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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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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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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'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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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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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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As a heads up, BoardGameGeek seems to be running a design contest of their own, for two-player print and play games. It doesn't officially start for two months, which I don't quite understand, but I'm assuming that we can start thinking of it now and the thread/feedback is the bit that waits until Feburary? I'm hashing out a very rough idea called First Contact, a game about the first negotiations between aliens who crash-land on Earth and humans. You can have both players win through peace or one side or the other win through war. You can build up your military power, which makes you better at war, but the best peace options require you to have low military power. The game is basically about looking at the cards you can play and figuring out if you can win through cooperation or if you'll need to pursue a military victory. I'm considering trying to make a meta-game around it Descent 2e style, if only because it's so much easier to design something like this when you can have different degrees of victory.
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Dec 16, 2012 20:43
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It's been quite a few years since I've played Frag (Deadlands), but as I recall the biggest problem with Frag was it's stupidly discrete damage system. So often you would do exactly one damage, so a lot of it was ordained well in advance, and the luck that did mix it up was not really controllable. I think an FPS game would probably do best by trying to take Tannhauser and making it more freeform and less bad.
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Feb 19, 2013 02:09
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The Cards Against Humanity guys are taking submissions for a table top game. Top 16 get to demo their game at GenCon, winner gets $7,500 towards their first printing. I'll be submitting a party game that won the November Board Game Design contest right here on SA. 
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May 3, 2013 03:40
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I'm working on a board game. It's a traitor game where you don't know if you're the traitor at the start - imagine Clue, but it matters if you're the murderer or not. It's kind of hard to explain. Anyway, I've done some small playtests, but I think I'm about ready to start scaling up the scope of the playtests. First, though, I thought I'd get you wizards to peek at it and give me your thoughts. It's kinda long, so I'll just link to the google doc instead of spamming this thread. You can comment inline on the doc or here. I'd really appreciate any feedback you could find the time to give :] (Also - note that the Visions and Anomalies lists are nowhere near complete - I intend on having quite a few more in the final product. But I want to work on those as ideas come rather than trying to hork out a bunch at once without regard to quality.)
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May 8, 2013 21:21
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Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, everyone.jmzero posted:First off, I think the game has a lot of promise. There's some good mechanical ideas here definitely, but from the rules it's hard to get a solid picture of how it functions. There's lots of rules that really aren't clear - like... Hah, that was just a simple mnemonic because I know people confuse "turn" and "round" a lot, so it's a little thing to remind that turn is what one person does and four people make a round. If it's causing any confusion I can axe it for sure - it's just a personal thing. quote:Maybe replace this with a card draw? I hate chart lookups, and they're very rare in successful games. It's funny, Surges seem so bland on paper but in practice the surge being rolled is like everyone's favorite part of the game! Still cake is delicious too but it doesn't mean it's healthy. I'll think on this one. quote:You've got some things that are a good spin on the hidden role dynamic - the multiple roles and options and partial revelation and what not. I also like your core "hidden contribution" mechanic (mostly). But I think the interesting, clever gameplay of this core game is going to get swamped under the other stuff - the boons and the map and the spirits and what not. Pick a small subset of that stuff that you like the best, and get rid of the rest. Simplify your board state. Reduce the range of decisions, and you'll make the decisions more interesting and meaningful. Well the issue is that, essentially, there needs to be a tradeoff between the three facets of discovering your own position (requires power, is fairly obvious, and crucially, has random information popping up sometimes, so observant players can see exactly WHEN you figured out what you are), discovering the position of other people (requires even more power, aggressive, and wasteful IF the target turns out to be clean - which is what traitors can whinge about when you discuss hurting them), and acting towards your interests (principally altering Leylines and investigating Anomalies). So, at minimum, there needs to be those three options that players must continually choose between, because otherwise analysis is impossible. Bidding could potentially replace the map - I admit it's not an avenue I'd considered. Altering, gaining power, using spirits, and coercing - I think they all need to remain in some form for the deductive/bluffing gameplay to really be there. quote:If you want to keep some "combat" - cards for "fight" and "protect" or something could be hot