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Vivian Darkbloom posted:I have some ideas for a 4-player card-driven game set in Cold War-era Africa, with inspiration from Twilight Struggle and the COINs. The sides would be Pan-Africanists who seek to liberate the continent and build African unity, the Imperialists including Britain, France, and Belgium who want to maintain indirect influence over African countries, the Settlers led by South Africa (and later including Portugal?) who want to forcibly control white-minority states, and the USA who are mainly looking to counter Soviet influence. Soviet and Chinese actions would be abstracted through events. I love more unusual themes, so Id say go for it! But a more important thing to focus on instead of the theme might be the core gameplay - games always seem to wind up stronger if you design from the bottom-up instead of top-down. I'd recommend coming up with a handful of "pillars" that you want to build the game on - for my Behemoth game, those are -providing interesting card combinations for players to discover -encouraging players to be passive aggressive towards one another, rather than directly aggressive -forcing players to balance risk / reward in multiple aspects If ever I design something, I try to make sure it's supported by one or more of these pillars. If it isn't, I cut it out or rework it. I also have another soft pillar that i'm not as strict on, which is evoking the feeling of being up against a bigass dragon in a somewhat realistic setting.
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Jun 3, 2016 02:06
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Gutter Owl posted:I like this idea, save for two things. 1. Yeah, I was bouncing between the Ikko-Ikki and some kind of European representation but given the time period (1570-ish) it makes more sense to play up the peasant angle. The basic structure of the game was always intended to be a singular power that can fight and react on every front, a fractured power that's trying to minimize losing what it already has, and an unpredictable insurgency force that can appear on the board at any moment which the other two players can unleash on each other. 2. I should specify, I wasn't going for literal currency but rather an abstraction of a clan's reach. Like in Polis where "Prestige" is spent for all military actions but if you run out you immediately lose the game as you're completely ostracized from power. But fighting is the best way to earn prestige so there's a risk/reward element of needing to spend prestige to fight but needing to earn more than you spend. But no I totally see your point and certainly want to avoid any Orientalism tropes. My main sources of inspiration are Triumph and Tragedy and Here I Stand where you have these super powers that are simultaneously dealing with important "neutral" powers and that's where inter-clan relationships come in. Some clans can never be allies but the players can play cards to slow relationships or create strife e.g. breaking up the alliance between Tokugawa and the Oda player. al-azad fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 03:28
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It also sounds kind of similar to Chaos In The Old World, especially with the Ikko-Ikki basically taking the place of Khorne.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:24
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So I'm in a bit of a lull at work, and have time to prototype my Betrayal rework. This is the component list so far: 5 Player Pawns, 1 Killer Pawn, 12 Dread Tokens, 25 Fatigue Tokens, 25 Delirium Tokens, 30 Favor Tokens, 1 Game Status Mat, 175 Character Cards o 35 of each color (Purple, Orange, Blue, Green and White) in the following denominations: 10 Ones, 10 Twos, 10 Threes, 5 Fours Seven Masque Cards: The Fox, The Swan, The Bear, The Hare, The Goat, The Fly and the Wolf; Seven Archetype Cards: The Fool, Justice, The Hermit, The Devil, Temperance, The Tower, The Hierophant; 105 Object Cards, 87 Room Tiles... o 24 Top Floor o 24 Bottom Floor o 39 Main Floor 102 Event Cards, I'm looking at all of that, and realizing that actually printing this would start creeping into the triple digits, right? I sort of want to cut, but right now everything feels necessary. I guess I need to play to actually figure that out.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:27
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CodfishCartographer posted:For the weapons, since that's the next big stack of cards, what would you guys consider to be "too few" for a personal deck size? I figured 20 would be a good size so that players could see variety in cards they'll draw, and if they lose / play cards it'll be a little while before they see them again. Hands are 5 cards, and so if a player has a 10 card deck, then they'll cycle through the deck pretty quick. 15 seems like a possibly decent middleground, but is still a bit on the high-end if i want to trim down the number of cards. Gutter Owl posted:Man, I'm fighting with that question in one of my own designs. If I figure out how to cut that particular Gordion knot, I'll let you know. From my experience with this situation, you can probably have a very small deck (the game I was working on was 4 card hand / 15 card deck). That said, I don't think the system I was working with had anything as clever as some of what I've seen in Behemoth. How many unique cards are there per weapon? How many copies of each card? I'm really excited to see this is still being worked on. Looking forward to more information as things progress.
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Jun 6, 2016 01:08
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Anniversary posted:
Thanks! I'm excited to be back working on it. A major problem I'm having now is balancing. I took a lot of the feedback from this thread into consideration in terms of balancing triggering conditions for archetypes (the traitor game element), and masques (the public facing part of your character that gives you abilities). I also massively cut down on game elements, which was a hunch I got from here. I'm aiming for actual playtesting by the middle of the month. I'll try and post a PnP to this thread if it's not total dogshit.
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Jun 6, 2016 01:39
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Anniversary posted:From my experience with this situation, you can probably have a very small deck (the game I was working on was 4 card hand / 15 card deck). That said, I don't think the system I was working with had anything as clever as some of what I've seen in Behemoth. How many unique cards are there per weapon? How many copies of each card? Right now, there are 9 unique cards in each weapon deck. Four cards have 3 copies each, three cards have 2 copies each, and two cards have one copy each. The design is that the 3x cards are more general purpose, the 2x cards are more situational tools and are generally a bit more powerful, then the 1x cards are the most powerful effects. One problem I've run into with my design is that every player HAS to put down at least one card every turn. If a player is only drawing one card a turn, then they'll never catch up if they combo multiple cards at once. I was planning to have players draw two a turn, but that'll require a decent number of cards in the deck to prevent players from shuffling the discard pile into a deck every three or four turns. Although maybe I could give players the option to delay themselves in order to draw a few extra cards? Or make sure to give each weapon some built-in draw options.
