|
Baronjutter posted:Hi thread, I'm working on a little lego game mostly just for me and my friends but who knows who else might want to play it. It's not really a "lego game", I just use a lot of lego as tokens and the game board as it's a bunch of handy pre-made pieces and boards. Not a boardgame, but M.U.L.E. is my recommended go-to for this kind of cooperative-competitive economy game. What you really need is specialization of labor/economies of scale. 4 ore mines and 4 rare mines split evenly between two players should be less productive than a player with 4 ore mines and a player with 4 rare mines. You need to reward players for deviating from self-sufficient builds or else they'll always stick with self-sufficiency. Alternately, you can enforce specialization through unequal resource access; if different resources are available on different parts of the map and there's a limit to players' geographic reach, they're no longer going to be able to get everything they need. Or have resources (including spots for factories) vary by quality, so the number of really good deposits of each type is smaller than the number of players and they have to either cooperate or suck it up and limp along with lower resource production.
|
#
¿
Jun 28, 2016 22:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 30, 2024 08:29 |
|
|
Being a racing game, you 100% need to make your rubberbanding mechanism a drafting system, both to simplify the movement of cards and more importantly to set up an extremely slick pun on the concept of "drafting"
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2016 16:45
|
|
|
jmzero posted:So are there particular rules on communication? Otherwise, it seems like the, uh, strategy is something like This is the sense that I get too. The sheer number of moves that the Rival's team get seems to make it very difficult for the traitor to do anything once it becomes clear who the rival or traitor is. Two thoughts: 1) Three "hitpoints" per city is probably way too many. There's very little risk for the Rival letting their cities be found out since it takes the traitor a ridiculous number of turns to destroy them and they're never going to be given the chance. Realistically the traitor is going to have a hard time ever getting more than 2 passes against the Rival's cities, let alone 6. That's setting aside the sheer tedium of how slowly the game will progress. I think cities might need to be one-hit kills to keep the game moving and give the traitor any shot at all, using surplus cities on the board to add some breathing room back into the game. You could maybe try 2 and see how it goes but I think in that case you would definitely need something else, like... 2) The traitor really badly needs an ace up their sleeve. What if the traitor card also gave them a third, secret base separate from the normal city cards? You could accomplish this with e.g. a deck of traitor cards with different cities, which you draw one card from to add to the other role cards. This gives the traitor insurance against massclaims. The only wrinkle this adds is that you'd need to come up with rules to handle the case where the traitor's secret base shares a city with the Rival. Just throwing some ideas out, I know they're not perfect but hopefully they may be useful as a starting point.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2016 17:22
|
|
|
I've been toying around with an election boardgame--I know my timing is pretty godawful, but it strikes me as potentially being a fun design regardless. I've started writing some crude draft rules; anyone up to help critique? A lot of the meat of the game is going to be in the individual issue/event cards but I want to know if the basic gameflow is at all understandable and sensible here. My primary concerns: -The 2v2 format may raise some eyebrows. Eventually there will be rules for a straight 1v1 variant, of course. That may even evolve into the primary form of the game if 2v2 proves too unwieldy. But for the moment I like the idea. -Setup may be overly complicated. I want a good mix of being able to see what's coming and plan your strategy out in advance without getting perfect foreknowledge, but this may come at the expense of simplicity. -Third party rules are probably overly complex for a feature that only shows up on a relatively small number of cards. But third party campaigns tend to attract an outsized amount of attention and interest, so I feel compelled to include potential third party EVs.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2016 18:47
|
|
|
jmzero posted:I really like the whole idea, though obviously it's hard to say too much without seeing some cards. I think 2v2 is underserved and will make for some great gameplay possibilities. My thought is that there will need to be a certain amount of basic cards--e.g. "Gain 1 step on X issue", "Whoever controls X issue gains 1 step on Y and loses 1 step on Z", "Place X number of support tokens", etc. Maybe 25-35% of the deck, although it probably depends on what you define as basic cards. But there should be plenty of room for more interesting cards, and the theme allows for a certain amount of dark humor. Like a 9/11 remembrance card that just won't go away once played, or an overseas atrocity that gets forgotten from the media cycle at the drop of a hat. The other thing that interests me about the design is that there's nothing that says a card has to be help out the player pursuing its associated issue--so a fair number of cards may actually be double-edged swords, having some harmful effect when played but still letting you get your issues out and in the public spotlight.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2016 03:16
