Board Game Design Laboratory: Igor, get the meeples

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

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

For those looking at the self-publishing route, I've been told Superior POD and The Game Crafter are pretty good resources, but good luck with that whole distribution and turning-a-decent-profit thing.

And of course, BGG's forums can be mined by those with time for lots more design and publishing resources.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2012 03:58

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 10:13

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

jmzero posted:

ActingPower posted:
Once you've successfully set up the situation necessary for the sleeper agent to complete their task, you wake them up, have them perform their task, and get them out before the opponent captures them.

My first concern would be managing the tug-of-war between "setting up the crime requires multiple steps", "you want to do some extra stuff to throw off the watcher", and "you don't want the game to go on forever".
...
I really like this kind of setting if you can figure out the mechanics to support it.

Edit: maybe have more than 2 players, and have the "bad guy" player be secret? Have some sort of benefit to "getting checked" when you're not guilty, so everyone is motivated to look a bit suspicious.

I'm working on a modern/near future, civil war/political struggle game that started out as a checkpoint interview roleplaying/boardgame mix inspired by Papers, Please and Sheriff of Nottingham. But I broke off that core mechanic those games inspired to maybe use elsewhere because the rest of the game was getting big enough without it. The way this design handles the tensions jmzero identifies is not by having individual tasks for agents to set up, but instead having each player maintain dual loyalties: one to a public group they fight for (maybe along with another player) and another, secret loyalty, different to each player, to one of a few public resources that everyone has a vested interest in maintaining. It's not quite the same mechanics problem as ActingPower's idea presents, but maybe it can stir some brainstorming:

Each player publicly belongs to 1 of the 3 Factions struggling for control on the map, and each player on a Faction can move and use any of that Faction's Agents to do Actions. But each player also has a secret Loyalty to 1 of 5 Pillars of Society (essentially: the wealthy, politicians, military/police, laborers, and everyone else). The Pillars each have their own 10-point Support track and action cards, and function as a publicly shared set of resources that represent the power of these social groups struggling to survive or thrive through this on-going conflict between the Factions.

The Pillars' Support tracks automatically go down 1 every few turns, or faster if any Pillars are already at 0. They'll go down quicker than that during play though, because Pillar Support can also be used as a resource to convert other resources (money, weapons, intel, influence, support, agents, control, etc.) or to gain action cards specific to particular Pillars. If all Pillars hit 0, however, all players lose. Each Agent on every Faction also has a secret Loyalty to one of these Pillars, on the bottom side of their token, which remains secret unless players use special actions to check or reveal it for individual agents.

At the end of the game, each player gets VPs based on whether the Pillar they're Loyal to finished with the most Support, as well as how many living Agents on their Faction remain who are also Loyal to their chosen Pillar. They also get some VPs for how well their Faction is doing at the end, but can get more from the Pillar they are Loyal to.

So each player wants their public Faction to do well, but is more interested in their Pillar doing best, and uses actions with their visible Agents and Pillar Support to accomplish both. But if they make it obvious which Pillar they're Loyal to, other players can work to bring it down. And everyone also wants to keep all Pillars from hitting 0, which is a constant pressure. Granted, this is all theoretical as I'm still working on the action cards and prototype, so my current rules are wholly untested.

------
EDIT: Maybe each player has a board with an individual track for each of their agents, and each agent is gradually working their way to the end of the track which represents them accomplishing their goal. Each player assigns each of their agents' goals at the start of the game by placing a goal card face-down next to each agent's track. Maybe 5 agents and 3 goal cards are red herrings and 2 goal cards are actual player goals. Then gameplay consists of players playing cards or doing other actions to advance agents with certain goals forward, and maybe set agents with other goals back. There could be another investigative element that might reveal more about an agent's goal by examining the actions they've done. Over the course of the game, maybe a player would only be able to stop 3 or 4 agents from reaching their end goal, so they have to choose wisely. When an agent reaches the end of their track, their goal is revealed and performed. If it's a red herring, play continues. If it's a player goal, the game ends. VPs go most to the player whose agent performed their goal, but other VPs are gained based on how far your agents went on their track? and whether you stopped other players' agents on their tracks?

