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xopods posted:Regarding geographical terms, there's plenty of precedent for this outside of gaming... if you tell me, for instance, that you're going out for Chinese food, I don't assume you're flying to Shanghai to get it. Amerikanerdummregel sounds right.
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Dec 4, 2012 03:01
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Crackbone posted:Amerikanerdummregel sounds right. Roboterdrachenzombiespiel?
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Dec 4, 2012 03:11
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Hmm. This talk of positional games is making me think of using position as hit points with more gradations then dead/not-dead. You have a Southeast player and a Northwest player. Your units want to be in the enemy base, so Northwest wants his units in the Southeast, and the converse for Southeast. The Northwest player can deal South damage and East damage to enemy units, the Southeast player can deal North damage and East damage. You move them with cards akin to...my first thought is Starcraft the board game, where you have cards that have general values and better values/specific powers if played for a specific unit or class of units. Combining this with a textured board (different terrain types, obstacles) means that the relative efficacy of zonal and meridional damage is a function of position, unit, and hand. You have a limited number of actions to work with: maybe each unit can go twice in a turn, you have 4 units, 5 actions a turn - something like that. You can also use actions to draw cards. So, it's a game of small-scale tactics (who to move and when), hand management, light bluffing on what your hand has. I have no idea how units damage other units - maybe every card has four values (General movement/general damage, specific movement/specific damage) so you need to decide both whether you're playing a card specifically (which limits who you can use it on) or generally (more options, less power) as well as whether you're using it for movement or damage. (I admit 90% of this idea is me wanting to write "zonal and meridional damage" but still I think there might be something here).
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Dec 4, 2012 03:48
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A positional game where your position along an axis acts as your effective hit points is effectively a pushing game, is it not? I mean, if you're "shooting" and forcing a "retreat," you're working at a distance, rather than literally pushing as in something like Abalone, but it would seem to fall in the same general category.
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Dec 4, 2012 04:30
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I have been messing around with a variant idea for Resistance and wanted some feedback and ideas. I'm assuming most people know the rules for Resistance (and/or Avalon) - the basic idea for this variant is that instead of pass/fail cards, everybody has a hand of cards that they can play any number of during a mission. 1. Each player has a token with their player color on it. 2. Each player is dealt a hand of 3 randomly colored cards at the start. If selected for a mission, players must play at least one card but may play up to their entire hand - each player selects however many cards they want secretly, and then places them in front of them simultaneously. The cards are shuffled together and revealed - Any cards played that are the same color as any player on the mission are passes. Cards of any other color are fails. The mission objectives are to achieve a certain number of net successes above the number of failures. 3. If a team is proposed and voted down, all players draw a card. If a team is approved, players on the mission play their cards and then draw two new cards. Any time after drawing, players must discard down to 4 cards. 4. In addition to the colored mission cards, there are special power cards in the deck. These cards are color-coded as well and will only activate if a player of that color is on the mission - otherwise, they are neither a pass nor a fail. Each power will only key to one specific player, so if you don't want to worry about a power activating you can avoid putting that player on the mission. Powers: 1. After counting all mission cards, switch the number of passes and fails 2. After counting all mission cards, each player on the mission must play an additional card 3. After the result of the mission has been determined, all players pass their color token clockwise 4. All players pass a card counterclockwise 5. All players on the mission draw an extra card 6. All players not on the mission discard a card 7. All players on the mission must reveal one card from their remaining hand I think powers 1 and 2 are more interesting than the rest, but I haven't been able to think of anything else similar. So, any thoughts on the concept or balance, or ideas for powers? One of the big concerns I have is getting away from the BSG rule of forcing people to be vague about what cards they played. I want to make the cards another aspect of the bluffing in the game, as well as allowing players to develop strategies based on their hands. I'd also be interested in finding ways to combine this with the new roles from Avalon.
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Dec 4, 2012 04:42
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I think it sounds too chaotic. It's hard enough to identify the spies in The Resistance, where even a single fail indicates the presence of a spy... for all the added complications to have any real game effect, the possibility has to exist for the good guys to fail a mission by accident because they don't have the right cards, or for the spies to be unable to thwart a mission for the same reason. But if that's the case, the core deduction mechanic is undermined... I like the idea, but maybe you're better off starting from the BSG mechanic rather than the Resistance one, and making a more elaborate version of that (but minus the board and all the other stuff BSG has).
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Dec 4, 2012 05:04
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xopods posted:A positional game where your position along an axis acts as your effective hit points is effectively a pushing game, is it not? I mean, if you're "shooting" and forcing a "retreat," you're working at a distance, rather than literally pushing as in something like Abalone, but it would seem to fall in the same general category. Are pushing games a thing? I've never heard the term before. If there's a canonical "pushing game" or general axioms for them, I'd love some reference stuff.