|
|
|
sector_corrector posted:I had an idea for a game recently, and I was wondering if anyone knows of something similar before I start: Sounds a lot like a less lolrandom version of Fluxx, which would be extremely my bag.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 21:56
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:The part I’m worried that might be confusing isn’t that there’s a shared deck of cards everyone buys from, each person would have their own personal deck that they buy from. So let’s say I use Dual Swords, I have a Dual Swords deck that I can buy cards from and nobody else can. You use Hammer, so you have a Hammer deck that only you buy cards from. I guess this loses some of the interesting bits of deckbuilding (aka figuring out what other people are building and accounting for that), but i’m mostly trying to figure out a way to add in customization without bogging things down a ton or losing out on theme. What if there was a shared deck that everyone was buying from, but not every weapon can use every card? Give each card a row of symbols or whatnot showing which weapons can use it, with different weapons overlapping parts of their shared deck with other weapons. e.g., you have a staff. Staves have various properties: they're blunt weapons, they're long, they're good for blocking. So you can specialize in different things with your staff fighting style, which are shared with other weapons. You're competing with the mace wielder for "bash guy over head" cards and you're competing with the spear wielder for "poke guy from a distance" cards, but the mace and spear guy aren't really competing with each other--they have other parts of their decks that they're competing with other weapons with. The main problem with this approach is that it becomes vastly harder to balance the draws/offer from the main deck when you can't guarantee that every card available to a player is relevant to them. There are workarounds, but it complicates things. It does have some ancillary benefits, though, like potentially cutting down on the total number of cards (e.g. you don't need print as many near-identical cards across different decks, because you can use a smaller shared pool of identical cards.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2016 20:46
|
|
|
signalnoise posted:Possibly. I am trying to think of ways to deal with that. One option would be just to make it a bigger game, like have a board or something with armies on it, or have a draft every turn. I dunno. I just want this theme and I want to deal with officers in such a way that you are picking up abilities and stripping abilities from others based on future leverage. You could also make it so most things generally just temporarily take an officer out of commission, to make things a little less snowbally and allow for comebacks. It's been forever since I read Rot3K but it seems like it would fit in with the theme pretty well, I remember plenty of episodes of commanders getting chased off to hide and lick their wounds for a while before rejoining the war later.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 23:58
|
|
|
Hrm. What about a reverse deckbuilder where you set aside cards from your deck to build up a resource base to spend on playing cards/powering them up? Kind of like MtG's "land drop" mechanic, except you just get to take whatever card from your hand and say "this is a forest." As the game progesses your deck gets thinner and more focused, but you also get more ammo to spend. Presumably you'd have a lot of scaleable cards that can be pumped up, so you can do bigger things with the same cards as you dump more and more of your deck into your resource base.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2017 07:15
|
|
|
You could do it one better, then. Give each card 3 functions: play-for-effect, resource, and scoring objective. You remove cards from your deck to your resource area. Once in the resource area, they have an objective on them that you play cards towards completing. When you complete an objective, you remove the card from the resource area to your score pile. First person to X objectives wins.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2017 02:19
|
|
|
Foolster41 posted:One idea I had if there is a storyteller is that of some sort of deal they can make with the players, but I'm not sure how that'd work. Generally trades with two players/groups don't work in my experience. They don't want to trade because there's no other competition. The idea is something like a faustian deal, though obv. since it's a game it has to be better situation than the obvious "never make a deal with the devil". I think the solution here, both thematically and mechanically, would be to give the storyteller explicit incentives for making deals and make the players face consequences painful enough that the offer of a "get out of jail free" card from the storyteller is extremely valuable bordering on mandatory. Make it so both sides need each other.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2017 16:26
|
|
|
Kashuno posted:Do you folks feel like your game has some fundamental broken pieces if 3-5 players works well, but 2 doesn't work especially great? Not necessarily? Some games absolutely require a minimum number of players to make sense, and a lot of games are going to be fundamentally different at 2 players vs. 3+.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2017 19:27