JMBosch fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Feb 20, 2015

# ¿ Feb 20, 2015 01:20

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

My attempt at an action movie fighting card game is fumbling around this question with a Momentum mechanic. Currently, the idea is that each round starts with players anteing up increasing amounts of Momentum for the round. Momentum is primarily used to play Action Cards that do most of the fighting in the game, but you have to spend all the Momentum you dedicate to a round. Spending a lot of Momentum in one round will limit how much you can use the next, to try and get an ebb-and-flow of actions for each participant. And order of play is dictated largely by Momentum for the round, where the player with the highest dedicated Momentum is the only player that can't choose to pass on their turn to play an action. I'm still hammering out some specifics about the mechanics and how they interact with a Balance stat as well.

For health, I'm planning to use Injury Tokens that give stat de-buffs instead of health points, but now I'm wondering if I should tie health in to a player's available cards for their deck. I'm also toying with the idea of using a Resolve stat like a shield that usually must be worn down before a character can actually be Injured, and it recharges a bit every round. Works thematically if your game is about super-tough, hard-to-kill fighters.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2015 07:52

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Anniversary posted:

This sounds like an interesting take on the resource based fighter concept, but if injuries are debuffs what causes the game to end? I also really like the idea that a bid resource becomes your fuel for actions for the round, so you're somewhat preemptively determining how explosive you want it to be.

Yeah, the idea is to give a warning to other players right before someone tries to do a big string of actions, so they can maybe try to act a little defensively, preserve resources, and try to respond next turn. That and, of course, to turn the mechanic of committing to a rhythmic beat in a fight into a competitive game of 1-upping machismo.

I really hate player elimination, so currently, if a player's character gets X injuries they abandon the character (thematically the actor probably pulls out of the movie's production because they took too many injuries or something) and the player gains a new character. Still deciding on how to balance this. Maybe they get an alternate, B-list actor character with reduced stats, or an old, washed-up actor character that starts with a random injury or two.

But the game itself is paced by the Director's Demands deck, which lays out 3 face-up Director's Demand cards at a time that players are trying to fulfill with their characters' fighting. Mini-Objectives like "Reduce a Fighter's Resolve to 0 in 2 Actions" or "Move 8+ Spaces and gain 8+ Style Points in 1 Round." When a Director's Demand is met, the player that met it gets the card and the Victory Points (or equivalent) on it. The game lasts until a certain number of these cards have been completed.

JMBosch fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Feb 28, 2015

# ¿ Feb 28, 2015 08:56

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

The Lobster posted:

That all sounds really badass, actually. I'm not sure how I'd implement it though at this point in time. I mean I've barely started so I could go any direction really. But that sounds like a tangent with mechanics worth pursuing. I don't know if I'm clever enough to pull it off though.

I like the direction Whalley's suggestions could take your game too. Of course, pursuing them would mean your game would become longer, and have more heavy strategy. If you want a bigger, less random game, here are some ideas for a different take on the design, based on Whalley's suggestions:

-Publishers: No publisher cards. Players are the publishers. Start of game, each player is dealt X random Work Cards. These will form the player's deck and playing hand. After looking at their starting Work Cards a minute, players draft Author Cards until each has Y Author Cards, and they put them face-up on the table in front of them, as that publisher's frequent authors. If using money, each player also gets Z money tokens. (Or you could use 1 Publisher Card per player to give each player a special ability or something, variable player powers.)

-Authors: The Author Cards show how much it costs to play 1 Work Card on the Author, the minimum number of Work Cards that an Author needs to release a work, how many Work Cards maximum the Author can take on before they can do nothing but release a work, and score multipliers/penalties the Author provides to any of their released works that include certain Work Cards. (For example: Georgette S.S. Martine only costs $1 to have a Work Card played on her, but she takes a long time before one of her epic works is ready, so she needs a minimum of 5 Work Cards before she can release a work. She can keep writing if you let her, so she has a high max of 10 Work Cards before she HAS to release her work. When her work is released, every "Grim" Work Card scores x2, every "Scandalous" Work Card scores x3, and every "Fantasy" Work Card scores x4. However, her novels' caring relationships tend to fall pretty flat, so every "Romantic" Work Card only scores half.) Maybe Authors also have a "Freelance Cost" or something that, if a publisher pays, that publisher can take the Author as theirs, as long as they aren't already working on something for another publisher.

