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I have been messing around with a variant idea for Resistance and wanted some feedback and ideas. I'm assuming most people know the rules for Resistance (and/or Avalon) - the basic idea for this variant is that instead of pass/fail cards, everybody has a hand of cards that they can play any number of during a mission. 1. Each player has a token with their player color on it. 2. Each player is dealt a hand of 3 randomly colored cards at the start. If selected for a mission, players must play at least one card but may play up to their entire hand - each player selects however many cards they want secretly, and then places them in front of them simultaneously. The cards are shuffled together and revealed - Any cards played that are the same color as any player on the mission are passes. Cards of any other color are fails. The mission objectives are to achieve a certain number of net successes above the number of failures. 3. If a team is proposed and voted down, all players draw a card. If a team is approved, players on the mission play their cards and then draw two new cards. Any time after drawing, players must discard down to 4 cards. 4. In addition to the colored mission cards, there are special power cards in the deck. These cards are color-coded as well and will only activate if a player of that color is on the mission - otherwise, they are neither a pass nor a fail. Each power will only key to one specific player, so if you don't want to worry about a power activating you can avoid putting that player on the mission. Powers: 1. After counting all mission cards, switch the number of passes and fails 2. After counting all mission cards, each player on the mission must play an additional card 3. After the result of the mission has been determined, all players pass their color token clockwise 4. All players pass a card counterclockwise 5. All players on the mission draw an extra card 6. All players not on the mission discard a card 7. All players on the mission must reveal one card from their remaining hand I think powers 1 and 2 are more interesting than the rest, but I haven't been able to think of anything else similar. So, any thoughts on the concept or balance, or ideas for powers? One of the big concerns I have is getting away from the BSG rule of forcing people to be vague about what cards they played. I want to make the cards another aspect of the bluffing in the game, as well as allowing players to develop strategies based on their hands. I'd also be interested in finding ways to combine this with the new roles from Avalon.
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Dec 4, 2012 04:42
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| # ¿ Apr 30, 2024 02:22 |
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I have a couple ideas I haven't made progress on for a while. Anybody want to help brainstorm and/or take them and make a game? 1. The purpose of the game is as a filler to play while people are arriving, something similar to but slightly more board-gamey than Egyptian Ratscrew. It's a 1-vs-all game where new players can jump in at any time. 2 players are battling to the death, a 3rd player can jump in between turns when he thinks the current players are weak enough that he can beat both together; the other two now have to team up against the new player; a 4th can join if he thinks he can beat all 3, etc. Score points based on how many people you beat, anybody observing but not in the round gets -1 point. Start new round with winner vs. newest arrival. -Anyway, I like the concept but I have no mechanics for how the game actually plays, anything I come up with just feels tacked on. 2. Another concept: A co-op game where sharing information is dangerous. A Cthulhu-esque theme - you are trying to learn things man was not meant to know without going insane. As a mechanic, think quantum Blackjack - you are trying to get a hand of 21 without breaking, but you break if you even KNOW where cards summing over 21 are (i.e. I have 16 and I know player two has a 6 - I broke 21). If you go over, you go insane and discard your whole hand, and everybody discards one card. You can trade cards with other players, but only at random. There's some kind of turn limit to the game to force you along, maybe different suits interact in different ways. Other possible victory condition - if you can identify exactly where 21 is in a single suit, without necessarily holding them all. (Cards would go 0-10 in each suit). Again, my problem is I don't know what else to do with the game, I don't know if there's any actual strategy to it, and as a co-op game I don't know that it encourages interaction, the idea was basically to get around quarterbacking. 3. A SCARY GAME MECHANIC for a horror game: Game comes with a hundred unique character cards, each with their own name, picture and maybe a minor special ability. At the start of the game, you draw and lay face down in the middle of the board a card from a Darkness deck. The deck consists of 99 Darkness cards and 1 Beast card. At the end of the game if you lost, you reveal the card. If it's the Beast, you have to BURN YOUR CHARACTER CARD. If it's a Darkness, you just lose - but you burn that Darkness card. I don't know that there's really a game in this, I was just trying to think of a game that would actually be scary to play, and I thought having that unknown face-down card looking at you all game would be intimidating (there's a big red eye on the back!), that plus the sense of loss in destroying a unique character, and the idea of gradually making the threat higher every game. Dr. Video Games 0069 fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Mar 30, 2013 |
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Mar 30, 2013 05:38
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I did a board game jam last weekend and we successfully completed a prototype of a relatively awful game. Overall I'm actually happy with how things turned out - we had the smallest group size at 3 (most were 4 or 5), and had no dedicated artists, layout persons or technical writers among us, but we hammered out a theme, rules, a board and 2 decks and a few other crude components in the space of about 5 hours. The themes they gave us were Natural Disasters, Escape, and Movie Extras, and we had to use at least 2 of the 3. I insisted on not going with the first thing we thought of, and we eventually settled on "Casting agencies trying to get all of their extras out of a terrible disaster movie by having them all killed off on screen as quickly as possible," which was a little cumbersome but seemed fun. We almost subconsciously locked into a worker placement game - among the components the event gave us were a set of custom Lords of Waterdeep meeples, which would continue to haunt our design process as we tried to get away from accidentally copying that game by being too generic. Our central conceit was that you were trying to get rid of all your workers, which you would need resources to do - influence, which you get by schmoozing at the craft services table, contracts, which come from the production office and can also be used to draw special cards that would give you bonus objectives or personal worker placement spots, and costumes, which could also be spent to avoid losing points. There were 3 new scenes from a deck every round that you could put an extra in to kill them if you had the appropriate resourcees, and you would also keep the card, which could apply to your bonus objectives. As a worker placement game, it did end up being pretty generic. We were afraid if we made it too complicated, it would be easy to find an imbalanced strategy that we didn't have time to account for and the game would just get broken immediately. We also didn't leave enough time to actually playtest the game, but luckily it did not end up being broken, just boring. Your resources were just different colored cubes, and the spots you got them from were all the same - 2 people can put a worker there to get a cube of that color, and one person can put 2 workers there to get a permanent cost reduction of that resource type (our one attempt to allow some progression in your board state). There was a spot to take the start player marker (stand in front of the director and he notices you), a spot to look at the next round's scene cards (the cgi offices), a spot to draw a card (your trailer - not very thematic, but the cards weren't either), and an always-available but cost-inefficient spot where you can kill an extra - in front of the greenscreen. One of the judges really liked our game, but his one complaint (rightfully) was that there weren't enough spots for workers for a 4 player game - you would just end up not being able to play, and there was no overflow spot. The other judge did not care for our game at all and gave us bad marks all around, including for lack of theme and lack of strategy, which we thought was unfair (the strategy was overly simple, and probably favored the first player, but it was there). But since the first judge was probably too nice, I think it evened out. If I had to do it again, I would have just gone for putting more varied and potentially imbalanced stuff in, in the hopes that at least it would make the playtest fun, and then we could just balance by putting bonus points or negative points on the things that were too strong or weak. We also had a weird scoring method that felt unwieldy, where everybody starts with 100 points and you lose points every round for the number of workers you have left, which was way too mathy and unintuitive. Overall it was a fun experience and I'd happily do it again. The event, I mean, not our game.