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Jun 6, 2016 02:04
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That does seem potentially problematic. I'm actually a big fan of simply allowing players to draw up to their max hand size at the end of each turn, and balancing everything around players having X options at any one time (where X is that players hand size, which you could vary from weapon to weapon.) Or if that interrupts the balance too much, give them an option to delay, discard their hand, and draw up to their max hand size. Though for some reason I feel like this might interrupt how health works in Behemoth? I don't have any of your playtest documents handy anymore so can't confirm. Sounds like you're on a good track!
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Jun 6, 2016 02:43
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Anniversary posted:That does seem potentially problematic. Actually up until now, in all of my previous versions, players would draw up to their max hand size at the start of each turn  I have been considering cutting this down to make card draw effects more powerful, and to make it a little more of a tough decision on whether or not you want to dump all your cards into a wombo combo over and over.Player health works where you discard equal to the amount of damage you take, with overflow damage reducing VP. The problem with drawing to full is that players can fairly easily figure out when they'll be in danger of being attacked - so they can just go maximum wombo until just beforehand, then pull back the aggression right before they have a chance of being hurt. If card draw were limited, then players would be taking a legitimate risk by playing down huge numbers of cards, because they wouldn't fully recover often. I suppose I could just make damage discard your whole hand, then remove some amount of VP. This would encourage wombo comboing, since you'd lose everything anyways, but would get rid of the interesting decision of choosing cards to discard and managing your hand size. Maybe I should just leave it with draw up to max, and see how it works with the new mechanics and decide from there.
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Jun 6, 2016 03:26
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What's the fail state for the hunt? Is losing cards from hand / VP the only penalty for tanking hits? If so, why? (I know I've read the rules which explain all of this, but honestly can't remember.) Anniversary fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 03:33
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Haha no worries, it's been a while since I've done a playtest. The fail state is if players can't kill the behemoth in a certain number of turns. And the only penalties are losing cards from your hand and VP. VP mostly come in the form of behemoth cards, and previously if you lose any VP, you need to place one back on the behemoth deck. I probably will cut this out though because it feels kind of like just a tacked on thing for players to remember, and it's more natural to just discard cards. I guess thinking about it, taking hits isn't closely related to the fail state. The fail state is actually surprisingly hard to reach - the focus is meant to be more about players trying to outdo each other. Not about trying to avoid losing, but more about trying to personally win. If you take a lot of hits, you're most likely not going to win the game due to losing VP. There is a minor problem where if you have 0 VP, there's nothing really bad that happens from taking a hit, aside from losing cards in hand. I considered making the player get delayed, but then that cascades into them getting hit more and just is kind of kicking the losing players while they're down. I think the better option is to give all OTHER players 1 VP for each damage taken, so it's as though they're still losing VP. Typing this out, I realize that the focus is on getting the most VP, so maybe taking damage should ONLY effect VP. That would still have the issue where players wouldn't need to think super hard about their hand sizes, aside from having fewer options.
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Jun 6, 2016 03:53
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One alternative could be that, instead of losing VP cards when you get hit, you gain negative VP cards. Can a Behemoth attack hit more than one player? If not, perhaps you take whatever attack hit you and add it to your victory points as an endgame penalty. Otherwise you could do something like Dominion's 'Curse' cards to track penalties from being hit. Then you could split hand disruption off into a separate effect that some Behemoth attacks caused, if you still wanted to make some attacks have that effect. Out of curiosity, what do people recommend for linking pnp documents to this thread? I feel like I've mostly seen google docs but what are some other options?
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Jun 6, 2016 04:08
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Behemoth attacks can hit multiple players, but there could be just negative VP tokens. I do like the idea of penalty cards. I could maybe even see them being shuffled into a player's deck and having some negative effect when drawn. Something like a lasting injury. Downside: MORE CARDS which I'm trying to cut down on.
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Jun 6, 2016 04:23
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You could also just let players "bottom out" at zero, and not incur any additional penalties. Like, at a certain point, you just don't have any dignity left to lose. For that, you'd probably want to start at a number of VP above zero (like, 10 maybe?) so that the hunters have something to lose from the first few possible attacks. And you can find a middle ground between draw one and draw-full. David Sirlin's Codex, for example, uses a system where you discard your hand, then draw that many cards plus to, to a max of five. So you tread water if you only play two cards a turn (the average for the game), but your hand gets reduced if you play 3+ cards in a turn, and you might need to spend future turns only playing one or zero cards to recoup handside and deck velocity.
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Jun 6, 2016 04:41
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I actually really like Gutter Owl's suggestions here. So I've been working on a relatively simple duel game that utilizes elements of role selection and worker placement as its resolution mechanics for about a year and a half now. Here's the pnp files as well as how to set it up. All feedback appreciated.