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Dec 4, 2012 06:34
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hito posted:Are pushing games a thing? I've never heard the term before. If there's a canonical "pushing game" or general axioms for them, I'd love some reference stuff. Well, Abalone would be the classic. There's also Push Fight, which I heard about in the Board Games thread. I'm sure there are others that I don't know about... it seems like a somewhat obvious mechanic for abstract strategy games, though it's certainly not done as much as e.g. jump over or land on a piece to capture. As far as non-abstracts go, the only one I can think of offhand to include a pushing mechanic is Robo Rally, although there you're not trying to push someone off the board, but rather into pits and lasers and stuff, which are placed erratically around the board, so there isn't this sense of "distance from the edge = hit points." A lot of strategic-scale wargames also sort of include "pushing" in that the loser of a battle is more often required to retreat (possibly suffering loses) rather than being destroyed outright. So the goal is often to push the enemy's front lines back, or better yet, push through them and create an opening for your forces to get through to the other side. So anyway, it's definitely a thing, but probably an underexplored thing. There's definitely room for a good tactical non-abstract with a focus on a pushing mechanic.
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Dec 4, 2012 15:52
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SUMO! is another "pushing game".
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Dec 4, 2012 19:20
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Crackbone posted:SUMO! is another "pushing game". If I remember correctly, Abalone is an abstraction of Sumo wrestling. It is also one of my favorite abstract games, but that's beside the point. I like to hear people's ideas about doing fresh things with tactical combat games. I'm not a big fan of the genre and I don't try to design one, but that may be because I see the genre as stagnant. Games like Attack! and Memoir '44 are fun but I just haven't had an experience with many of them that really stand out in my mind. They all just kind of... blend together. I just like to hear new ideas for the genre because I think it has a ton of potential in spite of this.
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Dec 4, 2012 19:46
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xopods posted:As far as non-abstracts go, the only one I can think of offhand to include a pushing mechanic is Robo Rally, although there you're not trying to push someone off the board, but rather into pits and lasers and stuff, which are placed erratically around the board, so there isn't this sense of "distance from the edge = hit points." Blood Bowl is another non-abstract game with positional pushing being a core game mechanic. Like Robo Rally, there isn't a direct correlation between distance and health--you are usually pushing the target into sporadically placed threats (the other players), or trying to create a positional advantage/disadvantage. But you can push players off the field and into the "crowd" to incapacitate and/or injure them.
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Dec 5, 2012 08:03
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I've started to rethink my Time Travel Criminal Empires game, and would love some advice. I've scrapped my original few drafts (far too complicated) and would like to rebuild the idea from the start. The fundamentals: 1) Race to build a criminal empire and be the first to create a world-conquesting superweapon. 2) Use time travel to advantage yourself (and if I can do it without complex rules, disadvantage others) Originally I was looking at something which, across generations, had you acquiring resources through worker placement actions. This would be broken by a time travel action by any player, who'd use it to pass back resources or attack another player, at which point you'd start play again from that point, wiping all players' boards of anything after it chronologically. But this was a huge mess of needing to recalculate 'current' resources, and so on. So now, my approach is less 'gather resources' and more 'build pipeline'. Imagine instead a set of cards, played lengthways, each of which has an IN side and an OUT side. Some starter level cards, like RECRUITMENT, have no input required, but generate a constant availability of the MINION resource. A PETTY CRIME card may have no input, but an output flow of the MONEY resource, whereas an ORGANIZED CRIME card requires an input of MINION for an output of TWO MONEY. And so on, generating an engine where eventually you generate the right set of inputs to build your superweapon to win the game. It'll probably be a branching flow (otherwise you end up just refining the one resource) so you'll probably take something like 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 actions per phase, or 1 > 2 > 4 > 8 actions per phase. Time travel is something I really want to get the core concept down for before I start expanding the engine-building aspect, as I want it to be significant. As I want it to be a key feature of the game, and not a sidelined optional approach, that means it'll be quite frequent, which means it must a) be balanced and b) not require massive recalculating of the game state when it's used. To this end, the current simple time travel mechanic I'm thinking about takes that INPUT > OUTPUT card flow and allows you to, if given a better card, go back in time to replace an older card with a newer one. So for example I might replace my 'INVESTMENTS: Money > 2 Money' card with 'CHEAT STOCK MARKET: Money > 4 Money'. I'm interested in feedback as it currently stands, and also should mention that I haven't yet considered HOW players actually get their cards, so I'm interested in ideas there. Things I may consider when I have the core concept down: * Playing cards to attack other players' engines * Protecting your own engine from attack * Resource trees using things like Chemicals, Uranium, Explosives, Science, Metal, Circuits, Robots, Cyborgs, Spies, Engineers, Scientists... * Cartoony superweapons like Massive Bomb, Army of Robots, etc... * (Even further down the line) I'd love to allow for situations where popular culture time travel can be referenced - robots to be sent back in time as attackers, becoming your own father, etc
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Dec 5, 2012 20:34
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EddieDean posted:To this end, the current simple time travel mechanic I'm thinking about takes that INPUT > OUTPUT card flow and allows you to, if given a better card, go back in time to replace an older card with a newer one. So for example I might replace my 'INVESTMENTS: Money > 2 Money' card with 'CHEAT STOCK MARKET: Money > 4 Money'. As you're describing this it doesn't sound Time travel-esque at all. It is literally just upgrading parts of your engine, which is a pretty standard game mechanic.
