Board Game Design Laboratory: Igor, get the meeples

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Board Game Design Laboratory: Igor, get the meeples

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

Rotten Cookies posted:

So I was watching Sealab 2021 and fuckin' around with dice and had an idea. You know, Pods going critical and poo poo.

At the core of it, every player has a pool of 7 dice that they allocate toward 3 target numbers using 3 of the dice from their pool. But every die in the pool is differently colored and differently numbered, the colors corresponding to spots/Pods on the board. Pods on the board can be Safe (no marker), Critical (yellow marker), or destroyed (red marker), and all start off as Critical. Beating a Pod's target number lessens the danger, where failing to beat the target number increases danger/destroys it. When a Pod on the board is destroyed, the corresponding die is removed from every player's dice pool. The 3 target numbers you are trying to beat is Nd6 where N is the number of players. Figure it's a nice distribution to start with.
Win State
All remaining Pods on the board are safe.
Lose State
All Pods are destroyed OR center Pod is destroyed

My imagined steps for the game rounds

1) Roll 1d6 that has each side colored corresponding to the colors of the Pods. Let's say Purple
2) Roll Nd6 for the color that comes up, and Nd6 for each 2 adjacent color Pods. So you defend Purple [13], Yellow[7], and Green[8]
2a) if the color die rolls the color of a destroyed Pod, the center Pod is targeted, and the Pods that are adjacent to the would-be target are targeted.
3) Players go around allocating 1 die to one of the targeted Pods
4) Roll the allocated dice
5) All players allocate another single die to one of the Pods and then roll
7) Allocate last die and roll.
8) Add up the allocated dice, compare to target numbers, change Pod states if applicable, and remove any affected dice.

Why I think it's fun?
Well, all those dice have the same number of pips and should average out to a roll of 3.5 in the long run. But..... you're not gonna select them all willy nilly because of that, right? Like that yellow die can roll a result that literally none of the other dice can. Sure, it's a Hail Mary, but if you're in a pinch, it's all you got. Obviously the game is a lot of luck, but I think that the players can make meaningful decisions in what dice they choose to put forward. Do they want the ultra safe 333444? Swing big? Swing medium? And the idea of having to save certain dice.

Why would it not be fun?
-Too much rolling dice
-Relying too much on luck and not feeling like your decisions matter.
-XCom probability-hatin'

Possible Tweaks?
-Instead of having to beat the number, it could be meet or beat?
-At higher player numbers it might get annoying to roll all those dice and total them so many times. I dunno what alternative there is for generating target numbers that's as easy as Nd6
-Obv different numbers on the dice. Like sub in one for 1,1,1,6,6,6
-You send all your allocated dice out at once instead of allocate, roll, allocate, roll, but I like the idea of rising tension, desperation, and pressure to get the dice to perform

Sorry for the disorganized thoughts, but I just thought I'd throw this out here and ask if there's anything glaring that makes this Not Fun. Haven't playtested anything yet, but may get to next week or so.

Its sounds like from this description like a co-op snakes and ladders? We roll a dice to decide which dice to roll. Stick the dice we get on the pods then roll those to see if we succeed or fail? What's the decision point for players in the game?

In a 4 players game for example you roll purple in your case so you roll 4 Purple, 4 Green and 4 Yellow dice.

You then roll those dice and say average rolls you'll have 14 as the TN on each pod.

You then allocate 4 of the dice, obviously none of these rolls can save a pod at tn 14 individually, if you allocate all 4 dice to a single pod you have a 50/50 chance of saving it. Second round of allocating you have another 50/50 chance of saving the pod. Because you allocate the dice before you roll you've no idea if you're over allocating or not. It's just going to be a total crap shoot isn't it? Yeah some round the TN's will be 4 but an equal number of rounds they will be 52.

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.

Aramoro fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 26, 2020

# ¿ Feb 26, 2020 17:43

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 03:16

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

Ah ok, I thought the dice got allocated to the pods of the same colour and you rolled those colour of dice to set the tn's for some reason.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2020 18:28

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

Frozen Peach posted:

I really want to include some anti-cryptocurrency mechanics, but I can't figure out a way to make those fun. Maybe if I get published and they want me to make an expansion that'll be a feature of the Black Hat expansion.

_{Walking Doggos is great fun}

oops 51% attack forked all your transactions, need to keep that mining pool diverse.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2020 15:56

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

Whybird posted:

There's a mechanic that I recently ended up developing by accident that I haven't seen anywhere else and I'd like to share.

Background: I was playtesting a set of rules for a wargame with some friends and I wanted to make sure that the mechanics I'd set up properly led to units working in a paper, scissors, stone pattern: skirmishers should beat archers, who beat pikemen, who beat great weapons, who beat sword-and-shield, who beat skirmishers.

It struck me that for the playtest, it'd be better to make the game more deterministic, so a string of bad rolls didn't make it look like a unit was worse than it actually was. So instead of using a d6 for each roll, each player had a hand of four cards numbered 1-4. When a player would have rolled, they and their opponent both selected a card from their hand and revealed it; the total value was their card minus their opponent's plus 3. Then both players discarded the card they'd played; when a player had completely discarded their hand, they picked their discard pile back up.

The rest of the game mechanics were pretty unremarkable but the system of using hands of cards rather than an RNG worked really well: it meant that players could plan their successes and failures ahead of time, they couldn't be screwed over by a string of bad rolls, and added a whole new dimension of bluffing and double-bluffing your opponent.

I refuse to believe I'm the first person to think of this as a way of making wargames less reliant on luck. Are there other games which have used a similar mechanic, or have I come up with something new?