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:+/-might be unintuitive to players unfamiliar with MtG I don't think this a huge concern--gamers will probably have enough familiarity with MtG to grasp it, and non-gamers are probably going to find a simple greater-than comparison easier to grasp than HP tracking. It sounds like the main problem you're facing is that the only reason to engage an enemy is to defeat it. Maybe you could give some/all enemy cards passive effects that can be disabled as long as they're being engaged?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2017 23:05
|
|
|
Triskelli posted:...Yeah that got a little rambly, my ultimate question is that despite a 55% victory chance either way on 2d6, why would one player feel they have more of an advantage with one pair of dice than another pair? My guess: 55% is still basically coinflip territory, so the results will be fairly evenly distributed to the human eye, but when people can see that the odds are clearly not equal they'll read more into that than they should. If they lose a bunch of fights they had a slight advantage on it feels too weak (because they "know" they have an advantage and are supposed to mostly win) and if they win a bunch of fights they had a slight advantage on it feels too strong (they "know" they had an advantage so how was the opponent supposed to compete?), even though both results are well within the realm of possibility.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2017 16:49
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Hey guys I'm putting together a simple little game just for me and some friends to play using lego. It's sort of like catan meets civ. Build up cities, harvest resources, and mechanics that reward trade and cooperation. I have a lot of experience and exposure to economic/trading games but not combat games. Risk and Axis and Allies is about my extent. IMO Scythe has some really cool ideas for combat in an economic-oriented 4X. If you're not familiar, a quick rundown: each player only ever has a small handful of military pieces on the board. Pieces don't actually have intrinsic military strength--building units unlocks new military capabilities, and you can move pieces around to represent area control, but the pieces themselves are just containers for players to spend military resources on in battle. Each player has a general resource pool of "power" that represents their military reserves, plus they can accumulate combat cards that can be spent for one-time bonuses; when combat happens, each player just decides how many points of power to spend from their pool, modified by whatever combat cards they play (which are all just basic numerical addition.) That's it, your actual military pieces are just there to mark territory control--how many you have in the combat only matters as a cap on the number of combat cards you can play, but cards are relatively expensive so dropping multiple cards is a pretty huge play. They're never destroyed, either, just pushed around: your losses are represented by the power and cards you spent on the battle. It's a great implementation of the "combat as an extension of economy" idea that most 4X games revolve around, without the fiddly parts of moving around a million little pieces and rolling fistfuls of dice.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2017 23:15
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:Random, possibly cool board game idea: A presidential election board game, but one that’s for 4+ players, and one that goes through the primaries as well as the actual election. Players would be split into two teams for the two parties, and then the first half of the game would be spent on the primary elections. The two teams more or less ignore each other, as they’d be competing against their own team members to win the primary election. But then once that’s over, it’s the two teams vs each other, and the players who aren’t presidential candidates then need to support their team’s candidate in order to help win. I think it’d be neat to have shifting focuses of competing against teammates, and then competing together as one big group. Also you’d need to play the careful balance of beating your competition during the primaries, but not totally beating them down so that they’ll get crushed in the presidential election (or be unable to support you during the election). jmzero posted:Like, you can say somewhere "you'd rather be president than vice president, and you'd rather be vice president than have your party lose" - but once "individual victory" becomes foggy, people will make their own goals. Like, in Eclipse, you'll get people who team up with someone, work for "the team" to their own detriment, then take the "team-breaker" penalty in order to help their teammate win. Even though their personal VPs are bad at the end, and that's the "official" victory condition, they feel they've won if their "team" wins (even if the "team" is dissolved). Obviously that's a bit extreme - my point is just that the idea of a team will really warp the way a lot of people approach a game. I think it'd be hard to make players "really" fight consistently during primaries - and if just one player decides not to fight hard, it puts a lot of pressure on for everyone to stop fighting and just focus on the team win; and if that becomes the pattern, the beginning part of the game withers pretty hard. I was working on a game along similar lines before the election destroyed my faith in both the system and the universe in general. I skipped having any explicit element of competition within the team and just tried to keep the focus on trying to coordinate between teammates who have separate, secret, potentially contradictory strategies, more in the vein of bridge than anything else. (Come to think of it, overhauling it into a trick-taking game would be a great way to make a lighter, simpler, faster version.)