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Dec 5, 2012 20:38
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Crackbone posted:As you're describing this it doesn't sound Time travel-esque at all. It is literally just upgrading parts of your engine, which is a pretty standard game mechanic. OK. Like I say, very interested in suggestions, so please let me know how you'd expand it to make it more genuinely time-travelly. It was my intention to get the most minimal version in place before I start growing it, but one thing I was certainly planning was the attacking opponents through time, causing their engines to crumble. For example, a combination of explosives and minions, when sent using time travel, might destroy an opponent's building , causing their entire engine to crumble in a sequence of "nope, that didn't happen"s. I imagined that with this approach you'd have a 'paradox' defensive card which, if you had it, you could play on (purpendicular to?) the attacked action to make its output remain even though it had been destroyed, for example. I'm certainly moving in that direction, but wanted a starting point set down first (minimal engine, minimal time travel) so that I have a base to start testing and expanding from.
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Dec 5, 2012 20:50
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What if there are three, or four, or five time zones or eras or decades or whatever you want to call them? With an action, you can travel forwards or backwards in time one zone, or do something in your current time period, which might include playing a card into your own field for the era, or playing a card to sabotage something someone else has in their field for that era... maybe by default you move forward one era at the end of each turn to represent the natural passage of time. You can only play a card in an era if its required "inputs" are covered by the previous era's "output" (or perhaps any previous era's output?). If the past cards required to support a given future card are later sabotaged by another player, the future cards are lost to Time Paradox, possibly causing a chain reaction - i.e. an opponent sabotages your Era I recruitment action, which means the Bank Heist in Era II never happened, which means the money wasn't there to buy the Giga-Laser in Era III, so both the heist and laser are lost to a paradox. To maintain balance, cards lost to paradox probably shouldn't just be discarded without compensation... maybe they go back to your hand, or maybe you can come up with some very clever mechanic where they go in a separate Paradox Pile that you can later do something else with, like discarding them for free time travel actions, as being involved in paradoxes slowly makes you become unstuck in time. Or something. EDIT: Or maybe losing cards to paradox gives you Paradox Tokens which allow you to gently caress with causality later... decoupling a card from its origins so that it can survive the sabotage of its precursors, or eventually even bringing future things back in time; once you build up to that Giga-Laser in Era IV, you burn 5 Paradox Tokens to allow you to decouple it from everything needed to build it, so you can bring it all the way back to Era II, giving you the required Destruction to play Hold Europe Hostage in Era III. xopods fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 21:33
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That could be a fun riff on those dungeon crawler/infiltration "press your luck" games. Your goal is to be in the last era with the most resources when the game ends. Time machines only go back, not forward. You only go forward by naturally advancing through time. As people advance through time, you learn about the challenges you'll be facing and the resources available. By traveling backwards in time, you can make choices to be much more prepared for those challenges...but the time stream decays as the game goes on, doing bad things to people too far back. I'm seeing something like Space Alert. You have cards in front of you representing the decisions you made. When you go back in time to time X, you put all of the cards you played after time X back in your hand. Presumably, you'll make better choices this time around. As time collapses behind you, it forces you to accept the choices you made back then. Additionally, something bad happens if you're IN time as it collapses (elimination is thematic, but depending on game length could be unwanted). Then after some game ending condition you "roll the tape" from first era to last and see what everyone actually ended up doing. hito fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 21:46
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I have a couple questions for the designers in the thread about their workflow/setup. I'm like, a week away from doing some sellsheet drafts for the thread, Parlay I think might actually be a good, viable game. What sort of response should I expect from the emails I send out? I've been job hunting for 5 months now so I'm used to not hearing a word from anyone, but should I expect at least a 'No Thanks' email? On that note, how many games do you guys crank out? When I get to work, my process is pretty rapid. Get to Prototype within 2 weeks or so, change up the prototype every other playtest. My prototypes are hodgepodge, full of stolen artwork, temporary lovely art, etc. Is this about right? Finally, anyone know of any publishers looking for party game/Baron Münchhausen style stuff?
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Dec 5, 2012 22:04
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That's a cool idea too.hito posted:(elimination is thematic, but depending on game length could be unwanted). You could just be pushed forward in time and forced to discard cards from your hand... something about "potential realities that failed to become anchored in time."
