, and build some higher valued tiles.

Carcassonne's not my favorite game, but I have no objection to tile laying, and I absolutely love role selection in general and Puerto Rico in particular. So King of Frontier sounded like an excellent game that was right up my alley.

Unfortunately, upon playing the game, it left me wanting. I was not impressed with the balance, and I generally thought it fell flat. I wondered if I couldn't do better with a role selection tile laying game, but I didn't think about that for very long - instead I just sort of lost interest.

Recently I've become enamored with a new game called Isle of Skye. When I heard the title (spoken), I assumed it was some kind of airship game, probably with a steampunk sort of theme. But as it turns out, Skye is the largest and most northerly major island in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Isle of Sky is a tile placement game where you build your little board by connecting square tiles like Carcassonne, which you obtain by a nifty sort of "I-split-you-choose" mechanism wherein you price your tiles, then opponents have a chance to buy them from you - but if they don't, then you buy them for the price you set. Medici works something like that as well.

Side discussion about Isle of Skye and "fake variability"

I've played Isle of Skye a handful of times now, and I enjoy it a lot. the tiles you get have landscape features which you need to connect appropriately, and they have various icons which interact with scoring conditions in various ways.

That's one of the attractive mechanisms - there are many tiles that depict scoring conditions, and you only use 4 of them each game:
In round 1 you score condition A,
In round 2 you score condition B,
In round 3 you score condition A & C,
In round 4 you score condition B & D,
In round 5 you score condition A, C, & D
In round 6 you score condition B, C, & D

So timing of scoring is interesting, and available scoring conditions changing game to game is interesting, it really gives a feel of variability and replayability... Or does it?

MOST of the tiles (there are one or two exceptions) score points based on different icons on your board, or your geographic situation (closed landscape regions for example). This serves to alter the values of the various tiles that you draw at random, which informs your decisions for how to price your tiles, and how much you should pay for tiles.

The thing is, it doesn't matter WHICH scoring conditions are up... you just reference them in order to make your valuation decisions. They could really be the same tiles every time and the game wouldn't really change - you draw the tiles at random after all! This idea of fake variability is interesting. It almost doesn't matter that the variability is fake, players will think it's real because it LOOKS like variability. I'm certain if the game came with static scoring conditions, people would complain that it feels too samey.

Now, if you saw the scoring conditions for the game, built a personal draw pool of tiles based on that, and always drew from that pool... then it might matter which scoring tiles were in and in what order they appeared, because you could include (or omit) certain tiles that will or won't score too well. for example, some of the tiles have end game scoring such as "1 point per Farm" which are independent of the variable scoring conditions, and you could include many farms and all of those score tiles when the scoring conditions don't include them, hoping players will allow you to buy them on the cheap as they chase the scoring conditions. THAT would be variability!

But I digress... let's get back to my original post, which is less about Isle of Skye, and more about fixing The King of Frontier.

Back on track

Where was I? Oh yes - I'd played King of Frontier and it fell flat, I wanted to take a stab at a better version but lost interest, and recently played Isle of Skye. Right...

The other day on a plane ride I was looking through my design notebook (as I am wont to do), I came across the notes about King of Frontier and I had an epiphany. Maybe I could fix the problems I had with King of Frontier by basically just playing with the tiles from Isle of Skye! I knew I had a copy of Isle of Skye waiting for me at home, so I wrote up some rules and looked forward to trying it:

Skye Frontier: An Isle of Skye/King of Frontier mashup

Setup:

* Give each player a player board with a 4x5 grid of spaces (the exterior of the grid has pre-printed landscape types).
* Give each player a Castle tile, which they will pace on any space on their board (landscapes must match, roads need not).
* Shuffle the tiles in the bag, then draw 4 into a face up display on the table.
* Place a certain number of coins (not sure how how many yet) per player into a supply pile and return the rest to the box.
* Place a supply of green, black, and blue cubes nearby.
* Randomly choose a starting player and give the Starting Player tile to that player.
* Draw 2 (?) Scoring Conditions and display them for end game scoring.
* EDIT: Make that *4* Scoring Conditions (after playing once, it was clear that more scoring conditions would be better)

You are ready to begin!

Each round, the start player will choose a role from the list below and each player in turn will resolve that role. For choosing the role, you'll get a privilege. Then the Start Player marker will pass to the left, and the new start player will choose a role... technically you don't need the Start Player marker, but since it's in the box, I used it anyway.

Roles:

Explore
Either:
(a) Draw 2 tiles from the bag, place one on your board or into your storage, and place the other face up into the supply. Placing tiles on your board costs cubes (see below). Or...
(b) Take 1 tile from the face up supply and place it on your board or into your storage.