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2017 01:53
|
|
|
Even history nerds think memorizing dates is boring, I think this game concept needs some work. What if you had something like this: every player gets dealt out a card that lists some random historical fact. Without showing their card to anyone else, everyone reads their fact out loud to the group, but the traitor must falsify theirs in some way, and then the group tries to guess which of the facts given is fake. "Is this true or false" is a much easier problem than recalling an exact date, and outside of hardcore history nerds you're going to get a lot more engagement asking details other than dates. The average educated person is going to be a lot more accurate guessing how many wives Henry VIII had than they would be at guessing the year of Henry VIII's birth/death/coronation, for example.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2017 17:59
|
|
|
I think the first question that needs to be asked is "does it matter if the slasher bother keeping track of an actual position turn by turn"? You could roll with it and just say that whenever the slasher is revealed he gets to place himself within X moves of his last known location, where X is however many moves he's had since going into hiding. Obviously if you were going for a very deduction-heavy game this would be a nonstarter--I'm assuming that unlike Fury of Dracula the players are not trying to hunt down the slasher, so having a defined location is not necessarily important. But if the victims are just trying to avoid the slasher long enough to accomplish other goals it could be a fun twist that would help simplify things while being very thematic.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2017 15:56
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:You could probably even simplify it more with something like “Move to any neighboring tile that contains the resource we have the least of” and leave it at that, even if it means that army is moving to a terrible position or fights a fight it has no chance of winning. Honestly I think this would be more of a pro than a con. Playing competent AIs off each other isn't very interesting, allowing the AIs to be exploited makes the game a lot more dynamic.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2018 17:38
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:I mean, at the end of the day it’s not much of a threat, it’s just “get this many points, and then try to get more.” Maybe look at Archipelago to see how a competitive game implements an everybody loses rule? that works pretty well as an ever present OH GOD WE’RE GUNNA LOSE threat, and it’s more nuanced than just “get so many points before the end of the game.” It sounds like the goal is to have the collective goal be more of a "shopping list" type goal while the competitive scoring is just a straight point comparison. So presumably the main conflict would be between players wanting to selfishly run up their own score versus taking less lucrative actions to check off obligations towards the endgame goal. Everybody is trying to get by doing the least amount of actual work so that they can maximize their scoring potential while other people save everyone's collective asses, but the less work you do towards the Ragnarok goals the less incentive other players have to work on them.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2018 16:17
|
|
|
Sandwich Anarchist posted:A main problem I foresee with that is players seeing themselves as too far behind to possibly win, so they stop contributing to the group effort because gently caress it. Unless players kept their scores secret? It's almost like the game you mentioned, in that everyone has a "secret win condition" (being top dog in points), and might need to lie to get what they want. You definitely need some sort of dynamic element in the scoring or else it just devolves into the pirate game. Although... hmm. Another way to get around some of the issues here, rather than having awards be hidden, would be to go turnless and have simultaneous hidden actions. So everybody knows what the stakes are, but they don't know what everyone else is committing. You might have a situation where e.g. between the 4 players you need to send 5 heroes to go kill the dragon to get the magic horn you need, but you also have the option of sending as many heroes you want to go mug dwarves for 5 points apiece, and guys it's not fair to ask me to send 2 heroes after the dragon because Steve is the one with the dragon-slayer hero who counts as 2, and I'm not sure I trust that Nick is really sending anyone after the dragon since he's been bitching all game about how behind he is, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2018 16:46
|
|
|
PMush Perfect posted:Edit2: Just using a generic "magic and wizards" theme sounds incredibly dull, honestly. It needs to be something at least a little more interesting than that, I want this to have draw besides just "nah man the rules are actually really good". Stick with monsters, but with a mad science genetic engineering theme.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2018 00:54
|
|
|
Countblanc posted:I'd probably be turned off by that theme personally, but my tastes certainly aren't universal. I think fighters in the Street Fighter / fighting game sense could be a cool theme, though I agree faux-europe fantasy with wizards not so much. My assumption is that e.g. both Starmies have an identical back that shows a Starmie, so when your team starts out face-down your opponent can see you have a Starmie but they don't get to see what build you're using until you reveal an action.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2018 02:45
|
|
|
PMush Perfect posted:Exactly. I'm not inseparable attached to that mechanic, but I do like it. I like it too, my only comment would be to not tie yourself too much to doing every monster the same way. You can play around with the mechanic by having different monsters do different things with it. You might have some strong but predictable monsters with only 1 build, or some weaker but versatile ones with 3 or even 4. Even within the standard 2-build range you can play around some; I don't think you want to make every variant build as transformative as the Starmie example. You might have a generic sweeper type that has 2 very similar builds with different coverage moves but identical weaknesses. Or a monster that has one strong build and one noticeably weaker build that hits back at its usual counters. There's a risk when you give your players too much of a dynamic range in their options where everything just winds up feeling very random and overwhelming; including some simpler options should help cut down on the learning curve and AP problems, but I think it may actually help players feel like their decisions are more meaningful rather than less.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2018 03:53