commodities, but there'd be a balance between revealing yourself as a kill-happy traitor, claiming you're stock-piling for self-defense, denying the real bad guys, etc.. It's actually not "combat" specifically I want. There just needs to be a way to learn the signs/visions of other players that's actively aggressive and extremely wasteful. DirkGently posted:[edit: I realize that this comes off very critical -- but I really do think you have the core of something cool here with your traitor mechanic and I really like much of the fluff and world building. I just think that you need to start cutting and condensing! This is not a problem -- I have never seen a project, be it a novel or a board game, that did not benefit from starting grandiose and then being polished into a tight core!] Hah, no worries man. When I was sensitive about it I kept it to myself, posting the fork on SA means that I'm ready to have it rough and really get working on it. quote:I'm going to second Crackbone here (albeit in gentler terms) -- one thing that would really help is some redundant definitions. You are doing something that happened to me when I tried to write my first RPG, inspired by oWoD, where you invent a term for something, define it only once and then use it throughout your manual. At first that is not so bad, but by the middle you have sentences that are almost completely jargon terms and very difficult to parse: something like 'crystallizing an leyline with more Robust cards than..(and that is an example I understood -- there are definitely more confusing sentences). First, I would say get rid of as much jargon as possible. Second, it would help if you just reminded us what some of those terms meant in plain English. Yeah, I guess that's what happens when I spend so much time with a game - I forget how much jargon overhead there is for new people. I'll probably try throwing in redundant definitions but keeping most of the jargon first; it really is useful to have these terms defined when writing Anomalies and Visions, but that's no excuse not to have clarity! (Also, while a glossary was always a plan for the final draft, I really should put it in now.) quote:Of course, once you have done that, I would suggest just removing all the jargon words in general (so that the ones that need to be there: power, leyline, anomaly are more clear) -- I mean, seriously, you have like 8 different words that essentially mean 'spend your turn doing the action of this space'. I realize that it makes things more atmospheric but it also makes rules a pain to read. Yeah - it's a tough divide because we're trying to preserve theme as much as possible (hence only using the word "player" in the explanation of what the game is, and "Avatar" everywhere else). I'll keep the idea to slash the theme words with general purpose things like "use" in mind, but if redundant definitions + glossary is enough I'd rather keep the rulebook themed. quote:Second, I realize that you are going for an Arkham Horror vibe and there is a lot of 'stuff' going on -- but the danger of that is that it is very difficult to see how all of your elements fit together and conversely to balance everything. Even AH itself (which I think is a flawed game but many people find it enjoyable) is definitely weighed down by all of its stuff. I would suggest cutting what you have here by half, you just have too much going on... The idea behind having the map is essentially to put a time lag for what you want to do - by making you commit to options you want in stages, it gives observant players a chance to react. Probably the prime example is someone going to the Undertaker. They're likely going to see the alignment card (the times when someone would want the other Undertaker effect are generally pretty evident.) Which means that one of their signs is very likely in the House of Blood, and they're going to see whether or not they're the murderer. Well, there's a 1/3rd chance they're going to learn it's them, and if so, what's their power? If they're low, but start stockpiling after, that's a pretty big murderer tell. If they stay low and just alter nodes after, it's probably not them. If they have a lot of power NOW, you'd better stock up just in case they're the murderer. etc. That being said, I literally had not considered action drafting/"worker placement" as an option for this game until it was said here, so maybe there's a way those mechanics can facilitate this. quote:Some specific problems I see -- isn't it in the good guys best interest to start every game by saying 'show all of your cards -- if you don't then we will assume you are either the murderer or a traitor.' I really don't see a downside to this -- so it should be prohibited in the rules rather than discouraged (as it is now). Huh, I must have miswrote something somewhere. It's explicitly forbidden to show cards without an effect making you, because if you could instantly confirm you were telling the truth the game would be bad. It's not at all forbidden to say what your cards are (since you can lie) - the Traitor's Strike phase of the Reckoning is what punishes players all claiming at the start. I really don't like soft-line enforcement rules, so if mass claiming signs and visions at the start of the game even without being able to reveal your cards was ever useful, I wouldn't make that forbidden, I'd just nerf it more by making Traitor's Strike stronger or make some other weird thing happen. quote:Also, in terms of condensing, I find the murderer reveal incredibly confusing... as I see it now, there is no way to tell if you are the murderer...until you kill someone. Is that correct (if not, the reveal information needs to be centralized)? It certainly doesn't seem like it should be. If so, probably the murderer card should be revealed after turn 1 or 2. Various effects reveal the Sign in the House of Blood, the Undertaker lets you see the alignment card to know which of the 3 signs is the murderer. It's designed to gate it so the Murderer doesn't know right away but can take steps. It is sort of tucked away in that list of spirits. quote:Next, a key component of scoring in a number of victory conditions seems to be how many positive