Privilege: Repeat this action after all other players have gone.

Produce
Choose a landscape region and add 1 cube from the supply onto each tile in that region. If that region is complete, add 2 cubes instead. Fields get green cubes, Mountains get black cubes, and Water gets blue cubes.
EDIT: Now that I've played, I might try this instead: rather than double producing on a completed region, simply auto-produce once in a region when it becomes complete.

Privilege: Produce in a 2nd region.

Trade
Choose a landscape region. Take 1 coin from the supply for each tile in that region that has cubes, and connects back to your castle via roads. Then discard 1 cube from each tile scored that way. These coins will be worth 1 point each at the end of the game.

Privilege: Trade in a 2nd region.

Build 
Take a tile from your storage and place it onto your board, paying cube costs (see below).

Privilege: Build a 2nd tile.
EDIT: Instead of building a 2nd tile, I tried "get a discount of 1 cube" which seemed to work well.

Costs of placing a tile on your board:
Pay 1 green cube for each Sheep, Yak, or Farm on the tile,
Pay 1 black cube for each Tower or Barrel on the tile,
Pay 1 blue cube for each Boat or Lighthouse on the tile,
Pay 1 cube of any color for each non-matching landscape edge.

Game End:

The game is over at the end of a turn in which any player fills their board with tiles, when the supply of coins is exhausted, or when the tile bag is empty. At that time, each player should calculate their score to see who wins. Points come from:
* 1 point per coin collected via trade
* points based on scrolls on your player board
* points based on the end game scoring conditions

Idea for a series of games that make up a 4X game (which I need not worry about anymore!)

I had this idea I thought was novel, based largely on the new ideas brought about by games like 504 and Risk/Pandemic Legacy, and I guess Time Stories and 7th Continent (with their saving the game state). I liked the idea, though maybe ambitious for me, and I thought it was novel... turns out that the "Father of Legacy," Rob Daviau (title bestowed!), is already working on this exact idea (only likely better). Which is good news in some respects, it means I don't have to think about this anymore - I can just wait and play his game when it comes out :)

For posterity, here's the idea:

So... 4X games (Explore, Exploit, Expand, Exterminate). It's a genre that I, like many people I suspect, like in theory but never works in practice - at least not as well as I'd like it to. Either it turns out to be too complicated, or more likely too long. Or some players are turned off by the warfaring aspect. There's always something.

But suppose each of those X's were a standalone game, whose scope was on par with Ticket to Ride... and if you wanted to you could play some of them back to back, where your starting position in Exploit (for example) is based on your end position of Explore. So you could play a nice, 45 min game of Explore, or a 1-1.5 hour game of Explore+Exploit.

Explore is probably a tile laying game where you look for the "best" spots, like a land grab.

Exploit is probably an engine building game where you produce resources based on the land you control.

Expand is probably a resource management game where you use the resources you produced to grow your presence.

And Exterminate is probably like Nexus Ops.

Ideally, each game could be played as a standalone, with the setup rules doling out starting positions that ought to be somewhat fair. As an alternative, players could use the end position of a previous game as their starting position, which may or may not be as fair, based on the outcome of the previous game. If you like resource management and engine building games, maybe you'd skip Explore and Exterminate, and just play Exploit+Expand. If you just like fighting, maybe you skip straight to Exterminate. If you like a little engine building in your war games but don't want to invest a ton of time into them, maybe play Expand+Exterminate.

While each game itself would be on the light end of the spectrum, combining them would make a longer, more involved, and hopefully deeper experience. On the down side, when combining these games you'd have to play them in the correct order, and you'd have to play them back to back (no Exterminate +Exploit or Explore+Exterminate) if they're to really feed into each other correctly - at least the way I'm currently envisioning it.

But like I said, it sounds like Dirk Knemeyer and Rob Daviau are already well into making a probably cooler version of this idea, so the down side of my version is hardly relevant :)

(As yet untitled) Draft Row Game - first draft rules and cards

I spent about 8 hours prototyping today, and as a result I have not one, but 2 new prototypes ready to test! The one I'm more excited about is Deities & Demigods, which I hope to get to the table Tuesday with my playtest group, and if that goes well, I will bring it to BGG.con with me. I also managed to make some first draft cards for my latest new idea about drafting cards, playing them into a row, then "running" your row. I haven't tried this out yet, but here's a draft rule set - I suppose you could try it out if you wanted to:

What you'll need:

This file for the cards (10 pages): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4093/My%20Games/Draft%20Row%20Game/Draft%20Row%20Game.pdf

A supply of cubes in green, red, yellow, and blue

Paper and pencil to keep score

16 Bonus Score tokens (see setup, below)

Setup

1. Deal players a hand of 3 (2?) cards.

2. Deal 3 cards into a face up display.

3. Put a bunch of cubes in red, blue, yellow, and green into supply piles.

4. Stack scoring tokens with the highest number on top and the lowest on bottom for each of the following:

- Size 3 rows (5/3/1)

- Size 4 rows (5/3/2/1)

- Size 5 rows (5/3/2/1)

- Size 6 rows (5/3/1)

- Size 7 rows (5/3)

In other words, the first player to score a size 4 row will also score a bonus 5 points, while the 2nd person to do so will score a bonus 3 points.