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Jun 6, 2016 05:09
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Gutter Owl posted:You could also just let players "bottom out" at zero, and not incur any additional penalties. Like, at a certain point, you just don't have any dignity left to lose. For that, you'd probably want to start at a number of VP above zero (like, 10 maybe?) so that the hunters have something to lose from the first few possible attacks. Yeah, I like the idea of starting out with around 10 VP. Even very careless players probably wont lose more than that before dealing some amount of damage (to get up from the baseline) That Codex drawing system is super interesting, and has gotten me thinking a lot about drawing mechanics in games. I like the idea of treading water, and needing to throttle back if you want to refill your hand. While I dont think that specific method of card drawing would work well in Behemoth, the experience it elicits is the important part. What Im thinking is that players will have a 12 card deck, with a 6 card (max) hand. Players will draw 1 card per turn, but have 3~4 cards that are primarily there for draw power. In my head Im imagining players trying to wombo combo out cards as efficiently / as long as possible before taking a turn to reload their hand with cards. If I go with that, I think Id remove players discarding cards form their hand when taking damage, and just have damage directly relate to lost VP. Maybe I could have the VP lost just be reduced by the number of cards in hand, so youd still be giving up defenses by unloading wombo combos, but wouldnt have to directly lose cards and options.
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Jun 6, 2016 18:53
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So, the first forums playtest of MELTWATER is complete! Thanks again to Sine and Tricky! Figured I'd link it here, if anyone wanted an example or some tool recommendations for running forums PBP tests. And related, MELTWATER v0.61 is live, incorporating a lot of lessons learned from the PBP. Cardsheet and map are unchanged from previous version, except for the player aid cards on sheet 4. A full version changelog can be found at the back of the document. But the two big changes are a) massively simplifying Pressgang and Threaten, and b) supply depot no longer count as "units," which removes a lot of unintuitive crap from starvation, flight, and various actions. I'll probably be launching another round of PBPs later today, for Sine, Tricky, and any other interested parties.
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Jun 6, 2016 22:11
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...aaaaaand here's that second PBP! Sinewave, Tricky, please report to the thread!
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Jun 7, 2016 06:39
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CodfishCartographer posted:I love more unusual themes, so Id say go for it! But a more important thing to focus on instead of the theme might be the core gameplay - games always seem to wind up stronger if you design from the bottom-up instead of top-down. I'd recommend coming up with a handful of "pillars" that you want to build the game on - for my Behemoth game, those are -providing interesting card combinations for players to discover -encouraging players to be passive aggressive towards one another, rather than directly aggressive -forcing players to balance risk / reward in multiple aspects Yeah, it's a good point that mechanical coherence should come first, and with this sort of big historical period I would obviously be simplifying things a lot no matter what, so it's ok to make mechanics abstractly related to the plot. Currently I'm trying to imagine what a 4-way card-driven game with hand management would actually look like.
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Jun 7, 2016 10:04
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Guess who was up all night working on her sellsheet for potential publishers.  I'm worried the design is too cramped. But I can't look at the drat thing right now without going crosseyed. I'll get around to hating it when I wake up. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 14:06
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Gutter Owl posted:Guess who was up all night working on her sellsheet for potential publishers. My art instructor always said the best way to evaluate negative space and composition is by looking at your work from a distance or squint. And sure enough if you look at the thumbnail you can see some areas where information completely disappears because it doesn't have enough presence. The headline (abstract, diceless, head to head, etc) isn't doing much for you and the information it presents is repeated multiple times throughout.. I would move the player/time/age symbols to the bottom and replace the headline with your contact information. Just like a resume, assume the reader isn't going to make it to the very end so put your name front and center! This will let the right side of the page breath a little more and you can stretch your story flavor text to the right which would save a line or two. I would also re-evaluate the laundry list. I think you could put something more concrete and tangible than "simple, elegant rules." It doesn't mean as much as saying something more concrete like "open and play" or "teach in 10 minutes." The latter half of the bullet points should really be first because they're actually giving away details about the game. Diceless combat, variable setup, and mobile ready? As a gamer you have me sold there. I also wonder if your flavor text story is in a good place. I'd experiment with putting your features as high up as possible, at least under the picture. Overall a good presentation. As someone who knows nothing about it I get the gist after 30 seconds. There is room to move things around and trim a little excess. e: If I was doing the layout it would be Header: my name Title Picture Components overlapping picture Underneath picture: drive out civilians, etc. Laundry list Story/additional flavor text. al-azad fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 15:05
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Gutter Owl posted:Guess who was up all night working on her sellsheet for potential publishers. I am a philistine who can't give you any tips on specifics since I am less artistic than a ham sandwich, but I know what I like and you are definitely on the right track at least. It jumps out pretty easily from the page and already looks more professional than several finished games I actually own.