cards/negative cards are placed by individual players on a leyline -- how do you keep track of that? As I understand the rules, these cards are drawn whenever you attempt to influence a leyline (and presumably are not individual to each player)... so how I am supposed to remember that I played a +3 on leyline one and +2 on leyline two and a +3 on leyline four? What if players forget or if there are arguments? Don't blame you for missing it, it's just one sentence: "Place a personal token on the Barrier card denoting it as being altered by you." quote:On that note, I am really not a fan of these cards being as random as they are. As I read the rules, it is entirely possible for a player who want to do 'good' but only draw negative cards (or vice versa)-- correct? For that matter, the randomized values seem redundant as well and way too swingy. I could be the most stealthy traitor in the world but if my card draw sucks, what am I supposed to do (without overtly revealing myself). If everyone had a hand of these cards at the beginning and slowly drew more (possibly with some way to manipulate your hand or to look at the hand of other players) this would at least present some strategic options... now it seems entirely too luck based for me. This is kind of a really interesting design thing so I'm gonna get maybe more in to detail than you want. A hand of cards is something we tried and didn't like. The reason is that we absolutely wanted a chance to want to do good and only draw bad cards (in this case, it's a 1/8th chance). If someone has a hand of cards, then when facing the Anomaly or putting the last Barrier on a Leyline, they can say "Yeah, I have a positive card - it's no problem." And when players can enforce that, there's just no opportunity to deviate if there's any chance you'll be seen. Instead, the mechanic is design such that occasionally a good player will get draws that force strange things. Consider the draw +4,+4,+5. It's very rare (I realize I forgot the card distribution in the doc, my bad - it's a normal curve with +1 and -1 being most common and equally likely, +2 and -2 less common but both equally likely...) but it can happen. In that case, a player will have to discard a +4 face up and say "Sorry guys, but I swear, the other two cards are +4 and +5". Now consider a player with a They Who Wait aligned Vision and one of their signs in the House of Traitors. They draw -4, +4,+5. What do they do? Well, the safe option is to accept their hurting their faction, play the +4, discard the -4 faceup, discard the +5 facedown. Or they can be cheeky, play the -4, discard the +5 facedown, discard the +4 face up and say "Sorry guys, but I swear, the other two cards are +4 and +5". If they're doing an Anomaly and it won't decisively swing the game towards They Who Wait, they'll want the first one. If they're under heavy suspcion and are a likely Coercion target, they might want the first one anyway. But the second one really helps their gameplan, if they think they can get away with it. It's interesting choices like THAT that the play one, discard one up, discard one down system is trying to provide, and having a hand would completely kill that. There absolutely needs to be a chance to occasionally get a draw counter to your interests, so that you can bluff about getting that draw when you're being sassy. The question is just a matter of tuning, and I think the 1/8th chance of all 3 cards aligned with one faction seems to be about right. quote:Finally, player elimination sucks. I get the feeling that this will be a long game -- and even granting that a murder begins the endgame, it sucks to be left sitting around an hour while everyone does their thing. At the very least it shouldn't be as easy as it is right now. This is just a me-writing-rules-poorly problem then, the Reckoning isn't going to be an hour, not even close. Ten minutes maybe, and that's only if there are undecided players table-talking what faction to throw in with. I agree, player elimination sucks, which is why one murder ends the game (and murderering is against your interests unless you've either learned you're the murderer OR you're absolutely sure the guy you're killing is the murderer.) quote:But these are bandaid solutions -- I think you really need to focus on getting a core mechanic down before focusing on putting in more stuff. The more stuff that is in the game, the harder it is to see whether or not it is actually working. The big problem right now is that, as I read the rules, there is no real reason to work together and conversely, it is very difficult to see what you should be doing if you are a bad guy. The anomalies seems like the only possible threat... and, at present, it seems like (given the random nature of the card draws) you would be better off going it alone on each anomaly (even players who WANT to help may not be able to). The idea is that players working together are more efficient at spending resources (they're not Coercing each other) and can find the murderer easier (the power they save is being spent on Spirits to investigate and generally keeping things nice.) Who knows if I actually pulled that off though. quote:With all that being said, I think that you are onto something with your implementation of the traitor mechanic -- it is just really hard to see under so much cruft. So, let me sketch for you a simpler version of your game to test before you start adding stuff in (this is just a really rough attempt to distill the feel you are going for into the smallest number of components). If the simple version is fun, then you can start adding in different stuff... While I like simplicity, I think there needs to be a minimum amount of complexity (enough that players can analyze the signals being given off by other players, BUT players have some ability to somewhat bluff their signals while still achieving their goals) or it's just not the same game about finding out who others are, finding out who YOU are, and advancing your goals when you've figured out who you are. It's always a danger that the game will end up bloated and unwieldy as a result, but I really do think this game could end up too simple as well, if that makes sense?