-Work Cards: Work Cards represent the time and effort an Author puts into a work, as well as the elements of genre, plot, and style that people will like or dislike about a work. A Work Card is played face-down, below the face-up Author you are playing it on. This way, players can see who you're investing work/time in to, and who's working on big projects, or no projects at all. In the above examples, it costs money to play a Work Card on an Author, but you don't have to use that. It just as easily could be a play limit of 1 Work Card per turn instead, or something like that. All of the other special actions the publishers can do can either be special Work Cards they play face-up to the table, or they could be another card type that gets distributed at the start of the game as well.

-Releasing a Work: If an Author has at least their minimum number of Work Cards already on them, you can release their work. Turn over all their face-down Work Cards to show everyone what kind of Work it is. Then gain money (or victory points) for each work card based on how the market currently rates it, and any Author multipliers/penalties applied to it. The market itself is the tricky part, and you might want to research more economic/commodity-trading games to see how they balance it out, if you want something more realistic and predictable than simply dice rolls and multipliers. I'd recommend a track, with tokens on it either for each element from Work Cards, or for different groupings of elements from Work Cards. (For example: Suspense [genre], Twist Ending [plot], and Constant Reveals [style] could all be on the same market token. As people get sick of 1 of these, they get sick of all of them, or if they love one, they love all. Might depend on whether genre, plot, and style Work Cards are actually any different in any significant way, or you could just make them all the same thing.)

-Market: If using a Market Track, you could use it for either demand or supply/saturation. Either way, the stuff people want more you get paid more for, and vice versa. To try and replicate markets a little more, you could either move something's position on the market for every matching Work Card in a released work, or move each element on the market track once per released work that contains that element. (For example: If someone releases something with 3 Fantasy Work Cards, you could saturate the fantasy market by either 3 points, or 1 point.) Other cards/actions can have all sorts of effects on the market, of course.

Either way, I would recommend against the dice rolls, especially for valuing a work. As you recognized, there needs to be more predictability in the market, and in players tracking when other players might release a work or not. The above recommendations definitely take your game away from the quicker playtime you mentioned, but in my opinion, a bigger, deeper, more strategic version of this game/theme/idea is much more appealing. But that's probably just my tastes.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2015 21:40

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

You might want to take a look at Prosperity, if you haven't already. It brushes up against or tackles some similar issues you're trying to pin down, but in a simpler fashion.

Here's Rahdo's runthrough of it.

# ¿ May 30, 2015 00:15

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

CodfishCartographer posted:

I really like the idea of the non-urgent threats all piling on top of each other to create one gigantic clusterfuck of panic. Each one being kind of an inconvenience at best makes it all the more hilarious when it all piles up to create a massive catastrophe.

Following this lead and what oxidation said, you can structure it where everyone, hunters and monster, starts out strong, and doesn't get any stronger, but it's the hunter characters who progressively get weaker, or in worse of a situation, as the game continues and the monster takes more actions. It would add to the fear and feelings of insecurity in the hunter players to start out super confident in powerful armor with big guns, walking around a brightly lit, well-functioning ship/station/whatever looking for some nuisance, and then after every turn, the monster causes something else to go wrong. The metagame goals pretty much stay the same (survive until you can take out all the threats), but the emotions and narrative that unfold as the game plays is one of increasing desperation of the hunters as their confidence and power gets undermined by a menacing, unseen threat.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 21:21

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Big Ol Marsh Pussy posted:

What I'm looking for before I try to flesh out mechanics is some incentive for players to try to keep their mutated workers hidden for their own personal gain, making the game semi-co-op without there being a dedicated "traitor" player. The best I've come up with is "a player with X amount of workers who are all mutated wins the game by hostile takeover" but that idea has a lot of problems. Is there any way to do something like this without running into Dead of Winter style hidden objective bullshit?