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Jun 8, 2016 18:27
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Some progress on my Japanese grand strategy game. I've established the theme: three asymmetric factions fighting a war of supremacy. Now moving on to some basics. Every clan is represented by one or more leaders  Leaders have two value: let's call them military prowess and my favorite new Japanese word tetsumenpi (literally "iron hide" which sounds totally badass, but it means audacity or brazenness).  Leaders are attached to units of lesser samurai lords who are worth 1-4 strength. This number is kept hidden from your opponent so the discs are placed face down. A leader + some number of units = an army.  Example of Omi/Shiga province with Lake Biwa in the center. Circle spaces represent unfortified spaces: un-walled cities, villages, rest stops, and so on. Squares are fortified spaces representing walled cities and small fortresses. The diamonds are castles, which are also fortified spaces, and double diamonds are a clan's home. Straight lines are roads, dotted lines are trails, and double lines are highways that let armies move faster. The leader's prowess determines the maximum number of units attached. So Nobunaga, with a prowess of 4, could have five 4s or one 1 or any combination inbetween. Each clan has a limited number of units total, so a strong clan like Oda has a nice spread across all values while a weaker clan like Azai may have one large unit and a couple 1s and 2s. A single space can only be occupied by one army so this drives the importance of allying/dominating other clans to grow your army. The Oda player can form an army of allied units from different clans under a single leader e.g. Nobunaga can lead Oda and Tokugawa units together: this is their special ability representing Nobunaga's ambition and drive towards a unified Japan. The Warring Clans player must have a leader present for each different clan in their army. Attacking an army is done if you end your turn adjacent to an enemy unit. Fortified spaces give bonuses to the defender. Attackers get a bonus if they attack from a trail (representing an ambush). Here's where "audacity" comes in: if a leader becomes adjacent to another leader at any point you must check for audacity. If the leaders have the same rating, nothing happens. If there's a difference in ratings then the leader with the lower audacity is outraged and immediately attacks the leader with higher audacity. In this way "humble" leaders make great defenders on trails where they get the attacker's bonus while audacious leaders are "tanks" that can hold key crossroads. The Ikko-Ikki's unique ability is that their leaders have 0 audacity. They never provoke outrage (blend in with peasants) and can choose if they want to intercept passing armies. That's the core of the game, really. Your ultimate goal is to take castles which forces control of the clan to you and scores victory points. There's a couple of other map related things I'm tweaking including support (a special unit required to "fuel" armies or they lose units) and end-of-round upkeep where units have to retreat and station at fortified spaces or else they die off. This makes tactical movement important as you can cut off an army's retreat and basically starve them. Next up is action resolution, which is done entirely with a deck of modified Hanafuda cards which serve three primary purposes: moving armies, diplomatic relationships, and upgrading your clan. al-azad fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 19:54
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Trucking along. The major component I've held back on is the action resolution mechanic. I knew from the start I wanted the game to play with a deck of (modified) hanafuda cards and now I think I've got the gist of it hammered down. The game progress by turns and each turn is broken down like this: -Politics (play a card to influence current events, still working on this) -Diplomacy -Command phase ***Spring actions ***Summer actions ***Fall actions -Winter cleanup phase Here is the makeup of the cards:  Top left you have the command type: spring, summer, or fall (this card is spring, excuse my sloppy MS Paint kanji). To the right of that is the military strength rated 2-7 (in this case it's 4). I'm keeping the values 2-7 as a nod to Ombre, the card game the Portuguese brought to Japan. To the right of that is a clan symbol (crudely drawn Azai here). There's always a tableau of common cards available plus the cards in each player's hand. During the diplomacy phase each player takes turns playing cards for their diplomatic value which influences the various neutral clans. The more you play the stronger your alliances but the fewer cards you have for combat. Which takes us to the primary use for the cards. When initiating combat the players compare their army strengths then play cards. It's a zero sum game so having an advantage of 3 strength for the attacker is -3 strength for the defender. The cards are worth their value when played but can only be played if the command matches the seasonal phase e.g. spring command cards can only be played for effect during spring. Finally there's the common tableau. A hanafuda deck is made up of 12 suits of 4 cards each. If you have a matching suit you can play the card with a common row card to get both effects. For design purposes, the "winter" suits in this game are essentially wild cards that can be matched with any suit (which is kind of sort of how they work in most hanafuda rules). The attacker plays cards first so if it's spring and there are good spring cards in the tableau then it's wise to push the offensive if you have matching suits in hand. I'm almost ready to start refining and working towards a prototype.
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Jun 10, 2016 18:49
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Edit: Whoops, wrong thread.
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Jun 13, 2016 21:29
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Ok, double post but with actual content this time. My friend and I have been bouncing ideas back and forth for a few games that we would like to make for a while now but we lack direction and keep going from idea to idea. While that can be fun, I think getting some advice and opinions on some of our games will give us the kick in the pants we need to actually finish one. Here are a few ideas we have laying around: In Stock: A hectic grocery store themed cooperative game for 2-4 players. The basic idea came from playing a game of Waterdeep and wondering what would happen if you placed the resources into the locations instead of taking or receiving them automatically. My friend initially thought of this as an antagonistic game where each player is playing a cashier competing with their fellows to try and get the most amount of money through their checkout, but I thought it would fit the theme better if it was a cooperative game instead. We have both worked in the same upscale grocery store when we were younger and I really don't want to portray the workers as cut throat or callous to their coworkers. Gameplay works sort of like Waterdeep in that it is a worker placement game where the board (grocery store) is split into different sections that provide certain resources (produce department produces green cubes, meat produces red cubes, etc.) that you need to collect in order to fill a customer's shopping basket. The players control two workers each that they can send out to the sections of the store to "restock the shelves" and refill to the total amount of cubes in the