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May 9, 2013 01:14
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DirkGently posted:I feel you -- in the game I am currently working on, to keep the theme all of my key terms were originally in Latin (and that was tough to understand). But I stand strongly by the fact that, if you change nothing else, you should make all of the 'activate this space/cards power' terms the same. I think that would be a big help to the readability of the document and would not really impact your theme all that much. Yeah - that makes sense. quote:That sounds like fair logic but I think the map is an unnecessary distraction -- there have got to be more elegant ways of getting this effect -- worker placement is an excellent one (and pretty simple at that), as is jmzero's idea of making the spirit powers a revolving purchase thing (although given how critical some of those powers are, you are going to have to plan for the eventuality that they may only show up at the wrong time). Any game that has too complex of a map when it is not actually all that essential to gameplay is a big warning sign for me as a purchaser... see Arkham and Android. Hmm. Well, the goal of the map is to texture people's choice - I wonder if stealing the brilliant bidding mechanic from Revolution! or something similar might be the way to go. As long as it textures the choices so there's more than one reason you're choosing something... quote:I think I just misread this -- it says that you are only supposed to reveal your card in dire circumstances but, on reflection, I realize that you mean reveal 'vocally' (and could be lying) rather than 'actually show the card'. Possibly this needs to be made explicit in the rules, possibly I just failed at reading comprehension. Yeah, I do use "reveal" in the sense of vocal reveal, I should not do that. Nice catch! quote:That is a crap ton of tokens on the board. Probably not a problem for you but in my game, every token added was an additional layer of confusion. Not to mention that when someone looks at you playing and sees a sheet covered in stuff -- it is sort of off-putting. But that is just a personal aesthetic thing. I agree on a bunch of unique tokens, just ones for ownership I personally don't think are any worse then something like Pandemic. Personal on my end too, though. quote:Thanks for the explanation -- it is always good to see where people are coming from. I really like your explanation of how you see the cards being played but (and this is just my gut, because unlike you, I have not actually played the game) I wonder if you are hitting a disconnect between how you imagine the mechanic working in an ideal sense and how it actually works (this is something that I fall afoul of all the time). It is a really nice system when it runs, but it does sort of require you to be very comfortable with the distribution, and now that I think about it, most people don't like counting cards. quote:I also understand your point about the maths too but I still think that it is swingy. I realize that +5 is rare but even one +5 suddenly means that even my two -3's are not looking so hot -- and the fact that I get them entirely randomly is a bit of a bummer. Randomness is good but not when it works against player skill and there is no real way to mitigate it. I can tell you that my group would absolutely hate this level of randomness (I know because in earlier drafts of my game, the card draw was on the same curve as yours) -- but then again, people (not us) love Arkham and it is randomness incarnate! Well the idea is that the randomness averages out and you can suss out who has a signal of "worse draws than average" indicating they're a traitor actually lying about some of their draws. Although it does occur to me that I'm asking rather a lot of players to try to manage that analysis over the game... quote:To keep some of what you are going for -- does it really hurt things to keep the draw exactly as you have it now but just make everything +1 or -1? That was you can still legitimately fail when you want to succeed (or vice versa) and still discard a positive because you "got a hand of nothing but positives" while keeping you from undermining someones work when you get a lucky break. Just a thought. It has some benefits that the +1/-1 method doesn't (namely the empower tokens, which really mix things up) - but then, +1/-1 has some benefits as well. Will have to think... quote:Nah -- your rules are pretty clear that it is the endgame, I just made an inaccurate estimate of the time it would take (for me lots of rules pertaining to a section = takes a long time to resolve but that is not a given, certainly). If the eliminated player still has a chance of winning (via his team) then I don't think that it is much of a problem... although I couldn't find a section that says whether or not the dead player gets to declare allegiance. You do have an allegiance, but no choice. If you're the murderer and kill someone, you win. If you're the murderer and are killed, you're forced to side with They Who Wait in the Declaring of Alignments. And if you're neither but were killed, you're forced to side with Humanity. quote:I'd have to see it in play but given how large the potential negatives are of