Drawing from Euphoria's Worker Knowledge mechanics, you could do something where mutations aren't hidden, they benefit the controller of the mutated worker by making the worker more efficient or something, but they also lower the efficiency of non-mutated workers in the same work area/type. Then, have a mechanic where too many mutated workers in the same area causes some big negative effect for all players (mutant revolt? Gorge themselves on resources? Just leave the colony?).

This way, players are incentivized to have some mutated workers and use them for bonuses, but everyone is going to feel constrained when other players use mutated workers. You can keep the inside the colony/outside the colony distinctions between actions with risks and rewards being tuned so that using a mutated worker inside the colony is much more likely to trigger the negative effects than having them work outside. And, of course, unmutated workers outside the colony are more likely to be mutated. Maybe have enough workers so that players can still have some choice about whether or not to use mutated workers at all in the first few turns when their workers start getting mutated.

Then you could have any resource-based victory conditions you want, as long as it's pretty much guaranteed a player will have to use SOME mutated workers at some point to win. This kind of loses the political uncertainty of who might be working against the best interest of the collected survivors to win, so maybe you could just use basic hidden objective cards, where each one is a unique victory condition based on a different survivor mindset or resource or something. So everyone will be vying for slightly different things more than others throughout the game, but no one will be sure exactly what someone needs to win, forcing players to try and block each other strategically. One of those hidden objective cards could be something like "You win if you have X+ mutated workers, or Y+ mutated workers per player."

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 23:04

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Anniversary posted:

So I have a question about where you would rather have luck in a game; would you rather have players action selection be somewhat random (like Mage Knight), enemy/NPC actions be somewhat random (like Kingdom Death), both, or neither?

I started off with players actions being random but that led to too many unwinable game states (that said I think this, or both, is the right answer, I just need to refine it to have more meaningful choices). Then I tried neither being random and that turned it into a solvable math problem.

I think the right call here is to have both be random, with ways for players to manipulate both. How exactly is somewhat up in the air, but if anyone has any suggestions here I'd love to hear them.

The issue is more than just "random or not" and where, as you allude to in your last comment. It's more about hidden vs. known Information, select randomness, and ways to prepare for or manipulate the worst random results, and how you bring all of these together. A little bit of randomness and well-placed hidden information can be much more effective and interesting than just high randomness, for example.

The important thing is, as usual, making sure your players have interesting and, at least somewhat, strategic choices to make. Too much randomness sucks away the significant of player choices and can undermine this, so I always try to balance randomness by having interesting ways to use what would be the worst random results, or by having different approaches and strategies to mitigating the randomness. You can look at more Euro-type games that have randomness to see different ways to do this: Bora Bora (rolled dice are workers to place, with high #s being better, but low #s block out higher #s from taking a worker space), Village (set action cube #s, but random distribution, then distribution is visible to players and they can choose which spaces to use when based on this), Agricola (randomized starting player powers, and small amount of set randomization with new actions becoming available somewhere within the same 2-3 specific turns), etc.

I try to approach hidden vs. known information somewhat thematically, thinking "what would this player's character actually know about this enemy upon first encountering them, and what would they find out only after engaging them?" (But balance should take precedence over theme most of the time, in my opinion.) So one idea I just came up with could be that your enemies and your enemy AIs could be separate, and the enemy AIs could be on different cards that fall into categories of type. Like, say there are 5 Berserk AI cards, and 5 Guard AI cards, and 5 Prowler AI cards, etc. with their AI type printed on the back. Each card is unique, with unique AI plotting to run through, but they are based on their AI type, so you can make some assumptions about how a "Guard" might act as opposed to a "Berserker." These cards can be all shuffled together and placed into a facedown AI deck. If you don't want the player to be able to know what type of enemy AI is coming up next, you can have a blank dummy card on top of the deck, or draw cards from the bottom of the deck instead of the top. Then, when a new enemy appears, draw the first AI card and apply it to them. The player would probably be able to tell how an enemy is behaving before engaging, so it would make sense that they can identify "this enemy is guarding, this one is berserk, etc." You also get the added bonuses of having a lot more varied encounters, as each enemy acts differently and has to be fought differently when they have a different AI card.