Is this not how Land Air and Sea works to a large degree?

# ¿ May 28, 2020 10:30

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

The choosing a value from a fixed hand is a pretty weel established mechanic, see things like Libertalia where everyone has the same cards and you all pick on round on round. Air Land and Sea you're picking from a fixed deck I think but peoples hands are different turn to turn.

Thinking about it it is how combat is resolved in Kemet. You have a hand of cards which are more complex than a single number but still the concept is the same.

# ¿ May 28, 2020 13:52

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

What's your timezone?

# ¿ Jun 26, 2020 19:54

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

burexas.irom posted:

Oh, okay, I think I get what you're saying now.

I was wary of carry-overs because I want to avoid bids where one player is completely uncontested for the most desirable card, so the idea was to always start the bidding on as equal a footing as possible, save the extra influence cards which were "paid for" by not taking the won resource.

This will have to be play-tested, I think, seems now that each bidding round will likely have a clear favorite with most tokens, and testing has shown that it's usually one card that everyone wants in a bid, since they vary by value tiers (1,2,3, 1d6 resources) and the correspondingly valuable effect, as well as their importance in regards to the position of the event markers (if war is close, everyone wants swords). So this may kill what I think is the most interesting part of bidding, that is bluffs and figuring out your opponents moves, game theory poo poo. But maybe I'm too married to this idea, maybe it just spreads the strategy over consecutive bidding rounds. Hard to say, but it's easy to include in testing as it doesn't require physical game alterations.

Narratively, I'm not worried, it plays right into the "court intrigue" concept.

I think you're leaning into the uncontested bids zone slightly, if you think through say a 3 player game. There are 3 cards to bid on, everyone get X tokens (X is irrelevant because everyone has the same). Player A has a bonus to bidding on Blacksmith cards , players B and C have nothing yet. Everyone wants to get a card because not buying a card is bad. For players B and C it's pointless to bid on Blacksmith as player A has that down. So for B and C they have a couple of options, go all in on one card and win it, or split 50/50 on the other 2 and win the one the other player doesn't want. Player A can of course bid X-2 on the Blacksmith card and 1 on each the other just in case. As you saw in your own playtest people will just tend to go all in on a card.

I still don't get why the influence is random, it varies the power of the bonus cards a little but not enough to be interesting I don't think. Just give everyone 12 tokens?

Prisoner's Dilemma games are always really tough to balance into something that's fun. If this plays up to 4 players there's a chance this turns into just a deeply frustrating experience for the person who fails to get on the escalator at the start as now they're in the same position as they were on turn 1 but everyone else has some bonus or another. If they fail again, which is just as likely all they do is fall further behind with no prospect of being able to catch up.

One question, at what point are cards added to bids? How do you keep that secret or is that public knowledge?

# ¿ Sep 7, 2020 09:49

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

burexas.irom posted:

This is an example of a special event in the King's deck, namely a quest:

In a 3 player game if everyone supplies 1 does everyone lose 1 point? Is what the effect spreads on ties means?

# ¿ Sep 7, 2020 09:53

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

burexas.irom posted:

I'm okay with this scenario, because the uncontested bid was earned twofold: by smart bidding when the playing field was level and by opting to take the influence effect instead of the resources on the won card. Also, the uncontested player may opt to bid just the influence effect card on the corresponding courtier card knowing he's not going to be contested, and try and go for a second card with the rest of their influence.
That being said, I am intrigued about how the bidding will play out with carry-over tokens too. A lot of games have the element of giving the least advantaged player of the current turn the most advantage on the next one.

I do think you need something to keep the game interesting, how long do you think it will take to play, how many rounds of bidding are there? If the game is fast like 15-20 mins go wild. If you're expecting folk to sit down for an hour then it needs some game to it. if you had any written up games they'd be interesting to see how they played out.

burexas.irom posted:

It's secret, like the rest of the bid. That's why the trays are so big, to fit a card. Since it's a bluffing game I'm okay with players talking about their bids and making it clear they are using the advantage, kinda plays into the whole court intrigue narrative. Can you think of a reason to force keeping it secret or public?

It's really just the logistics of picking up a card and secretly putting it behind a screen.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2020 21:46

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

MrBlarney posted:

Secondly, if you have cards such that a player would rather retain an influence token instead of gaining the card, then you might want to eliminate those cards from the design and raise the floor level for card power. Winning a card should always feel good -- there's enough bad feelings in the game already from making a substantial bid that loses out to another player or not getting any rewards in a single round.

I think this is really the crux of the issue with games like this which can just be bad feeling generators. That turn where you get nothing is going to feel terrible, much worse than the other rounds where you get something.

I know I asked this previously but I think knowing how long the game is kinda matter here. I get that it's variable based on drawing a specific card but is that ~10 rounds or a 100. Your King deck looks reasonably chunky, like 40 cards? So that would make a game length between 31 and 40 turns. If you clip through that at 5 mins a turn which doesn't seem unreasonable for a 4 player game especially if you get rid of the randomised influence. so somewhere in the 2 1/2 - 3 hour mark. If that's a 20 card King Deck then, 1h 20 mins to 1h 40 mins. Is that what you were imagining?

# ¿ Sep 15, 2020 17:07

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 03:16

Aramoro: Jun 1, 2012

It seems OK, not sure about the game itself, you'd need to do some analysis on how often its possible to draw an impossible sum. One bit was confusing in the examples

quote:

This is the rare case where we choose which operation to use between aces. We’ll choose addition.

That isn't explained in the rules at all as I see. When you have 2 Aces with 2 cards you resolve the right Ace and use that as the third value for the left Ace, no choice is given.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2023 23:19

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