Game Play

Players take turns drafting cards, playing cards into their row to collect resources, and if possible, scoring the row.

On your turn you must...
1. Draft one of the cards in the face up display into your hand, then replace it from the deck.

2. Play any one card from your hand. Collect the resources on one half of the card, then turn the card so that the taken resources are upside down and the other option is right side up, and add it to your card row.

3. If you have the resources pictured right-side-up on the cards in your card row, then spend those resources and score the points shown (right-side-up) on those cards. If available, also take a bonus scoring token based on the size of your row and add that to your score as well. Record those points on a piece of paper.

Game End

The game ends when all of the bonus score token stacks are used up, or when the deck runs out. At the end of the turn in which one of those things happens, the game is over. The player with the most points wins.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. If you are so inclined, give it a try and let me know how it goes!

YANGI (yet another new game idea) - in need of theme: draft/play/run your row!

For a while now I've had some thoughts about a dynamic - I'll see if I can describe it here:

So you're drafting cards into your hand, then you're playing cards from your hand onto the table. Like Thurn & Taxis, you want to (or have to) keep extending your row of cards in play until you can't, then you get rid of those cards and start a new row. So while you're building your row in front of you, you're building your NEXT row in your hand.

I've had this idea for some time, but as yet I haven't really seen a good way to put it together. Last week I was in Seattle at Sasquatch, and I caught a glimpse of Mombasa, which had an interesting mechanism that looked cool - you build a path out of some book tiles, then you advance up the path for rewards. Well, this morning, while lying in my bed evading sleep, these ideas returned to mind and merged, with an important new detail...

Imagine you draft a card into your hand from a supply (like Ticket to Ride), and then you play a card from your hand onto the table in front of you, let's call that your "row." The cards give you resources when you play them. Then after you play a card, if you have the right resources, you may "run" your row, paying the required cost for each card to discard the row and score for accomplishing that goal. Then next turn you'll begin a new row.

This is sort of the opposite of Thurn & Taxis, where you want the row to grow as much as possible before you need to reset it. In the case of my new game idea, you'd want to pay for and reset your row (and score) as often as possible, so you'd want to draft the right cards to earn the resources you need, or draft cards that cost the resources you already have (or can already make).

So for example, maybe a card gives you a red and a blue resource, but costs a yellow resource to clear. Maybe another card doesn't give you any resources, but instead gives you an action (steal a resource from an opponent, draft an additional card into hand, trade some of your resources out for other ones from the supply).

As I type this, I think perhaps each card could have 2 sides, one with say 2 cubes (worth 1 point) and the other with maybe 3 cubes (worth 2 points). When you play the card, you choose which side to take resources from, and which side you will pay to get points... so the more resources you collect, the worse you will score and vice versa.

I think as a mechanism that would work, and I might make a prototype and try it out, but I do not have a theme for this - what does it sound like to you? Leave a comment below and let me know where you would go with this idea thematically, and whether it sounds like a game in and of itself, or the driving mechanism for a larger game (what game would that be?)

Deities and Demigods - deck learning with a common deck (further thoughts)

If the central deck is "calling roles" as it were rather than other players, then it makes much less sense to need a hand of cards from your own deck. So perhaps the "cards in your own deck" should just go in front of you in a tableau.

So when the card in the deck comes up, it tells you what action to take, and you get to boost it with all the cards in your tableau that apply.

And if they're in front of you in a tableau, then they don't really need to be cards as such, they could be tracks with a single marker on each, showing how much "devotion" you have to each deity. This would cut the number of cards needed in half.

This makes sense to me. Now, what should the common/starting actions be, and what should the actions of each of the deities in the pantheon be? And how exactly should the turns resolve?

One thought I had on turn order was that maybe one of the gods - let's say Zeus - dictates turn order... when given the opportunity to do so, you 'buy' a Zeus card (into the deck, as well as increasing your devotion), thereby improving your turn order. Maybe turn order is based on devotion to Zeus, from highest to lowest, where tied players reverse relative turn order (so if you're a later turn order player, you can get better turn order by obtaining a Zeus card).