Enemy AI is really hard to do right, of course, but I think the best approaches have both some hidden information and a little randomness involved. But whatever the systems of your game are, you need some ways to gain an edge over the randomness as player powers and/or rewards (draw an extra card, or draw 3 cards and choose 1, or peek at an enemy's action plan or the next card in the AI deck, etc.)

# ¿ Nov 3, 2015 18:06

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Misandu posted:

This could be interesting too, but might really slow down play if you have a lot of units that modify dice. Alternatively "Buff/Leader" type units could take in one type/roll of dice and turn them into another as an action maybe?

If Anniversary thinks it would get to be too much bookkeeping to have to use a unit to convert dice to the numbers players want, he can instead just make a resource that allows players to change a die. Make some way for players to earn "Nudge Tokens" or something, give them one each at the start of the game, and whenever a player wants to change a die roll, they can just spend one to "nudge" their die by + or - 1. If it's a resource players know is available, and they can earn more and/or save them up for when they need them, players would probably feel less constricted than if they have to use up dice/a unit to convert their less favorable rolls towards something more useable.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2016 22:36

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

If anyone's interested, I made a poorly organized and not very brief blog update on my unofficial Venture Bros boardgame design, in honor of the Season 6 premiere tonight.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 04:01

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

I'm looking for some ideas to change the core system of one of my game designs. I've gone through a few different iterations trying to avoid too much randomness, too much math, or not enough suspense and fun, but then I seem to come right back around to similar problems with each new system.

Currently, there are 4 stats, and each stat has 5 skills. Basically the stats are really just categories or different action types and the skills, represented by icons, are what actually do things. Here's a sample character card (ignore the ugly prototype-ness and clipart):

Each player controls 4 Characters, each with a card like this face-up on their player board. Most actions require spending these skills, like entering new areas, searching and resolving effects, completing quests, combat with other players' characters, etc. To perform an action, a player places an action cube on one of the 4 stat rows on the character card (Explore, Sneak, Fight, or Think), which generates all the skills on that stat row that the character can then immediately spend on an action. (For example, Rusty here can use an action cube on his Think stat to generate 2 Investigate skills, 1 Plan skill, and 1 Fix skill to spend on an action.)

Each player also has a small hand of unique skill cards specific to their characters, drawn from a small deck. When performing an action as above, a player can also play one or more of these skill cards from their hand to add more skill icons for the current action. (To continue the previous example, Rusty can play this skill card to add 2 more Plan skills to his current 2 Investigate, 1 Plan, and 1 Fix.)

And here's a reference card for the different ranks of skills in each stat.

They are ranked 1 through 5, and their relative power can be quickly grasped by looking at the number or corners in an icon.

First and foremost, this is still too much math. I changed from a simple points system to an icon-based system to cut down on the math, but I had way too many icons. (I started with 10 skills in each stat, but even cut down to 5 in each, it's still too much to calculate for each potential action someone might want to do.) I wanted skills and ranks because I want some variation within a stat about what a character can or can't do, not just a linear scale of "this char's strength is 4 and this one's is 5, so they win." This gets messy in combat too, where I have been vacillating between things like "the highest ranked skill determines the winner and number of skills resolve ties" and the opposite. I think a desire to avoid randomness, as I want this to be a fairly strategic game, led me to over complicate the base stat system in order to compensate for lack of dice rolling or something.

I added action cubes to limit a player's number of actions (with 4 characters each, giving 1 action per character on a turn seemed to add friction between what a player thinks they should be doing/able to do and what they are). Action cubes also created a risk/reward mechanic of having to decide how many cubes and cards to hold on to outside of players' turns, in order to counter against any potential combat or other effects from other players. But it's causing a lot of headaches for defining when you have to use action cubes and when you don't. If you have to use them whenever you want to generate skill icons, then players either need lots of action cubes or they can barely ever respond or counter when attacked by others. Too many action cubes is a big problem for analysis paralysis and long turns, and dilutes that risk/reward trade off at the end of turns. If some actions, say responding outside of your turn, don't need action cubes, then it can be tough to keep those rules in mind and remember where and when to use action cubes. Similarly, limiting skill cards being played from the hand for bonuses is becoming an issue, solely because of the number of skill icons it brings into the mix. Limiting one skill card played per action seems to be an okay temp fix, but some players may feel it limits the usefulness of having a hand of cards mechanic at all.