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Feb 2, 2016 23:38
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sector_corrector posted:That does sound like fun. Worker placement is something I'm nearly entirely unfamiliar with outside of Carcassonne, but I'd be interested to try it. Stone Age and Lords of Waterdeep are kind of the barebones worker placement games, though there's better ones out there with more variation on the mechanic - Dungeon Lords, Argent, and Keyflower are all pretty great. sector_corrector posted:Who was hosting the event? I'd like to try my hand at it if there was one nearby. Misandu posted:That sounds incredible, especially the theme for your game. Is that a regular thing in your area or was it more of a one off event? The Board of Games in Los Angeles hosted it, they've done 2 before and are planning more, probably for June if not sooner.
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Feb 4, 2016 02:20
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JMBosch posted:To foster more conversation: Maybe have some of the pieces on the board have secret owners, so the pawns are all gray with the actual player color on the bottom (or no color). They move semi- autonomously and every time they cross a border everybody gets a chance to secretly add contraband or information cards or whatever to their cargo. But the cards do different things depending on if their color matches the pawn or not, so if a blue agent crosses the border with a red tech card nothing happens, but if they bring a blue tech card over they can use it as a bomb. The border owner can detain the agent, but he must correctly guess which player they belong to.
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Feb 6, 2016 20:44
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You could add competition to the missions if you had some communal ones that anyone could be doing in addition to the personal ones. You could use the same mission deck or have one specifically for the communal one, which could also award points for the second person to finish it, or have a major and a minor objective that two people could do. Maybe it doesn't require you to go to a specific spot to start it, just to fulfill the end condition. You could also have multi-step missions that everyone can contribute to, and at the end you get rewards based on how much each person contributed. The calculation for hazard checks sounds overly complicated. Like, it's nice that it's only one die roll but there's a lot of things to add and subract to the point where it feels like the elegance is lost, especially if you're doing this almost every turn. Crash landing sounds brutal, selling back all your upgrades seems like it would be game ending. I remember them crashing like every other episode in Tale Spin, seems like it should be more fun. Like you have to steal a pirate ship, or do a favor for the mechanic like a free mission, or take on debt and then race against time to pay it off. Or you can fly with a broken plane, it's just riskier. I am not really clear on what fate cards are - it's just a thing you get 2 of per turn and you can add them to your roll? And you can place or remove hazards with them? Can't you just remove the thing so you don't have to roll for it? Possible end game scoring - most/fewest crashes, most valuable plane, most missions of a certain type, most completed missions overall.
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Apr 14, 2017 05:31
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You could have the storms and pirates come from an event deck or die and change every round. Maybe players can manipulate then when they're on the board, like pirates will chase you if you're in their quadrant so you can lure them into other players.
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Apr 15, 2017 21:15
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Instead of or in addition to multiple phases, you can have bosses made of multiple pieces, and track health independently on them. Big hits can take out a whole piece, and small hits can target and accumulate on one piece until it's dead. You can combine that with the armor idea and have say one piece which is the "shell", which provides damage reduction on the other pieces until it's destroyed, but itself has no damage reduction.
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Dec 19, 2021 02:46
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| # ¿ Apr 30, 2024 02:22 |
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To your last question, people that like auction games will play auction games that are just a bunch of different auctions. For Sale is an all time classic and is just an auction followed by a different type of auction, and Modern Art is another well regarded game that's just a series of alternating types of auctions. For your specific idea, it's a little confusing to wrap your head around, since you're describing two diametrically opposed types of bids - one where you're bidding high (for the specialists) and one where you're bidding low (the jobs). I can't actually think of any games where players are trying to bid low - not saying it hasn't been done or can't be done, I'm just not sure how it would work mechanically since you can hypothetically always bid zero or one - even if you make no profit, you are still denying the job to other players. The first thing that comes to mind is maybe each player alternates being the job auctioneer, and they get some kind of payout if the winner of the job is successful at completing it. Then they have incentive to not just accept the lowest bid.
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Sep 30, 2023 00:40
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