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Dec 5, 2012 22:04
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Xopods, you need to charge for your help! So you end up having: code:Maybe you could make scoring only happen at certain intervals? So you only gain points after everybody's had 5 full turns, but your engine "stops" at whatever age you're in during the scoring round. Maybe if you end up in somebody else's timeline during a scoring round they get bonus points. EDIT: Ooh! Maybe mark both sides of your cards with different symbols or numbers or colors. If you manage to lay down a set of cards with matching symbols/numbers/colors that's how you create a paradox. Crackbone fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 22:05
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I'm like, a week away from doing some sellsheet drafts for the thread, Parlay I think might actually be a good, viable game. What sort of response should I expect from the emails I send out? I've been job hunting for 5 months now so I'm used to not hearing a word from anyone, but should I expect at least a 'No Thanks' email? Totally depends on the publisher. Generally, the smaller the operation, the more likely you'll be to receive a response explaining why it's not what they're looking for and what they actually are looking for. The bigger the publisher, the more submissions they're receiving, and the less likely they are to make time to respond to you personally. quote:On that note, how many games do you guys crank out? When I get to work, my process is pretty rapid. Get to Prototype within 2 weeks or so, change up the prototype every other playtest. My prototypes are hodgepodge, full of stolen artwork, temporary lovely art, etc. Is this about right? I probably come up with a game every couple of months, but reject 2/3 of them, so I end up with about two a year that I think my publisher will want. I could probably come up with them a lot faster if I tried, but I've got such a backlog of stuff my publisher wants to put out but hasn't gotten to yet that there's not much point. Hodgepodge prototypes are good, but the mechanics should be nailed down, with nothing left that you're thinking you might want to change. If you're still changing things every second playtest, the game's not ready to show a publisher... try to get to the point where you play it at least a half dozen times in a row without feeling like you want to change anything (possibly a lot more than that if it's a complicated game with lots of potential hidden balance issues).
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Dec 5, 2012 22:12
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Crackbone posted:Xopods, you need to charge for your help! I wish "game design consultant" was a thing! I'll settle for a mention in the "thanks" section of the rulebook if anyone takes my suggestions and ends up getting published. 
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Dec 5, 2012 22:14
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xopods, Crackbone, hito, many thanks for your input. xopods, Crackbone: Yes, I imagine it as four or five time zones (or 'phases'), each with an increasing number of turns per phase (representing a successful empire naturally growing in influence, and making time travel further back have the biggest ripples). I'm starting to imagine that you have a hand of cards which you always replenish to maximum. Usually you'll play a single action (input > output) card to continue the flow, but you'll need one time travel card (or one per time zone distance) additionally in order to replace a prior turn. That, or perhaps having time currency be an actual independent resource. Ooh! Maybe spending time travel cards moves your 'current time zone' marker, but you'd need more to get you back again, leaving you potentially undefended in the future! In my original plan (when it was worker placement), each time zone was a generation, each with two children: Victorian mastermind, two 1940s superscientist children, four modern scientist grandchildren, and eight futuristic megascience great-grandchildren. Actions included stopping another's action so it never took effect, and (much more difficult) killing that worker, meaning that it (and its kids) couldn't take actions. Defenses against this were a cheaper proactive 'time lock', meaning that an action (and its worker) were untouchable; and a expensive reactive 'paradox', meaning that action was stopped or worker was killed, but its effects (and their ripples) still happened. But we encroach on getting too complex. I'll certainly see how these themes play though. I think your idea is a little more elegant: Your actions may be overwritten by an opponent (by literally placing the new action over the top), but playing paradox cards can let you dig back through that event's stack to pick your original move again. hito, I do like the notion of time travel events 'wiping' all times after their placements. That's how I originally conceived it, where the game restarts at that point but with 'artifacts' from the previous timeline generating the advantages or disadvantages. I like your notion of it being beneficial in terms of information, and with the game as I currently have it that would lend well to having the superweapons (win conditions) being secret until one is completed (ending the game): Travelling back in time, you'd take with you the information about the kind of engine your opponents were trying to make, and could try to stop them from making their build. I'll play more with that idea. Please, keep the feedback coming, this is very valuable. EddieDean fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 23:31