working together (eliminated and lose the game) versus the positives (more efficient resource use), as a player I would absolutely avoid it unless it was absolutely necessary to keep us in the game. Well remember, too, the biggest aspect of working together isn't actually being together on a space - it's whether you trust someone when they tell you what X sign is / what a players vision is / what the alignment card is / etc. quote:I totally agree -- but I also caution against equating 'stuff' with 'complexity'. Again, as something that I am guilty of, it is very hard to tell what is and isn't working/necessary when it is concealed with so many moving parts. For instance, you wanted people to be balanced between finding out about themselves, finding out about others, and personal interests. That is great... but as I read the rules (as stated before, not always understanding them) I really don't see much motivation towards finding out about others... certainly not to the extent that I would waste resources on it. In addition, if I know from the get go that I am a good guy (with no possibility of being a turn coat), I think that optimal play suggests just staying away from everyone and influencing as many leylines as possible on every turn... basically ignoring all of the options. I might be wrong but it is hard to see. Well, even if you know you're good, you want to find if someone ELSE is the murderer, and kill them before they kill someone else. This is the principle goal for investigating other people. And it's almost impossible to know from the get go you're a good guy, since if you have one Heroic sign and one unknown, that unknown sign could make you the murderer. It is true that someone who cashes out of the investigation games early for whatever reason does have a pretty dull time of it, though. quote:Not to mention that adequately playtesting a game of this level of complexity is a nightmare. Live testing is tolerable. Play by post is horrific. quote:So, I would take this statement to try to design a barebones version: It's an interesting idea. My suspicion is that the deduction would be far too trivial - but it's worth playing it as a light bluffing game and figure out WHY it's broken, I suppose! Thanks for the idea. quote:Still caveat emptor! Make the game that your group wants to play! The idea is to make it so it's costly to throw a fake signal that you're searching for your alignment when you know your alignment (because you're gaining power instead of influencing leylines, which you actually want to do), so that the efficient play is also the one that gives the other players the biggest clues about where you are. One of the things I'm really trying to encourage - in the game structure, in the 3 card mechanic, etc. - is having players choose between efficient and transparent and less obvious but slower/more expensive. Thanks again for all the time you spent!
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May 9, 2013 05:09
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jmzero posted:I'm working on a game. Character cards need two stats: Tactics and Strategy seems like such an elephant in the room that I assume there's a reason you veto'd it? Individual and Team value is bland but gets the point across. You could just do whatever word you want (battle/fight/etc.) for the individual value and "Unity Value" for the team?
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Aug 15, 2013 07:49
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The easiest way to think of whether a game will be good is to write some narratives about times in the game where you'll have interesting decisions. E.g at this decision point, I could do plan A which has the benefit X and the tradeoff Y, or B with the benefit XX and the tradeoff YY, or C with the benefit XXX and the tradeoff YYY, and evaluating those benefits and tradeoffs is difficult and interesting because... If your rules aren't leading to those narratives, bin it.
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May 18, 2014 18:40
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As weird as it sounds, I always distrust any game that involves flanking because they tend to be games that make you deal with a lot of cruft to learn the optimum play but then there's pretty much one set algorithm you always execute. I don't know why this is, but it's something I've noticed. When in your space game is flanking and shooting not the right move?
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Oct 19, 2014 20:59
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There's a game I've had on my mind for a while called Scrap Dogs basicially a mashup of Galaxy Trucker and Steve Jackson's Revolution! (which is actually pretty rad for a Steve Jackson game). Elevator pitch: Starts as an auction game where you try to assemble the best mech, then you have a flight phase where you deal with various hazards and put them to the test. The winner is the player with the most Glory at the end of the flight. Glory is mostly obtained by how well your mech does in the Flight, but you can earn a bit during the auction by bribing the media to tell stories of your greatness. I have a rough draft of what the auction system should look like, just curious of any first impressions.