section regardless of how many cubes are currently there. For example, Player 1 sees that a customer wants two red "meat" cubes but there is only one red cube on the board in the meat section. He or she places a worker on the meat section and places two red cubes on the section, filling it to it's maximum of three red cubes. Once a section is at it's maximum it cannot hold any more cubes. The customers work similar to the quests in Waterdeep: each has their own requirements represented by an amount of differently colored cubes and come from a deck of cards, but instead of being static the customers add a time component. Just like in real life, customers will not patiently wait around for items to be restocked and will leave with nothing if the players take too long. A customer is drawn and placed onto a track that will automatically advance the card to the next space and fills the previous space in line with a new customer card at the beginning of every player turn. When the customer reaches the end of the track, the players have one more player turn to try and fulfill the customers wants before being discarded into a discard pile. Customers can be served in any order on the track but will keep advancing regardless of which customer is completed first, even if this creates a gap in the advancement track. A customer can be fulfilled on a player turn by the player removing the required number and color of cubes from the board, taking the customer card from the track, and placing it in front of themselves. The game lasts until the customer deck is empty and there are no customers on the advancement track. If the players are unable to serve a certain number of customers before they are discarded (around 10 or so), the players lose. We have a prototype that we've played with some of our friends but I feel it could use some tweaking. Personally, I would like there to be a mechanic that could delay or get rid of customer(s) on the track and I am not sure how to handle it. One method I was thinking of would be to have some effect text on a few of the customer cards that say something like "Do not advance customers this player turn" or "Remove one customer from the track. This does not count towards the lose condition" that the player could use at any time after the player has completed that customer and placed it in front of themselves. My friend wanted there to be a separate deck of cards that the players can purchase cards from but I feel it is unnecessary to involve another deck into the game. Currently there is no way to expand the store to add new sections and I think the game would really benefit from including that mechanic. I was thinking that once a player reaches a certain amount of customers completed they get to place one new section to the board, but the other way to handle it would be to spend them to place a new section. I like both ideas, but I guess I'm leaning towards spending them? As they are currently, the customers don't really have any purpose aside from just keeping track of if they have been completed. -------- Genesis: Tile based cooperative game with a sci-fi theme for 2-4 players. The game is based in the far future: Earth is dying, and in desperation the Earth Government launches a prototype "Genesis" machine capable of terraforming a dead planet without sufficient testing at the nearby Planet X-713. The machine lands perfectly, but as soon as it begins it's operations the planet's fragile ecosystem shatters. Earthquakes and volcanoes begin to dominate the planet but there is hope that the machine will be able to stabilize it. This game is still in it's infancy, but I think it has potential. Gameplay is pretty basic: Each player draws a random tile and matches its edge to another and the board expands, limited to a 9 tile by 9 tile grid. At the end of every player turn they roll a pair of dice for the longitude and the latitude coordinates to see where on the grid the planet has made a tile inhospitable. If it happens to be on a tile placed by a player, then they flip that tile and all adjoining tiles over to the destroyed side; if it lands in an empty space then nothing happens. The game ends when the players cannot place any more tiles. If over 75% of the grid is destroyed then the players lose. I'm just going to be honest, I think this needs some major overhauls. I don't really like the idea of setting it on a grid system as it limits the placement of tiles to much and it doesn't make much sense in terms of theme. Why would new life care about an arbitrary boundary? I'm also not a huge fan of the dice mechanic as it is because the players could lose as soon as turn 3 from bad dice rolls, but I'm not sure how to best approach a randomized selection mechanic otherwise. I was thinking of some kind of press your luck mechanic instead, where a player can place one tile for free, but if they decide to add another tile they need to roll a die with each successive tile adding another die. For example, the first tile is free, the second is one die, the third is two dice, fourth is three dice, etc. The tile is placed and on a roll of a six on any of the dice the tile is flipped to its destroyed side, also destroying the adjacent tiles. I feel like the game would need to have a more specific objective to accommodate such a mechanic and to keep people from just placing one tile a turn, like there need to be a certain number of grass tiles or they need to create a body of water x tiles wide. I was also toying with the idea of having the destruction be a physical presence on the board that flips over tiles as it moves over them, with some kind of marker that the players roll for the direction and distance it goes. -------- I'm open to any and all critiques, ideas, suggestions and recommendations for either of these guys. We have more ideas that I'll post later, but these are the two that I've recently been thinking the most about. Chip McFuck fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jun 14, 2016 |
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Jun 14, 2016 18:00
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In Stock sounds like it could have potential. Reminds me of the video game Cook, Serve, Delicious as well. From your blurb I'd wonder if you end up just playing in a very rote manner - filling the emptiest section that is needed, To add more, you'd probably want to vary the possible player actions so it's less clear what to do, and possibly include some element of blocking - if your guy is restocking the ice cream, I can't restock the frozen vegetables as we would close off the whole aisle to traffic. Adding a deck of purchased abilities sounds like clutter. I think you've already said what needs to happen with Genesis for its next revisions! One thing about the 9x9 grid: you can place such that it can't exceed 9x9, without requiring the grid to be in any particular place. Between Two Cities does this, you're making a 4x4 city but when you place the first tile that could end up being anywhere, you don't have to specify "this is the top-right corner" or such - just don't build to 5 wide or tall. If you keep the die roll mechanic, just roll a d81 (easier with a different grid size) and remove the rolled tile, removing nothing if higher than the number of placed tiles so far. A non-square grid can also be useful, then you can roll two dice with different sizes - for example 8 rows x 10 columns, roll d8 d10 - that saves on the counting.
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Jun 15, 2016 11:01
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Patchistory does that too, and in a more grand scale, so you might want to look at it too.