|
|
|
I'm sure this question comes up periodically, but: what's the best way to prototype modular hexagon boards? I want something uniform (so they can be randomized face down) that's reasonably quick and easy to put together. I could do psuedo-hexes by using rectangles laid out in an offset pattern, but the easiest way to do that is sleeved cards, and that makes them too slippery to hold pieces well.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2018 07:12
|
|
|
A lot depends on complexity. There are plenty of traditional playing card games that manage with hands up to 13, but they're very simple and easy to organize and compare. In a complex game with a lot of evaluation on each card people can struggle with half that many cards.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2018 20:40
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:So, I’m working on a card game system that I think has potential, but need some advice on it. You could have a lot of fun with positioning stuff. Have different abilities care about where you are relative to your teammates and make it an intricate choreography puzzle. You want to have a teammate to your left or right on the 2nd card and need someone on the other side of the enemy on the 4th card, but they need to make sure they are in front of someone for their 3rd card, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2019 17:09
|
|
|
golden bubble posted:I was more worried about things like having a class that relies on melee attacks for everything and having the monster that counters melee attacks in the same game. Without some ability to choose your fights, you have to be careful when creating monsters that hard counter (or even soft counter) specific tactics. As long as your encounters are designed holistically I don't think it would be an insurmountable issue, since you just make sure that monsters which counter X only show up in mixed groups that include monsters vulnerable to X. It only becomes a real issue if you're doing something like drawing 3 random monsters, because then you might draw 3 with overlapping strengths/weaknesses or unbeatable synergies etc.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2019 18:56
|
|
|
Aramoro posted:I'm assuming the tweak to make it meet or beat the target because otherwise the green pod is extremely difficult to save, if you do not roll a 1 on the TN roll then it cannot be saved. As I understand it you get to allocate dice of any color (as long as that pod is still alive), so you can use other colors that have faces with 5+ to try to beat the green TN. I also don't see anything in there saying that you have to allocate your dice equally among the pods under attack, so you can throw 5+ dice at the 16 TN green pod. The luck management aspect is a start, but when you started describing your inspiration I thought you were actually going to go full Sealab and have it be a hybrid coop-competitive or traitor coop. I think it would get a lot more interesting if players had reasons to be selfish. Make pods worth differing amounts to different players--give them skewed distributions of die colors, or hidden objectives to blow up a specific pod, something. EDIT: also I think that allocating everything all at once might be the way to go as long as pods have multiple "HP." you get your rising tension from pods taking damage, you don't need to string things out even more. this also heightens player-to-player tension even if there is no explicit competitive/traitor mechanic because there's less room to adjust to misplays/disagreements, especially if you also make allocation simultaneous and hidden. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Feb 26, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 18:27
|
|
|
Rotten Cookies posted:Ah, yeah, I kinda like the idea of different pods being worth more/less for other players. Quinn gets 3 points if the Green Pod survives til the end. Stormy gets 3 points if the Yellow pod survives til the end. Maybe something like that to get players to prioritize certain pods when they're in danger. I think you're going to have more luck making it a sabotage objective. If your objective is to keep the green pod alive until the end, as soon as the green pod blows you're probably locked out of first place and don't have much reason to care about the game anymore. If your objective is to get the green pod destroyed you've still got a shot until the very end.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 18:51
|
|
|
Gutter Owl posted:tl;dr I need help finding body horror scenario ideas for my horror game, but specifically ones that can carry meaning (esp queer meaning) beyond eep spooky monster. Hrm. Not sure how workable this one would be in play and it overlaps some with the existing clone scenarios, but something like: I Don't Know Who I Am Anymore You place a second girl somewhere. One of you is real; one is fake. The Community player draws a randomizer card to determine which is which; you do not get to know. Whatever clues the Community gets to your location reveal which girl is which in a way that they can distinguish but you can't (color coded or some such, e.g. "Red Girl is at location X") You control both girls, but if the fake girl escapes or gets sacrificed, the other player wins. You get twice as many resources to work with, but your odds of victory are only 50/50 unless you can win a complex game of chicken to try to provoke the Community into revealing which girl they're actually after.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2020 16:31
|
|
|
Your costs are likely going to be dictated by the rate of ramp that you want. Figure out how many turns you want to take to reach various milestones (this is going to have to be an average due to the random nature of your resource collection, limiting how tight the balance can be) and base your costs on that. This will probably take some trial and error iteration to get right; maybe it turns out that such-and-such buildings are too broken if you can get them reliably before turn 6 or what have you and need the cost jacked up, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2020 06:15
|
|
|
I would assume that there is some sort of cost to do jobs / penalty for failing them.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2023 00:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 30, 2024 08:29 |
|
|
Actually, this is pretty similar to an idea I've idly thought about before, a road construction game where players both bid for jobs (profit, low bid) and subcontractors to complete them (cost, high bid), with the added dimension that jobs take up physical space on a map and are not completed all at once so there would be some potential for blocking (e.g. someone else is resurfacing 3 blocks of a street, so you might deliberately leave a project on a cross street languishing so that they can't complete that segment.)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2023 01:40
|
|