And the locations: Bar Bid, credit/reactor ban. +1 credit. Effluent Plant Action +1 reactor Slums Bid, scrap ban +5 scrap Academy Bid, variable If a player did not spend the most actions on this, they lose one of their most expensive currency from their bid for each action less. +2 credits. Workshop Bid, scrap/reactor ban. +3 scrap and +2 reactors. News Office Bid +2 Glory. Become this rounds Ace, if you are not already. (This does not affect who will be Ace next round.) Scrapyard Action, variable +1 scrap for each action spent. If you scavenged more than any other player this round (no ties), also gain +1 reactor. Auction Hall Bid Bid winner gains a faceup schematic. Then second place gains a faceup schematic. Other players get their bids refunded. Black Market Bid Draw two schematics. Gain one and discard one. Laboratory Bid Choose a faceup augment and add it to one of your mech’s parts. Then second place chooses a faceup augment and adds it to one of their mechs parts. Garage Action, variable For each action token, you may do one of the following:
Observatory Action Look at any player’s Orbit cards. Shipyard Action You may only spend 1 action per turn at the Shipyard. Action tokens spent on the Shipyard are never removed. The effect of your token depends on how many tokens have been spent already:
Obviously subject to change on testing but at least it gets close to what I want. I like having the end of the auction phase be dynamic, so no matter how the Shipyard ends up changing it'll always do that. And now...I need to design the entire Flight phase, and by extension every schematic and augment  . I'm always bad at making big sets of things like this.
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Feb 15, 2015 02:58
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Indolent Bastard posted:The win condition is the most money; so do you cheap out on upgrades to save cash or do you get upgrades in hopes of being able to take jobs with bigger pay offs? But don't spend too much, the only victory condition is your ending cash. For what it's worth, this is probably not going to work as well as you want it to. Think about every engine building gave you've played. How many of them spit out the same thing you put in? As an exercise, imagine if the winner of Dominon wasn't the player with the most Provinces but instead the player with the most Gold. How would the game be different? What would your strategy be?
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Sep 19, 2015 04:40
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jmzero posted:This wouldn't be the same at all - you don't lose the Gold you spend in Dominion (and in Dominion Gold earns money, while in this game money doesn't). His game (from my understanding) actually has the same core choice you have in Dominion - when you do you stop "increasing your ability to earn" and start "amassing VP for the end of the game"? Yeah I just picked a generic engine game without thinking but Dominion is a bad example because gold can either buy cards OR buy VPs directly. The point is that the sinew of a lot of engine games is that you pick whether you want to turn over your VP engine, whether to turn over your engine that gets you better inputs for your VP engine, or whether you turn over your engine that gets you something that improves one of your engines. But in the smuggler game, you just have one VP engine that turns over, then you choose whether you want to un-do some of that turning over to make the VP engine do better the next time it turns over. It's just a lower-order problem and it'll be a lot more solvable/less interesting. It's not like it's impossible to make it work or anything. But the question "Do you want some money now, or more money later" is much less interesting question when the goal of money is to "have the most" instead of using the money to do some process. In smuggler game, I just always want money later, unless later is after the game ends, in which I want money now. There's a reason most games go for "what can I DO with some money now, and what will I be able to DO with more money later". Figuring out what money will do early (when the engine I invest it in turns over more times) vs late (when I'll get more of what money offers me, but the system I improve will get less of some other input, like time) is interesting. Much less interesting to judge "will the game end before I get a return on this investment" - if you make this HARD to figure out it probably means your game has a lot of luck, kingmaker, or both. hito fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Sep 19, 2015 |
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Sep 19, 2015 06:55