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Jun 16, 2016 04:10
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I'm working on a semi-cooperative game, and I'm interested in some advice. The players represent factions on a space colony ship. Its a generational ship, with the turns representing periods of years. The players need to work together to keep the ship running, while, at the same time, trying to expand their influence and get their policies enacted. The game lasts a finite number of turn. Each turn, each sector generates a certain number of needs depending on population. Each sector has a unique deck, (e.g. bio-harvesting will have lots of cards which make food, while fabbers will make materials, etc.).  The needs have three levels of requirements. Any player can meet a need, with the lower levels of needs being required to be met before the higher levels can be met. Players satisfying a need place a support cube of their color on the need they satisfy, discarding the required resources (if resources are required, for example, reproduction and improvement needs do not require resources) from their hand and drawing back up to hand size. One of the levels (surrounded by an indicator) allows the player who places a cube on that level to take the card (adding it to their deck) at the end of the turn. If a need goes un-fufilled (base level not satisfied) then a black cube (Discontent) is placed on each of the unfilled spaces. In addition to needs, there is a crisis deck, seeded with cards which correspond to various turn numbers and/or the end of game scoring phase (i.e. early trip = turns 1-3, mid trip = turns 4-8, late trip = turns 9-10 and arrival ). Crisis cards act similar to Need cards, except they have multiple groups of 3 needs, and each group needs to have the base level satisfied for the crisis to be resolved. If a crisis is not resolved, black cubes are placed on each of the unfilled spaces on the card. Some crises have additional effects, read the cards for more details.  At the end of each Game Turn, all cubes on cards are placed in a central bag and all unclaimed needs are returned to their respective decks. Some game elements will call for support checks. To make a support check, draw 3 cubes from the bag. If the majority of cubes are in support of you (either your color or the color of another player who decides to support you on this check) you pass the check [Discontent cubes always count against you] . All cubes used as part of the check are returned to supply. Cubes (and the contents of your deck) will be scored at the end of the game I'm worried about the number of distinct resources being generated and required. The goal is to allow for different players to "specialize" in different things, while encouraging a little bit of frustration with each other, as players can fulfill higher-order needs and "scoop" points from other folks. On the other hand, you have the twin risks of players not bumping up against each other and/or players being shut out of playing the game by not having matching cards. I'm going to try to keep this under control by making "cycles" of stations that intersect (Power -> Food -> Material -> Power and Food -> Entertainment -> Security-> Food). Any advice?
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Jun 18, 2016 00:17
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I have a prototype of my Betrayal rework done. I got my first game in, playing four different people. I decided beforehand to have one play intentionally go traitor. It was... actually pretty fun! There were a lot of interesting scenarios that happened, like the guy who was intentionally going traitor waiting around while Dread built up (Dread is the shared resource where if you get a certain number everyone dies, and the guy with that traitor role is the winner). He then made a mad dash for the Boiler Room (a set room in the basement that lets you add Dread) and tried to pump it, but another player managed to race down there and kill him before he could. I realized a few things: > I need to restructure the default win condition for the heroes, because they didn't even come CLOSE to it this time. > It needs balancing. I tried to make the four different ability types (brains, brawn, cunning, dexterity) have about an equal number of checks, but there were a) not enough checks in general, and b) in this particular game almost no checks for brains and cunning, and lots and lots of brawn and dexterity. this meant that two of the players who had masques that started them with the brains and cunning deck types didn't get much satisfying action. > The deck building part is very luck based, and not that engaging at the moment. I need more meaningful choice in deck building, and less luck-of-the-draw stuff that relies on the object deck. I think I can fix this a little bit by changing my current movement system. Right now there's a 4x4 grid for the upper and basement floors, and a 5x5 grid for the main floor. In a four player game, they discovered almost all of the rooms very quickly in a 45 minute game, and once you have discovered all of the floors (absent a few special events) there's no new way to generate new action in the game, and it grinds to a halt. The floors are all one 'space' per tile, and there isn't movement within tiles like in Betrayal. I played some Elder Sign over the weekend, and it made me realize that the way it structures 'movement' is actually fairly elegant, so I might redesign so there's not a fixed grid, and maybe do a market row type thing. I just need to figure out a way to make that work with the theme and strategy of my game... It's difficult, because I want to keep movement in (dexterity ability cards give you better movement, which I think is a nice touch), but I'm also not thrilled with the grid. Maybe just a bigger grid? Anyway, it's heartening that it wasn't completely terrible. It's also not super distinct from Betrayal in a lot of the ways that count, so I have to keep working on that.
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Jun 18, 2016 04:47
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sector_corrector posted:I have a prototype of my Betrayal rework done. I got my first game in, playing four different people. I decided beforehand to have one play intentionally go traitor. It was... actually pretty fun! There were a lot of interesting scenarios that happened, like the guy who was intentionally going traitor waiting around while Dread built up (Dread is the shared resource where if you get a certain number everyone dies, and the guy with that traitor role is the winner). He then made a mad dash for the Boiler Room (a set room in the basement that lets you add Dread) and tried to pump it, but another player managed to race down there and kill him before he could. I realized a few things: I don't have much in the way of critiques as I'm pretty new to the whole game design thing, but I wanted to say that I think this game idea is really cool. A deck building horror game seems like it would be right up my alley and it's awesome that your play testers liked it. I do have one minor thought: Granted, I haven't played the game so this may have already been taken care of, but from what you have described I don't really understand the idea of having a set room generating dread. If I were the traitor player and that was the easiest/most consistent way to generate it then I would make a bee-line for the boiler room/basement area every game. Is there a mechanic(s) to prevent/delay that from happening? It just seems to run counter to the exploration aspect as pretty much every game is going to come down to if I can reach the boiler room before the other players or me generating a lot of dread before I'm revealed as the traitor. Also, thanks for the suggestions for In Stock guys! I held a play test over the weekend with some modified cards that I thought of a few hours beforehand to try and make the game a little more dynamic and got some positive responses. Here are the things I added: > Some customer cards now have special rules on them that apply when the card is either completed by the players or discarded from the advancement track. I only have three so far, but they are: 1. Place this customer on position one on the advancement track, then add another customer to the track. 