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So I've hashed out a bit more on the pirate game (and I'm not married to that theme, but it seems to fit OK). I was forcing some content on the game to try and flesh it out and see what I could get out of it and it was too cluttered for me, so I took a step back. What I want first and foremost is a worker placement game where removing, not placing, your workers is the primary action. I want this to be rapid, as in multiple workers should be coming back and getting used each player turn. I also want it to require some cost-benefit analyzing, I want multiple routes of worker placement to be effective and for the state of the board to affect what you're going to do. Secondarily, with ship tokens moving from a location to another I want a non-standard setup. I don't want a grid or hex board, I wanted something a little more abstract. Primarily to keep it a bit more elegant but also to try and keep the focus on managing the "crew" of workers and not on any sort of area control or network building. My initial thought was players would draw a card from a deck and place them in a frame around the board, and moved ships from card to card. I turned this into tiles with each base location to place a tile being either FOOD or GOLD (or an X which I'll get to in a moment). When players move they choose to "loot" or "fish" and take a corresponding resource for each tile with that symbol they pass over. Here's my rough sketch: main board Players will have a selection of 3 tiles and as an action may "explore" and take a tile to cover up one of the base FOOD or GOLD locations. The replaced tiles will have a variety of actions and be a way to get the other 2 core resources than FOOD or GOLD I'm calling GOOD A and GOOD B for now. The main board also has ports, which can be accessed merely by being adjacent to them on one of the 3 central tiles on each side. Ports do 2 things: allow players to recruit men and allow players to sell any of FOOD, GOOD A, or GOOD B for gold. Gold is VP and is used to activate some tiles and hire men. So for the worker bonuses I'm thinking 10 is a solid number to start with and have: 1. MOVE +2 2. MOVE +2 3. MOVE +2 4. FISH +1 5. FISH +1 6. FISH +1 7. LOOT +1 8. LOOT +1 9. LOOT +1 10. FIRST MATE (prerequisite placement for certain crew size, more than 5 maybe) A basic graphic aid similar to the first one I made player board Having a worker placed on any spot gets you that bonus. To take an action you remove a worker. I'm trying to keep it simple so the actions are "move & loot", "move & fish" or "explore". So if after removing a worker, I decide to "move & fish" and lets say after my worker bonuses I can move 5 spaces and fish twice. That means I can move up to 5 spaces and activate any 2 tiles I pass that have a fish symbol on them. To start, the base tile locations would simply give me 1 food for activating them but maybe a different tile placed there has a fish symbol but does something advanced like "trade in 2 FOOD for 1 GOOD B". Taking a cue from Glen More, I think this works really well if I have players moving counter-clockwise from the X on the main board and the player that has moved the least space gets to take the next action. To prevent lapping, I'll have a "naval blockade" token that stays 1 space behind the last player and that cannot be passed. This naval blockade token also serves a purpose in if an entire round passes with no player taking the "explore" action, then a red X tile is placed under the naval blockade. These red Xs, including the one that's on the board to start have the effect where any ship token passing over them must lose 1 crew member. Selling to ports, restocking workers and using workers are not actions and may be done when at any port. I may call those port actions I suppose. My last thing is apart from selling GOOD A and GOOD B to ports, they are kept secret on your board and used for player combat. If I move my ship exactly on top of yours I initiate an attack. We both them take a secret collection of FOOD, GOOD A, and GOOD B cubes from our stash. We calculate strength with GOOD A being worth 3 strength, GOOD B 2 strength and FOOD at 1 strength. The winner gets something, I can't figure out if it should be gold from the loser based on the relative strength difference or if it should be a choice of goods remaining in the loser's secret stash. I need an incentive to explore, so I'm thinking each player gets a number of flag tokens and you place these adjacent to a tile when you explore there and these are end of game VP bonuses. I'm probably going to make a prototype of more or less this setup. I still of course have to plan out the effects of the different location tiles. As always I would greatly appreciate any feedback, comments, or suggestions.
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Dec 5, 2012 23:50
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I'm gonna type a bit about my time idea because while I was riffing off of Eddie's ideas my idea has turned into a different thing. Right now I'm working on abstract mechanics without theme. There are some number of Era's. My gut is thinking something around 5-7 but whatever. Each Era has it's own deck of cards. From these, everyone is dealt a facedown hand of cards for EACH Era. You put it down in front of you. You can't look at them right away. When the game starts, you look at your Era 1 cards, called "Opportunities". One of the things an Opportunity can do is give you Money ($). This is what you need to win the game. Another thing it can do is give you power (*). Power is needed to deal with Threats, which we'll get to later. If it would help the design, we could have different types of Power that different threats require you to have, but for now it's just the one. Another thing it can do is give you "techs". We're still theme-agnostic, but we want multiple techs, so let's start with four. There are Red techs, Yellow techs, Blue techs, and Green techs. Unlike money and power, you don't generally spend techs. Instead, they sit in front of you and let you meet prerequisites for better Opportunities down the line. Maybe in Era 1 you gain a Green and a Red tech, letting you use an Era 2 Opportunity ([RG] --> $$$$) instead of the Era 2 ($$). There are plenty of ways Opportunities can interact with these systems. You can spend money for better than usual cards that you're counting on to pay for themselves (e.g, Spend $$$ -> RR instead of just "gain R"). You can use "remodel" cards that break the norm and actually destroy techs, but give you more techs in their place. (Spend G -> BRY) We have a lot of options. However, we want to try to make it so the player doesn't make any choices as far as an Opportunity is concerned- an Opportunity is an exact function that never relies on player input. This lets us do what Space Alert does, and "roll the tape" at the end completely deterministically. Each Era is divided into 3 Phases. You have a little time board with a marker representing you. Each turn, you may either place an