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I've had an idea for a long time and I recently figured out enough to start prototyping. Unfortunately, protospiel is only a month away and I have to rush to get it into something playable, so I'd like to come here with some of my questions, since my normal policy of slow-burn trying to figure it out is - too slow! As a bit of background - the idea I've had for a long time is actually the metagame. Take some sort of fun, complicated puzzle that has a numeric input ("mana") and some sort of output ("victory points"), where it is a skill to figure out under time pressure how much VP you can get given a mana value.T here would be some sort of hidden information component that gives you additional ways to use input to get output. A round starts with one player claiming how much output they can get with a certain amount of input. Then the other player can raise the stakes, or claim that they can get the same output with less input / get more output with that input, or call your bluff. That seemed like a really fun meta-dynamic. But I didn't actually have a core game idea, just that architecture around it, so it sad. The breakthrough was actually kind of funny. I had never actually stopped to think, hey, what are examples of fun complicated puzzles in board games? Well Mage Knight is one of my all-time favorite games, in large part due to its complex and fun combat. Why don't I just rip off Mage Knight? Thus was born Valkyrie Ante (working title). The conceit is basically that you and the other player are two valkyries in a heavenly citadel that's being overrun by enemies. It's not a game about the desperate defense of the heavenly citadel, since you're both all powerful warriors who could easily crush the opposition. Instead, this is a game about the arguments you're having over mead about who can perform the same techniques better and use less of the heavenly citadels power. I won't get into the whole combat system design - let it suffice to say that mage knight experts will find it largely familiar, except instead of monster attacks just doing "damage", they do all sorts of things (since there aren't persistent wounds in this game) to make sure the decision to block or not block stays interesting. Also, there's a single generic mana source, Worship. Worship empowers most cards to do extra effects, and in some cases, is needed to use a card at all. There are also three special mana types - Crusade, Artifice, and Grace. You have to obtain these with card effects, but they enable much more powerful things. You get to take as many encounters as you want, grouping enemies as you like. You have a selection of enemies in front of you. You also have three starter cards you get every round - a basic attack, a basic block, and a card that will turn one worship into Crusade, Artifice, or Grace. The round starts when each player looks at their hand of cards for a round. First player flips over a three-minute timer. They have that long to put a certain number of cards in a facedown pile (later rounds = more cards), put one card facedown as their secret, and make an ante of the form "I can get 5 Majesty with 3 Worship". (Majesty is what you get for killing enemies. Harder enemies give more Majesty.) When they make their ante, they flip the timer BACK. Second player has that long (i.e, however long first player took) to put down their own secret card and then choose one of five responses: Claim Valor; "I can get more Majesty with that much Worship." Claim Wisdom; "I can get that much Majesty with less Worship." If one of these is chosen, the responding player then gets all of the cards in the common pile, the three starter cards, and their secret card. Using those cards, they need to back up this claim. Claim Doubt; "I don't think you can get that much Majesty with that much Worship." If this is chosen, the first player then gets all of the cards in the common pile, the three starter cards, and their secret card. Using those cards, they need to back up their claim. Claim Humility; this is the fold equivalent and is not super defined yet Or...Escalate! The second player puts one more card in the common pile, and gives a new ante. The new ante has to be for more Majesty and as much or more Wisdom. Then the other player responds to that ante. The game can go through multiple escalations, but you never get to place another secret card or change your secret card. That's the barest skeleton of it and I think it will be really fun. But there are a couple of hurdles I'm struggling with. First, while the metagame is good, the second-order metagame is not so well defined (i.e, who is the ultimate winner after so many rounds of play). It's really fun to have someone win or lose a round. But what does that get you? A "point", and whoever gets X "points" wins? Not sure what I want that structure to be. Ideally folding would give your opponent less than if you did valor/wisdom and were wrong (to reward bluffing). Another fun idea I had is to have a card that gives you nothing to help in combat, but a larger second-order reward, if it's played as your secret. Secondly...so, Mage Knight progression happens very naturally because of it's RPG nature. This is more of a puzzle. I can give the game some progression by having you draw and play more cards in later rounds. But ideally there would also be BETTER cards at play in latter rounds. However, if one players deck becomes significantly better than the other players, it would be really bad for the game. So I can't really give upgraded cards as a second-order reward. Do I just have waypoints where the monsters upgrade and then you get better cards for free? Maybe a draft of some sort? Essentially, now I have the puzzle and the metagame down well, but the flow of game BETWEEN rounds is something I need to work on - who's the ultimate winner, how does the game progress over time, etc.