2. Place a black cube on a section of the store at the end of each player turn. That section now produces one fewer resource for each black cube. 3. Players can no longer have two workers in the same section of the store. Workers placed before this card goes into effect are unaffected. Aside from the one that affects the track, these customers get placed into the "Customer Service" area of the board and the rule attached to them stays in effect until a player decides to deal with the customer. They do this by placing a worker in the customer service area and discarding the customer. If a customer is placed into the customer service area while another rule is in effect, the new customer and rule takes precedence. > Players now have hidden roles to incentivize them completing certain customers over others. Right now these roles are pretty basic (produce guy want to complete customers wanting produce items, meat guy wants to complete customers wanting meat, etc.) with the only exception being one I thought would be an interesting balancing act but wound up with the play tester taking it way too seriously and just not doing anything: Lazy Supervisor: If you have the least amount of customers completed at the end of the game, each customer you did complete is worth four points instead of one. > The gameplay is now split into three "waves" of customers, called "rushes," that represent the morning, noon, and night rushes that grocery stores experience. The morning rush is 10 cards, the noon rush is 20 cards and the night rush is 30 cards. The morning rush has it's own special easier-to-deal-with cards but the noon and night rushes are dealt randomly from the same deck of 70 cards so there is some variety each game. At the end of the morning and noon rushes the players can add a new section to the store. > Players can now bank resources on a customer. By placing a worker on a customer on the advancement track, the player can move any amount and color of resources from the board onto the customer card, which frees up the section(s) of the store so it can be filled again. If the players don't complete a customer with banked resources before it reaches the end of the advancement track, the resources are discarded and not returned to the board. While these were great additions that added some complexity to a game that sorely needed it, the play testers still felt that it lacked a sense of urgency. I was thinking of a couple of things to address this: The customers with special rules have an additional resource requirement needed to fulfill before the players can discard it from customer service. As it is right now, it's too easy for the players to discard the special customers so they pretty much just get dealt with the turn after they are placed in customer service. Having to place a worker on the customer service area isn't the downside that I thought it was. Also, more special customers in general. Right now the players have a 1/14 chance of drawing a special customer but I think i need to up that number. I was also thinking that there should be a limit to how many customers a player can complete in one turn. During the play test it was pretty easy for a player to just to clear two or three customers from the track which left no way for the players afterwards to score any points/clear any customers and the cycle would repeat itself. Currently, I'm thinking that I should limit it to just one customer completed per player turn (doesn't include customers in the customer service area). The roles need to be expanded upon and should be more complex to really get the players thinking something other than "Oh, I just need to get the most green guys." This is honestly my weakest area as I'm the type of person who thinks things should be as accessible as possible when it comes to roles. Anyone have any advice on how to introduce a little more complexity? Chip McFuck fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jun 22, 2016 |
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Jun 22, 2016 21:31
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I'm currently working on a dungeon crawl-like board game. Instead of building up one guy, you hire a party of heroes, build them up, and throw them into the mess. The dungeon is explored tile by tile, facing challenges/monsters that require a certain amount of Strength, Cunning, and/or Wisdom to overcome. Hired heroes will have rankings in these stats, as well as a special ability unique to that hero that can affect gameplay. You'll be managing Stamina, and earning and spending Gold to upgrade or hire heroes. The object of the game is to lead your party of heroes through the dungeon, possibly hinder the other parties, defeat the 4 Bosses, grab the Dungeon Deed, and escape the dungeon. I can post the full set of rules once they're ready to leave the early testing stages. I've taken a look at a bunch of dungeon crawlers (because it's definitely not a genre that's been done to death) but just about all the ones I've seen are about building up one character to work solo or in a party of other players. Are there games out there that have you command a party of heroes through a dungeon similar to what I was thinking? I'd like to see what's out there for inspiration on what works and what doesn't. Any general advise related to this type of game would also be greatly appreciated.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:31
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Vodvillain posted:I'm currently working on a dungeon crawl-like board game. Instead of building up one guy, you hire a party of heroes, build them up, and throw them into the mess. The dungeon is explored tile by tile, facing challenges/monsters that require a certain amount of Strength, Cunning, and/or Wisdom to overcome. Hired heroes will have rankings in these stats, as well as a special ability unique to that hero that can affect gameplay. You'll be managing Stamina, and earning and spending Gold to upgrade or hire heroes. The object of the game is to lead your party of heroes through the dungeon, possibly hinder the other parties, defeat the 4 Bosses, grab the Dungeon Deed, and escape the dungeon. I can post the full set of rules once they're ready to leave the early testing stages. Arcadia Quest isn't Co-op, but each player runs a "guild", a party of 3 drafted heroes.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:31
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Harvey Mantaco posted:Arcadia Quest isn't Co-op, but each player runs a "guild", a party of 3 drafted heroes. Awesome, thanks for the heads up! I've sorta looked at Arcadia Quest and Super Dungeon Explore because I dig the art and the minis. This might give me a reason to drop some coin on it.