I suppose that could work like the turn order track in In the Year of the Dragon for example, maybe when Zeus comes up you can either buy a Zeus card, or advance X spaces on that track (where X is your devotion to Zeus) Or both?

So in this structure, a card would be revealed, and in turn order each player would get the option to 'buy' devotion to that god (spending some resource), and (or?) gain the benefit of that god.

So another example is maybe getting gold. So maybe Hermes (god of trade) offers gold... when Hermes comes up maybe you can buy devotion to him, then receive some gold, plus 1 more per devotion to Hermes. This gold is maybe what you pay to 'buy' devotion to gods.

If you are cash rich, you could buy devotion to lots of gods, making all your actions better, but you're going to need to spend actions getting money. And maybe the cost of devotion increases for each devotion you already have (so maybe 1 devotion to each of 4 gods is cheaper than 4 devotion to any 1 god). Big Money could be a strategy, but it wouldn't be very focused.

On the other hand, you could show devotion only to those gods that support your strategy for a more focused approach, with less need to worry about collecting a lot of gold.

If 2 people support the same god, more cards for that god will be in the deck (this is sorta like in EmDo where 2 players will call the same roll more often if they're sharing a strategy), so maybe the cost of devotion should be more based on the number of cards left in the pantheon and less on the number you've already bought. That jives with an idea I had last October about deck learning anyway.

I'm liking the direction this is taking. Maybe I'll keep thinking about it...

Deities and Demigods - a new deck learning game?

Playing all this Deus and Elysium got me thinking a bit about the Mythology theme. In short, I like it. I liked it way back when I played Cyclades in 2009, when I played Olympus in 2010, and when I played Olympos in 2011. I've got my own design that centers on Greek mythology (Odysseus: Winds of Fate), and I've always wanted to work on a game about Hercules and his 12 labors.

I may have also mentioned that I'd like to find more uses for the deck-learning mechanism from Eminent Domain. I think there's more to that mechanism than just the one game. The other day when I was discussing design stuff with Dan Keltner, and he had some ideas which reminded me of some of the roots of the ideas that became EmDo - there was a thread on BGDF.com some years ago about Queen Games looking for games using their Cube Tower. I had a couple of thoughts about that - one of which ended up in EmDo, but another of which involved a central cube tower as well as individual cube towers for each player. The individual cube towers would have an effect on a player's individual game, but the central tower would be accessible by all players, and its contents would change based on the collective actions of all players. In terms of deck learning, this would translate to a central deck that would affect all players, and would be affected by all players.

One idea I had to which I could apply a Greek Mythology theme is to have such a central deck with a couple of standard actions in it, as well as a Pantheon (stacks of cards like in EmDo) of cards corresponding to Greek deities. The central deck would be shuffled, and cards revealed one at a time - giving each player a chance to do that card's action. In lieu of the effect of that card, a player may choose to instead pray to one of the gods in the Pantheon, thereby getting some effect related to that god, and putting a copy of that god's card into the central deck's discard pile. The next time through the deck, that card will come up, and if you wanted it in the deck, then ideally it'll benefit you more than others. In this way the game would be a deck-learning game with a single, shared deck.

The idea of a single shared deck is interesting, but I'm not sure it fits the deck-learning format very well. The variation in your deck creates player differentiation. Therefore maybe another approach would be more appropriate.

I do like the idea of a Pantheon of different deity cards, each supporting some game action. In order to have meaningful actions, I think there would have to be a game board to support land units (Ares), sea units (Poseidon), buildings (Hephaestus), agriculture (Demeter), and etc. I think a modular board would be popular, so I might try something like in Tempus (which I guess is also similar to Deus). I'll have to figure out what it means to have groups of units on land or on sea, but it would make sense if Poseidon let you add units to a sea space, or move units in the sea and stuff like that.

If your deck is made up of cards from a Pantheon (which I think is a great, thematic name for the central card stacks), then what would you as a player represent? My current thought is that players would be heroes or demigods from Greek mythology, like Perseus, Achilles, and Herakles, honoring the Olympian gods to aid in their conquests (or their empire building, or whatever).

I said in my earlier post about deck-learning that I don't think Role Selection is required to make the mechanism work, so long as there's some other form of interaction in the game. Though Role Selection does fit perfectly with having a hand of cards... Maybe this favors the above "common deck" idea, as the common actions could act like roles even if the game isn't exactly a role selection game. Or maybe it's fine not to worry about role selection, even if that sort of wastes some of the hand management aspect of deck-learning.