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Sep 25, 2015 05:50
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Anniversary posted:If I'm reading this right the only difference between the two players puzzle is their secret card? That asymmetry seems fascinating, but I can't help but worry it could make the variance between players capabilities insurmountable on a round by round basis. Is there a way you're balancing around that? It's a really tricky balance. The fun of the game is supposed to be the element of trying to figure out the puzzle better under time pressure, with the gambling aspect being used as a much more interesting way to display that mastery. Hidden information of some kind is pretty crucial so that two players who are really good at the puzzle aspect still have something to chew on. Ideally, we'd want the "better player" to always win, but if both players can see the optimal solution on the board, then we essentially need to change the game into poker where one hand really is strictly better than the other and it's about the bluffing. The problem is that pokers balance point is about usually folding, and poker tends to not really have a winner or loser. So we don't want pokers structure of being about "money", and we want folding to be reasonably rare. But it's hard to think of a discrete gamey structure that will work. Just summing points? Boring. But going deckbuilder would be even worse. Imagine playing poker, but the winner of a hand just gets better cards for their other hands. Eventually you hit this really dull lame duck end where the other person just always has better cards. So basically, we have a really fun round structure that looks a lot like Mage Knight and Poker. But we'd like to string those rounds together into something that doesn't look like Mage Knight or Poker. That's the tough bit! I guess I could just go the Pandante route, but that doesn't seem that good with two players any dang way. hito fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Sep 26, 2015 |
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Sep 26, 2015 04:55
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Mister Sinewave posted:Unless things have changed drastically in the past ~10 years, it is untrue that computers can determine the best move in any situation (ie chess has been solved). They can look forward a hella lot but chess still cannot be 100% brute forced; there are still decisions to be made (and which must be made well) in order to win at a high level. My understanding of it is that Chess hasn't been strictly "solved" but it's now impossible for a top computer to lose to a regular human being. So we don't know whether the computers are doing the mathematically best moves they could be doing, but they can "100% brute force" enough to beat humans.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:24
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CodfishCartographer posted:The main purpose of the healing dice is to avoid having to rest. On your turn you can choose to not play a card, and instead rest. When you rest, you recover health, stamina (resource for playing cards), and can draw extra cards. It feels crummy to "lose" a turn like this, so the idea is for players to try and figure out how to go as long as they can without needing to rest. Healing while attacking is great for this, since you don't lose out on momentum! So I'm trying to think of alternative ways to minorly heal up without losing momentum. If momentum is fun, why have resting in the first place? What interesting decisions does it give you currently?
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Sep 5, 2017 01:37
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CodfishCartographer posted:While it's more fun to keep your momentum and not need to rest, resting does serve the important role of being a very efficient way to recover both health and stamina, and provides additional drawing. The choice it provides is "do I want to risk NOT resting so I can get more damage in? If I can survive another turn or two, maybe me or my teammates will get some healing /draw cards that will help me avoid having to rest." Also, keeping your momentum wouldn't be as fun if there wasn't any way for that momentum to stop. For the draw and stamina aspects, it feels like the best solution would just be to make the action more efficient the more turns you go without resting (maybe every card you discard without playing makes the next rest better?) Then it feels fun because you're "cashing out" your earlier success. This doesn't work with health because then it's not a choice of "wait until the time is right"; the board state basically coerces you into healing. That aspect of it is basically never going to feel good by definition.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:49
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CommonShore posted:Looking at my new copies of Mint Works and Mint Delivery got me thinking about a possible mechanic that might fit into one of the designs I've been slowly chipping at.... Well, there are a lot of tableau builders that have concessions for other players to pay some sort of cost to access your tableau. Which is pretty close to the spirit of that. Here's a question - for a game where players are sort of civil administrators, what sort of mechanics lend themselves to representing "internal diplomacy"? Ie, not diplomacy between players, but a co-op game where players are trying to balance various factional interests. Cards being used to represent the kinds of PROBLEMS that occur makes sense, but I think representing the players resources as cards is kind of a thematic mistake, because the feeling should be "We need to stretch too-few resources across too-many demands", not "Ah nuts, I didn't draw being a good listener when I needed it." So I was thinking maybe something more like the X-COM board game, which has the sort of general feel I'm looking for - there are lots of problems, we can solve some of them by making tough decisions about what we can spare. However, that heavily embraces dice because of the RNG theme. Dice seem like a not-great tool for what I want because if Faction A demands X food, it's a lot more interesting to have Y food and decide if you can spare X, not "Roll for food and see if you get X". (Rolls could maybe work for "unrest" in that you roll a number of dice equal to the resources you're short and see what bad result happens.) So basically I can think of what mechanics WOULDN'T work but I'm drawing a blank on how to make it more interesting than just a simple cube pusher. Curious if anyone has any favorite games that they think represented this kind of give-and-take really well.
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Aug 10, 2018 14:15
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Hey, that's a really good idea - gathering resources *yourself* only gets them for next turn, but any benefits you get from appeasing a faction apply right now. Actually, that might be enough to get started prototyping if there's also an action that lets you anticipate faction demands. The dynamic tension of "gathering as many resources as possible" vs. "learning what resources you will need" feels very in theme. (But of course still happy to hear any other ideas or good example games to check out.)
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Aug 10, 2018 15:02
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