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Jun 24, 2016 15:23
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Vodvillain posted:I'm currently working on a dungeon crawl-like board game. Instead of building up one guy, you hire a party of heroes, build them up, and throw them into the mess. The dungeon is explored tile by tile, facing challenges/monsters that require a certain amount of Strength, Cunning, and/or Wisdom to overcome. Hired heroes will have rankings in these stats, as well as a special ability unique to that hero that can affect gameplay. You'll be managing Stamina, and earning and spending Gold to upgrade or hire heroes. The object of the game is to lead your party of heroes through the dungeon, possibly hinder the other parties, defeat the 4 Bosses, grab the Dungeon Deed, and escape the dungeon. I can post the full set of rules once they're ready to leave the early testing stages. Cryptmaster:Tomb is like that - keep getting refills of adventurers at the guild, competing with other players to get the loot, etc. It's not a dungeon crawl in the sense of exploring, more about resource and party management and luck-pushing, and beating other players to the good (but more dangerous) stuff.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:40
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Vodvillain posted:Awesome, thanks for the heads up! I've sorta looked at Arcadia Quest and Super Dungeon Explore because I dig the art and the minis. This might give me a reason to drop some coin on it. SDE doesn't have the guild system, just FYI. Also, Arcadia Quest is a lot more fun. It's a complete gong show. With 4 players that makes 12 characters in the game + monsters, and although certain tasks are better completed working together with other players, it also gives rewards for stabbing them in the back and it all ends up being very frantic in a good way. They're both played on a set board and monsters only really react, they never really attack or anything on their own, so I'm not sure if either is what you're really looking into emulating, just maybe the multiple character aspect of AQ. I will say though, if you look at the AQ rules one thing we've found is you're only supposed to take an action on one of your characters a turn and move them 3 spaces. We houseruled that into you can only take one action on one of your characters a turn but you can move up to 6 total divided among your characters, with a max 3 for any of them and the game basically instantly got twice as fun because you can starting organizing things, setting up attacks and bluff other players.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:53
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Side Effects posted:I don't have much in the way of critiques as I'm pretty new to the whole game design thing, but I wanted to say that I think this game idea is really cool. A deck building horror game seems like it would be right up my alley and it's awesome that your play testers liked it. I do have one minor thought: Granted, I haven't played the game so this may have already been taken care of, but from what you have described I don't really understand the idea of having a set room generating dread. If I were the traitor player and that was the easiest/most consistent way to generate it then I would make a bee-line for the boiler room/basement area every game. Is there a mechanic(s) to prevent/delay that from happening? It just seems to run counter to the exploration aspect as pretty much every game is going to come down to if I can reach the boiler room before the other players or me generating a lot of dread before I'm revealed as the traitor. The traitor conditions are triggered by a number of conditions, and the guy who has to blow up the hotel (represented by the Death tarot card) has their triggered at ~4 dread (still balancing that part). With that particular archetype, other players may make a check if they are in the same room as you to immediately kill you (in addition to the normal mechanics in the game that allows protagonists to damage each other if they desire), and the archetype may choose to reveal (in which case they get a movement bonus) or not (in which case they are just a normal player for all intents and purposes). So making a beeline to the Boiler Room and pumping away at it is a pretty good indication that one of the protagonists should try to stop you - in which case they win! Also, there are 6 archetypes for a max 4 player game, meaning that you might not have Death drawn into the game at all. That's the idea anyway. Many of the archetypes work in the same way. Right now I've balanced it as follows: 2 Antagonists (they get a new sole victory condition which can be resisted by the protagonists and the protagonists win if they foil that condition in some way) 2 Protagonists (they get special abilities that make winning a little easier) 2 Neutral (they get specific additional win conditions where they are still working with the protagonists, but lose the game if the protagonists get victory before they are able to achieve said special conditions) 2 AI Win Conditions (players win if they defeat a specific AI controlled NPC in the hotel through a special event) Right now I'm not sure if I want these to be exclusive (e.g. once an archetype is revealed no other archetypes may be revealed) or if I want them to stack (so you might have each player with a triggered archetype frantically trying to accomplish their goals).
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Jun 24, 2016 19:08
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Side Effects posted:Anyone have any advice on how to introduce a little more complexity? One idea I had from working occasionally in food service are events. Like "Manager Shows Up Drunk," or "Louie The Dishwasher Takes a Dump on the Floor and Then Quits". They could affect all players equally, and mix up typical strategies by slightly altering a core piece of the ruleset. You might want to give players some control over these events, or give them a heads up on upcoming events, or else it starts to feel like unfair "gently caress you" gameplay.
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Jun 24, 2016 19:12
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sector_corrector posted:The traitor conditions are triggered by a number of conditions, and the guy who has to blow up the hotel (represented by the Death tarot card) has their triggered at ~4 dread (still balancing that part). With that particular archetype, other players may make a check if they are in the same room as you to immediately kill you (in addition to the normal mechanics in the game that allows protagonists to damage each other if they desire), and the archetype may choose to reveal (in which case they get a movement bonus) or not (in which case they are just a normal player for all intents and purposes). So making a beeline to the Boiler Room and pumping away at it is a pretty good indication that one of the protagonists should try to stop you - in which case they win! Also, there are 6 archetypes for a max 4 player game, meaning that you might not have Death drawn into the game at all. Love the idea, can't wait to see where it goes, just wanted to swing by and remind you that the worst Arcana Majora is The Tower, not Death. Death just means transformation. The Tower (usually depicted in the process of being destroyed, hint hint) represents death, destruction, evil fortune. It's a common mistake, I know. ActingPower fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jun 24, 2016 |
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Jun 24, 2016 19:19
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Yeah, I was aware of that when designing the game. I had to go between something that intuitively makes sense to people who don't know about the tarot trumps (death is bad) and being true to the theme. Right now Tower is sort of similar to Death, but it has a condition where it still has the same victory conditions as the protagonist, but it has to use the boiler room 4 times before the end of the game - so sort of a fake-out antagonist card.
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Jun 24, 2016 20:24
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