Opportunity on the Phase of the Era you are currently on or draw an Opportunity for either the Era you are on OR the next Era. If you do one for the next Era, you can look at it, but then you need to put it face-down with the other cards for that Era. Every turn, after your action, you advance forward one Phase. The first time anyone reaches a new Era (besides the first), the Global Opportunity and Threat for that Era are flipped up. The Global Opportunity is just an Opportunity you can play for any of the 3 Phases of that Era - you do it by playing a "Era X Global Opportunity card" on your track (you get one per Era.) The Threat is something that, in resolution, will require some amount of Power to deal with. If you don't have enough Power, you suffer a penalty - maybe money, maybe losing Techs, maybe having a future Opportunity card removed from your track, etc. So that's the core of the game. You play Opportunities balancing getting money to win, getting power to deal with threats, and getting techs to do the first two things more efficiently. But there is also time travel. Instead of a normal action, you can travel through time. Pick any Phase that is later than the First Phase of the first non-canon era (at the start, no Era is canon) and earlier than the last Phase of the Era prior to the one you're in. Then, you roll: 1-2: Arrive 1 Phase before your target 3-4: Arrive at your target 5-6: Arrive one Phase later than your target. When you travel, you take EVERY Opportunity you've placed on the board prior to the point you land on and return it to it's respective hand. You also do not advance forward in time that turn. From there, play proceeds as normal. There is also Paradox to deal with as the time stream becomes more frayed. After each instance of time travel, the Paradox counter advances by one. At the end of each round (not turn), roll a die. If the Paradox level plus the die roll is greater than 5 + (the lowest non-canon Era * 3), that Era is considered "canonized". When an Era is canon, the Opportunities played cannot be changed, and time travel back to that Era is impossible. If anyone is in an Era as it is canonized, they are ejected forward to the next Era, lose the action step of their next turn (they still advance in time), and throw away 2 cards from their hand for that Era at random. Finally, each player has one "Upheaval" token. This represents your ability in the past to change the future for everyone, not just yourself. You must use an Action to spend your Upheaval token. Use the Upheaval token to draw a new Global Opportunity or Threat for the Era after the one you're in, replacing the current one. Players with "Global Opportunity" on their tracks will thus be carrying out this new Global Opportunity (unless they go back and change it) Kinda poorly written I know but this is stream of consciousness. But yeah, that's sorta what I'm thinking.
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Dec 6, 2012 04:39
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So finally had a breakthrough with my game idea and finalized a bit on how it will play out. Not ready to give out what exactly its about just yet, however, trying to figure out what good "odds" are for players to win. What I mean is for the win conditions, players need to collect 7 of a certain card. Not all of the same card is available at the same location, there are three locations on the board where they can collect said cards, in those location decks. There might be 2-3 versions of those cards in each deck, but not 1 of each version. In these same decks, there will be other card that aren't these collecting cards. Trying to figure out in a game that can play 2-4 players, what would be fair odds of having players to pull said cards out of these location decks. X factor I don't know how many cards per deck, but for this instance, say 60. Any ideas? Sorry if this sounds a bit confusing.
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Dec 6, 2012 07:51
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@hito: Sounds good. Only thing I'd say is that a die roll is kind of a cop-out when you want to add uncertainty to something... maybe certain Opportunities give you Timeflow tokens. When you travel back in time, you can pay two Timeflow tokens to guarantee that you end up in the right time. If you don't, then other players have the opportunity to play one token to cause you to end up one era earlier or later. (That mechanic of "pay one to gently caress with your opponent or two to preemptively prevent others from loving with you" is lifted from 1960: Making of the President) @Mt.Trifecta: Multiple locations with decks of 60 cards per location is way too many cards. Beginning game designers (myself included when I was starting out) often try to solve problems by throwing more components in - more cards, more different types of cards, extra tokens and tracks and tiles and and and... Try to find a way to less with more. To tweak your mechanic so either there's just a single deck, or that there are only a small pile of cards for each location, rather than a whole deck.
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Dec 6, 2012 17:27
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xopods posted:@hito: Sounds good. Only thing I'd say is that a die roll is kind of a cop-out when you want to add uncertainty to something... maybe certain Opportunities give you Timeflow tokens. When you travel back in time, you can pay two Timeflow tokens to guarantee that you end up in the right time. If you don't, then other players have the opportunity to play one token to cause you to end up one era earlier or later. Thanks for the info. What the players are looking to collect are two fold. -Gold -Collectible Items The same collectible items are also items they can use to attack other players. So they have the option to either keep the item for there win condition or use it to defeat other players. I plan on combining these decks together into "search" piles at each of the locations. Locations are used to confront other players as well as search for more items. So with the gold and items in the same pile, was trying to make it not super rare to pull one of the items as they may use, but not be common as the only thing they pull all the time. Each location has only specific set of items so it forces other players to go to different locations.
