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I like the idea of a "horror movie" 1vAll game with hidden movement... well... now I have sort of a game idea: I'm imagining kind of a Tragedy Looper style "Overlord knows the rules, players figure them out" game that allows for the recreation of a variety of horror movie scenarios. The Horror player gets a set of rules that control how he moves (he gets a "secret tunnels" version of the map that tells him he can go straight from the docks to the garage, etc), how he kills (maybe he can only kill meeples that are alone, or maybe has different options that he can only trigger in certain rooms/times/etc.. maybe he has a rule that says "if you kill a dude and someone else was in the room you have to read this text"), and what his motivation/win-condition is. The players "wrangle" a bunch of partier meeples, with specific actions also available depending on the scenario. They can always just move a dude - but maybe they can also "start the music" or something to bring all the meeples back together in the main room or whatever. Maybe certain meeples have access to certain actions (the jock can attack the monster if he's visible, this other person can explore or read the book or whatever). The players generally have victory conditions that the monster needs to work to avoid - like calling the cops or running away or something - or they might win just by having anyone survive 9 turns or whatever. And the monster might have actions available at different times - like making some guy and girl meeples sneak off together at an inopportune time that he can trigger based on some rules/timing. In practice, it plays out with the players hemorrhaging random people while trying to figure out how the monster works, but they also have some characters with sort of "plot armor" such that they can't be killed until a certain number of other people are killed or only in certain ways or something. Rather than having a known set of possible rules (as in Tragedy Looper), I think you have the Horror player be forced to read "clue texts" as he acts (and have a straightforward enough theme) that give players thematic ways to figure out how the monster works and how they can hope to win. The last trick, I think, is how you manage all this information for a bunch of scenarios (because the scenarios wouldn't have great replayability) without having a million cards and such. I think maybe the answer is put everything in books. In the player book (which you make "coil bound" so it lays flat), each pair of pages has one page that's a playable map (ie. you put your dudes and/or status markers on the page, so you don't need any separate boards or scenario specific markers), and on the opposite page is the scenario rules the player gets to know about and their characters special abilities. In the monster book, you have annotation for the map, some text that you read out loud, your special scenario abilities, etc.. Not sure about whether you need an explicit "looping" setup (which seems hard to balance for this) or maybe it's just expected that the monster and players normally "survive" so they see most of the fun content - and then a winner is decided either by a final fight (which is biased based on how the game went) or just by score. Maybe in this game the players got a bad score because while obviously the main character won, all their friends died, and they had to spend a VP to give the main character a "surprise I wasn't actually killed by that" return half way through. I also think maybe you want some way to "leak" hidden information on a per-scenario basis. Like, maybe the Horror might have to reveal their current location, or the status of some "trap" or something using some kind of coded "Oracle" card that's publically viewable (maybe the cards have Horror-y symbols on them that hint at what they mean, again on a per-scenario basis, with the rules spelled out in the secret scenario rules). I like this as an information leak/player-puzzle mechanism, but also as a way for the Horror player to remember where they are and/or what they have going on, but without requiring a screen or something (and it's simple for them, because it just says "when you move to this location, remove your Horror figure from the map and display card "Campfire"). Anyway, I think it'd be a bunch of work and require a lot of creativity to come up with different scenarios (and the scenarios do need to make sense and have a lot of variety for the game to work... oooh, you could even have some "sequel" chains where some rules are re-used, but with some new twist because this time it's the original killer's son or whatever). ...but I think it'd be a ton of fun. jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Dec 28, 2017 |
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Dec 28, 2017 21:27
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JMBosch posted:I've been looking for a system for a horror movie based game for a while now, and this really hit the spot I was looking for.... Moving meeples is similar to Five Tribes: the player picks up any number of meeples from the same location and can move to any adjacent/connected locations as long as they place at least 1 meeple in every location they move to. I like a bunch of your ideas; particularly I think you're on the right track in terms of base mechanics. The movement system you describe seems like an amazingly great fit because it kind of makes "togetherness" a resource that you spend to get around the board - and that makes perfect sense in a game where separation is such a natural risk. I think it'd provide plenty of grist for interesting decisions in game, and I think it also gives a lot of design space to work with. Some recurring elements (like the lights you mention) make a lot of sense too, and give you sort of knobs players need in order to experiment and interact. The other tough nut might be combat; if you can find something satisfying for that, I think it could really come together. Anywho, please post about it if you end up going further with this. VVV: All sounds good to me. jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 18:53
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CodfishCartographer posted:So, cooperative games generally tend to be quite difficult. What is it that makes them so difficult? Obviously it varied from game to game, but are there running themes you’ve noticed? I feel like a lot of it is having way way way too many things to deal with, of varying priorities, and trying to balance dealing with as many as possible. Trying to avoid being overwhelmed. Would you guys agree, or is there other stuff that tends to make them particularly hard? I'm not super happy with how most co-ops are balanced. It normally boils down to: "You're playing a game where the sides are completely imbalanced - if you were against a thinking opponent it would be completely impossible. However, because your opponent moves randomly, it might end up being a fair fight. Or way too hard or easy. Who knows." I think this is a thing that could really use some fresh ideas, but it's definitely not an easy problem. I think the AI (and difficulty tuning knobs) in Gloomhaven ended up working pretty well, but it was still hard to keep the difficulty in the "sweet spot" over a campaign - and we still had missions that were way too easy or hard based on how the AI behaved. On the other end, apps offer much more interesting co-op opponents - but they demand a bunch more work (on both the design side and often the player side).