I don't know, this is a new idea and I'm just feeling it out at the moment, kinda brainstorming. Please leave comments with any thoughts you have on this!

Puzzling out game mechanisms

In case you hadn't heard, I recently ad my hip joint replaced with a shiny new one. Literally shiny:

So I've spent the last couple of weeks at my parents' house. My mother is fond of jigsaw puzzles, so I've been spending a little time helping her put some together.

If you're reading this post, then you know I'm a game designer at heart. So it stands to reason that I might start to think about jigsaw as a game mechanism. I've actually thought about this before - sort of...

Some time ago I worked with Juan Carballal (from the Board Game Designers Forum) and Andy Van Zandt (now a developer for TMG) on a "dice building" game about hunting pirates called Admirals of the Spanish Main. The idea was to try to outdo Quarriors! as a dice building game. More accurately perhaps: to make a game with dice building as a mechanism rather than a Dicebuilder in a way similar to how Eminent Domain is a game with deck building that's not a Deckbuilder (or Dominion clone).

In Admirals of the Spanish Main you would take actions, each associated with a particular colored die. These actions would move your along the board, earn you new dice at ports, allow you to fight and capture nefarious pirates, and let you collect pieces of a treasure map.

It's that last one, the treasure map, which is relevant here. In AotSM, certain rewards allow you to draw map pieces out of a bag, the object of which is to piece together the treasure map pictured on the player board below. Duplicates of the same piece are useless, but there's a large end game bonus for completing the map, so one strategy you could employ involved earning many map piece draws, hoping to complete the map by the end of the game. There exist benefits in the game such as "when you draw map pieces, draw 1 additional piece and then discard one," giving you better odds of finding useful pieces.




Sadly, playtest feedback largely amounted to "if we're playing a game with pirates, we want to BE the pirates!" So we sort of gave up on that one, though I would like to revisit it one day, because I thought it had potential.

One Idea

Getting this blog post back on track, the point of that interlude was to talk about the similarity of that map mechanism to a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, I just used square tiles, but puzzle tabs would fit here, and would be novel. Of course, it may be awkward to draw tiles blindly out of a bag, and have some edge pieces and some not. This could be handled by making the player board be the edge of the puzzle, then all of the pieces could have tabs.

But is this using jigsaw in a meaningful way? Obviously not, as I did approximate it with square tiles. Though it could be a nice, novel way to present that aspect of the game. How then could jigsaw be used as a mechanism? Well, building on the map mechanism I was just talking about, here's one thought I had:

First, create several different (maybe 3?) small puzzles like the map above, 3x3 or maybe 4x4 in size. Presumably the images would be similar enough that it's not immediately obvious which puzzle each piece goes to. There would be multiple copies of each, of course, so that players can all draw from a common pool. Another option is that each player could have 1 copy of each puzzle to draw from, ensuring nobody is blocked out of completing a puzzle due to luck of the draw.

Then, have some aspect of the game involve drawing tiles at random, and solving a puzzle could be the point of the game, or could confer some benefit. The idea that sparked this line of thought was that players could work on putting together their jigsaw puzzles off turn, for something to do during down time.

Another Idea

The above idea was interesting but still doesn't really feel like using jigsaw in a meaningful way. Again, those could be replaced by square tiles. Another, different idea for using jigsaw in a more meaningful way might be this:

Imagine a deduction game in which there are like 9 different puzzles. Each puzzle would be similar in art style, and have maybe 3 common features with each other puzzle (thanks to the technology of Spot It). The reason for all that is to obfuscate which puzzle you're working on in any given game, for replayability.

Each of these puzzles would be in its own bag, and for any given game you'd use only one of them. Over the course of the game, pieces would come out at random, and players would need to piece together the puzzle, either as the goal of the game, or maybe better in order to then glean information toward the solution of the game.

Perhaps this would work well as a cooperative game, with a crime-fighting theme. I think that would be pretty thematic, as hunting down where pieces of a puzzle goes feels like a reasonable approximation of using clues to solve a crime. All players working on the same puzzle seems like it would lend itself nicely to a cooperative game, and has the added benefit that someone like my mother, who is not fond of games, but does enjoy jigsaw puzzles, to enjoy such a game with someone like me, who enjoys jigsaw puzzles as well as other challenges such as solving a crime.

This may be a more thematic use of jigsaw as a mechanism, but is it meaningful? Or can the pieces all be square tiles there as well? I suppose it's possible that puzzle tabs could be used to help solve a jigsaw puzzle in addition to the art on the tile, so maybe that counts?

In either case, even if it's not really a meaningful use of jigsaw, it seems to me like both of these ideas could have some merit.