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Dec 6, 2012 17:49
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xopods posted:@hito: Sounds good. Only thing I'd say is that a die roll is kind of a cop-out when you want to add uncertainty to something... maybe certain Opportunities give you Timeflow tokens. When you travel back in time, you can pay two Timeflow tokens to guarantee that you end up in the right time. If you don't, then other players have the opportunity to play one token to cause you to end up one era earlier or later. I've never played 1960 but from what I read it is like Twilight Struggle which is my favorite game, so that's cool. Having Opportunities that give it wouldn't work though. Time travel happens during the game but you only actually resolve your Opportunities at the end. (It's like Space Alert - you can put the stuff you've earned in front of you to help remember, but you don't actually have anything until the end when you just run the timeline.) There's also the issue that, unless I keep this 2p, directly griefing someone is going to pretty rarely benefit you vs. always being defensive. I agree the dice rolls were just a quick thing I threw in because I wanted time travel to be inherently less predicable than normal play, and I need something better. Maybe there's a "Flux" deck you draw from when you travel with a lot of "nothing happens" cards but some "you went back" "you went forward" etc. Players can start with a couple of Flux cards each they can use on themselves or others after seeing the result of the travel. Or something like that.
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Dec 6, 2012 19:02
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This is not really related to anything, but the clear cards that you can lay on top of each other to add or modify card effects is one of the coolest/most unique mechanics I've ever seen.
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Dec 6, 2012 19:03
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Hecatomb I think did it the best. It had these pentagonal cards with writing on one edge and clear plastic on the rest. You made "abominations" by placing minions one after the other on each other. Because you'd rotate them each time, you could see the edges with writing of the previous cards under the new ones, and you'd add up all of the abilities you could see. It was such a cool thing to see this big creature that had all of these cards swallowed up in it. They also had an interesting meta-structure for their tournaments involving a meta-game of picking the winner at the start. I'm pretty sad Hecatomb never took off.
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Dec 6, 2012 19:17
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hito posted:There's also the issue that, unless I keep this 2p, directly griefing someone is going to pretty rarely benefit you vs. always being defensive. Well, there's a self-balancing thing there. If no one thinks it's worth loving with someone else, then there's equally no point in paying two tokens to protect yourself from being hosed with, right? I guess it would work better if you were using my "sabotaging other players in the past" idea, though... then you'd totally have an incentive to screw with someone's arrival time if you thought they were going to try to sabotage the weak point in your machine while they were there.
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Dec 6, 2012 19:52
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Great thread, xopods. I've been prototyping and playtesting a mini's-based grav-racing (think Wipeout or F-Zero) game akin to Formula D in its dice/gears mechanic, and have run up against a bit of a conundrum. I'm not sure that I'm giving the audience I'm looking at enough credit because I've been really strict about certain areas of simplicity (for example, no math at all). I wanted to make the thing dirt simple because I think it speeds gameplay and wanted this to be a short-ish game, nevermind that keeping that feeling of speed is particularly important to the theme, but I don't know if I'm robbing myself of the complexity that actually engages the sort of players who would pick it up. Thus far I've only had positivity from the playtest group, and they always seem to have a good time, but there's always a lot of talk about how x, y, or z could be added and I'm worried that drawing in too many ideas is going to gum up the essential works, or that adding too much too fast is going to muddle things and we wouldn't know which bit did it. I guess one question that would help me sort it out a little bit is: When it comes to playtesting, how much ought you be playing the version of the game as it stands before running revisions based on feedback, and how do you handle burnout within a playtest group to make sure that you're getting enough plays? Thus far we've been tweaking around the edges a little at a time, but I can't be sure that each of the revisions gets proper testing.
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Dec 7, 2012 00:27
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One thing I learned early on is if you tell people this is your game, they will always have a million new ideas to throw into the mix. Parlay is a simple storytelling thing, but I had people suggesting gambling add-ons, expanding all parts of the game and adding tons of actions on your turn. So on that note, just dont throw in too many New Features if you feel like your game should be kept light. To answer your actual question, I mentioned I keep a fairly high rate of development, in early days anyway. When I first come up with a game, stuff gets added or changed almost every playtest or two. It winds down after that first stage till I'm happy with the game. "Burnout" I can't help you with, cause I have a whole games club to throw my games at.
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Dec 7, 2012 00:47
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If you're getting all positivity from your group, they need to be harsher. I can't think of any game that doesn't have a valid complaint against it.