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Mar 8, 2018 00:52
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Kashuno posted:I am really bad at AI and co-op games in general. I like to design games with multiple paths to victory, but with games that are more coop oriented I need to really work on having one goal to 'win' and having multiple key decisions along the way. I think as a game designer one of my biggest weaknesses is I can scope a really great idea on a macro level, but implementing the micro-components to get that macro to happen is something I really struggle with. Personally, I think you're going to want some cards. Gloomhaven has obsoleted the "you get to move and shoot, or you can spend a token to move-and-shoot" model - the card economy opens up all sorts of interesting design space, and makes for interesting decisions on every turn. To be clear, you don't have to be as complicated as Gloomhaven; something like Century: Spice Road demonstrates how you can really strip down that same mechanic and still have an interesting (and dead simple, and brisk) game. In terms of AI, I think a good point of reference is Slay the Spire. The enemy AI is trivial (enemies have ~3 things they do, and each turn pick one of the 2 things they didn't do last turn), but the enemies vary in a few important ways such that the game rewards a variety of different play styles. I think the important thing for a board game is not having the AI take a long time to manage.
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Oct 5, 2018 17:17
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Kashuno posted:That said, the cards do open some good space, specifically around the energy mechanic I had described previously. A character with a good amount of high energy low damage cards can be peppering out a lot of smaller damage, while being able to recover more cards at a time for less cards because of their high energy. Meanwhile, a powerhouse character could have cards that do massive damage, but are very low energy. That way, they can absolutely murder things in 1-2 hits, but they have to spend significantly more resources to recover cards. Yeah - that sounds super good to me.
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Oct 5, 2018 17:35
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Kashuno posted:Hm, so I’ve worked out a combat system and a general game idea (beat up Bad Dudes and get a boss tonappear, beat him up to beat a wave and then continue to a next ‘level’) but I’m worried my game doesn’t have enough to *do* in it. Sounds good to me. I'd suggest making the iterations short so you're having quick fights, getting new cards and back into a new fight quickly. The fights don't have to be super thinky if the "character building" has interesting choices, good variety, and you're getting enough shots at it that you're in control of your destiny. Your map/enemy/setup/card variety seems pretty key too. You want setup to be quick, but also the ability to throw a lot of different angles at the player. For a while I was thinking about doing a game like this where the maps (and other stuff for the scenario, like monster stats) are in a coil-back book (not, like, the book tells you how to build a map, but you actually put your dudes on the pages). jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Oct 12, 2018 |
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Oct 12, 2018 21:16
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FirstAidKite posted:I have what I think is a really stupid question but I'm just hoping to get some opinions from others. A game like SHCD is 90% writing an interesting story (and usually they don't) - something closer to writing a screenplay for a TV crime show than a board game. One could imagine a game like this being very intricately designed such that you could approach the mystery in lots of different ways and have them all play out reasonably as the game carefully manages possible states - but I've never played one that bothers with this. Instead, there's a main path with shallow branches (which often lead to the same answers as random punishment). Then there's some red herrings/dead ends to punish you for looking at superfluous details. Very few have puzzles of any note, and only the best have any sort clever twist or anything interesting to be figured out. One of these could be very hard to design - and very satisfying to play - but most are just conventional crime stories chopped up into haphazard bits. The "escape room" type games (both "real life" and "board game") have universally terrible/thin writing, and live and die based on their puzzles (and, to a lesser extent, their "set pieces", though most board games are very constrained in this regard). Most of these puzzles are banal "lateral thinking", finding hidden doodads, or dumbed down reskins of classic puzzles. The best of these have one or two good puzzles or fun discoveries. Designing interesting puzzles is apparently hard enough that nobody has chosen to waste many good ones on board game buyers. They also all seem deathly afraid of including a mechanically challenging puzzle (beyond the simplest "logic-puzzle" style stuff). I think there's probably a market for a more tough+fair puzzle-experience game (think "The Witness" video game, maybe) if someone had the puzzle design chops to make one. One could also imagine a game blending both sorts of experiences (good puzzles and strong narrative) but I haven't seen one that works (eg. TIME STORIES kind of wants to do both, and throw in some dice rolling, and fails in all directions). Detective: Modern Crime is another newish attempt at a gamey-mystery, and (so far) it fails on both sides as well.
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Nov 20, 2018 20:48
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100YrsofAttitude posted:Cool, this looks good but is it as academic as it seems? MIT Press doesn't look like accessible reading. It's very straightforward, and lots of it is very basic material. The only exception is some appendix material about Sprague-Grundy/combinatorial games; he gives a weird, brief dip that I don't think many people are going to find terribly helpful (nor do I think SG theory is all that important for most game design). Still, understanding the core Garfield definitions of "politics", "luck", and "skill" is worth the price of admission.
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Dec 6, 2018 16:52
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MJP posted:Hey folks, I'm seeking blind playtesters for Miami Nights, a board game I'm developing! It's a property management and backstabbing/trick-taking game for up to four players, set on the art deco neon shorefront of South Beach! Not sure I'd be up for playing - but I'd give feedback on rules if you post them.
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May 16, 2020 22:38
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