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Dec 7, 2012 00:49
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Positivity might be the wrong word. They've had good criticism and ideas to fix the problems we've run into, they've just been really upbeat about it, so they're either just being nice about it or they're having a good time regardless of the flaws. Edit: Oh hey, another question: What are the best sort of questions to ask new playtesters when requesting feedback? Fix fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 01:01
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Whatever you do, don't add a bunch of small stuff to your game. Good design is about subtraction, not addition. Usually, if I feel a game is too straightforward after a few plays, I just scrap it entirely and come up with something else... if you are going to add something, though, make it one large thing. Like a whole new layer to the game... and make sure it interconnects with the existing mechanics in multiple ways. The problem with throwing in a bunch of small additions is that they tend to connect with only one prior mechanic, meaning they add explicit complexity while only achieving a linear increase in depth... whereas a good addition is one which multiplies the game's depth with only a small increase in complexity. Good questions to ask... that's a tough one. I'd try to observe the players; if they seemed unsure what to do at a certain point, or made a weird move you hadn't considered, try asking them what they were thinking about. Maybe ask people what they feel they learned about the strategy in one play and what they might do differently the next time... maybe ask if there was anything they found confusing or unnecessarily complicated, or if there was one part of the game that dragged on too long. Maybe ask if there were any decisions where they felt one choice was obviously right and they're not sure why anyone would ever choose something different... xopods fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 03:04
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Yeah, there's really only one layer still to be laid over the core of the game, and it's not got the fiddly bits in it. The problem that I'm dealing with right now is that people find the game just too luck-based (it is a dice game, after all) and I'm up against a wall for if or how to fix that feeling. So here's the scenario: You've got a thin line of a racetrack that goes around a table in whatever configuration you set it up as. Players keep their ships close to that line as possible because if you ever move more than 2" from it, your speed drops to D4" per turn. During a player's turn they first decide if they want to accelerate, decelerate, or stay the same speed. Accelerating means moving up one Die Class (D6 -> D8), decelerating the other way. You can only ever move up or down one Class per turn. Once you've picked the class for your speed, you can choose to turn your ship up to 60 degrees (easy, the ships are on hex flying bases) by rolling your speed die lower than your piloting skill. No problem getting a 6 on a D6, so you automatically pass, but if you're bombing along at a D12, you might not make it. Roll your die, turn your ship to stay on the track, then roll the same die for distance in inches. If you fail your piloting check, you just roll distance on your current course and maybe end up in the weeds, rolling D4's until you can get back on track. The problem is that people don't like ramping all the way up to D20 and rolling a one for their speed. poo poo sucks, bad luck, but it does rob you of the feeling of actual acceleration. I know that Formula D handled this by having only high numbers on their high dice, but that sort of blows up the whole piloting skill check. And I don't think I can just add extra move inches (based on the ship's engine rating (part of that second layer)) because then you've got too much movement in the low dice, and can't have as many sharp turns in your tracks. I know inherently that the dice all even out in the end and so I'm a little hesitant to mess with it because it really seems to work, but compensating for bad rolls is really the biggest gripe people have because surprise surprise, people don't like luck when it's bad. I've already got an option for people to discard powerups they get along the track for re-rolls on their piloting checks, so maybe just extending that to the distance rolls would suffice?
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Dec 7, 2012 08:24
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Fix posted:I know inherently that the dice all even out in the end and so I'm a little hesitant to mess with it because it really seems to work, but compensating for bad rolls is really the biggest gripe people have because surprise surprise, people don't like luck when it's bad. Why not change the game to 2dx? That won't make crappy roles less painful, but it'll make them less common. e: How's the feedback on the 12->20 jump? Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 12:15
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Don't have a separate roll for the piloting check. Do the check based on the actual speed roll, and if it's under the piloting skill, offer the choice of turning OR having a speed boost, perhaps of 1/2 the die size. I.e. you're rolling a d10, and your piloting skill is 4. You roll a 2. You have the choice of either turning and moving 2", or moving straight ahead 2+5 = 7". If you roll a 5, tough titties, you're moving straight ahead 5". Do you have a rule in place to make sure people don't skip portions of the track? At a certain point you can trust players to apply some common sense (i.e. no simply doing a little loop around the start line and pretending that amounts to "finishing" the race), but if the track ever doubles back close enough to itself, it sounds like it might be worth just cutting across the gap even at d4 a turn instead of going the whole way around. Maybe if you're more than 8" from the track, the Mario Kart thing happens where you're removed from the board and next turn you're put back on the track at the place you left it and your speed reset to d4. Same thing could also apply if you reenter the track more than like 14" (as the wolf runs) from the place you left it; you're moved back to the place you went off the track as a penalty for illegal shortcutting. xopods fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 13:58
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What about doing a# of D6s instead of moving up a dice chain? Speed 1 is 1D6, Speed 2 is 2D6, etc. This will greatly reduce the variance you'd get vs a single d12/20/etc. Now , for your maneuver issue, make pilot skills go from 1-5. When you do a risky maneuver, you roll a # of D6 equal to your speed. If any of the dice come up higher than your skill level it's a failure.
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Dec 7, 2012 14:49
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