So basically I'm looking for any and all ideas to break up my thinking on the core system for this game. I want something that's engaging and thrilling in a pulp/comic book adventure sort of way, but avoids the sheer randomness of something dice-heavy like Fortune and Glory or Betrayal at House on the Hill, which both rely almost entirely on their theme to keep players interested in a weak system. I'm fine with bringing other components in, like dice, I just don't want your average, boring "I got 3 points plus my card is 4 points, you got 1 point plus your card is 3 points, I win," sort of resolution. And I'm hoping to keep it somewhat quick and streamlined, as I would really like to fit up to 6 players, if possible, into what's already a pretty bloated game.

Some early ideas:
-Character cards have dice roll results on them, where low level skills or skills in stats the character is good at only require low dice rolls to "activate" (like 2+ or 3+) while hard skills and those not familiar to the character require really high rolls. Adds suspense of dice rolling, but can still curb randomness by playing to characters' strengths. A potential issue is how to determine how many dice a player/character gets to roll. And I also hate when a low dice roll can't be used for anything, so maybe even a 1+ can activate some super low skill that everyone has that can sometimes be useful. Still doesn't help with direct stat/skill-to-stat/skill contests, though.

-Character cards have fewer skills on them (maybe they aren't even cards, but just rectangular tokens with some base skills on them), but each character has an "active skill card" face-up on the player board next to the character card/token. So there's always a character's small base stats, plus their current skill modifier card that add together to show what kind of skills they could generate right now. A player can change to a new active skill card for any of their characters at any time by playing a new one from their hand and discarding the old, basically to switch characters into different "modes" or "moods" for handling different types of situations. Problem is that it cuts down on hidden information, and hence strategy. Maybe combining with the dice roll "activations" above could help with that.

-Instead of "generating" skills in the moment right before an action that spends them, maybe each skill is a token, and your characters generate or earn these tokens throughout the game, which can then more literally be "spent" by you discarding those skill tokens to the general supply. Problem is, again, one's token supply would probably have to be hidden information, but if they're behind a screen, how do you keep track of which tokens each character has, and ensure players aren't cheating by switching tokens between characters? (While teaming up for combo actions is a big part of the game, letting all your characters go off and do their own thing, and coordinate them around the map for multi-level quests, is also an important aspect that would be lost if all characters on a players' team get their skills kind of lumped together in one supply.) Additionally, I might need to address how long a character could hold on to a skill token? Could a character just spend the first half of the game "training" somewhere quiet and stocking up on a bunch of skill tokens and unleash them in a practiced fury over the second half of the game?

None of these ideas particularly address the issue of direct contest resolutions with this stat/skill system. How would you resolve conflict between characters who have different numbers of skills in 4 stat categories, and each skill can have a rank of 1-5 or so?

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 18:35

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Harvey Mantaco posted:

You are the (almost) same loving game as me except better.

Good job though, I don't have much decent advice to give but your project looks fun and I'd play it.

One thing I've done to make it a bit more engaging than is the X + Y I have beat the Z I need? Is I have a thing where when the characters in my game use certain levels of skills, they gain certain vulnerabilities or disadvantages on following rounds. For example, If I use a card or static character ability that let's me "meditate" and gain a certain resource (Mind) it leaves me vulnerable to sneak attacks the following round for pretty much all but the most noisy enemies - however this can be mitigated by a few abilities in the game that let you "scout" (peak at the deck) to see what's coming to see if it's a good idea. The cards that mitigate the negative effects usually come from a different character so there needs to be some teamwork. It still ends up being X + Y > Z but the way you go about getting the numbers is a bit more interesting. I haven't playtested it too much though so you know, grain of salt. Maybe there's something similar you can look at. Having some abilities RNG though cards or whatever, but then having some static to each character (or on say, "items" they can equip) can help to mitigate the lack of control, and even cards can be controlled a bit with a bit of drafting if that works for your game.

Thanks for the encouragement. There's definitely some parallel thinking in amateur designers working on a slightly more strategic type of pulp adventure game. (I just found the Thrilling Tales of Adventure! prototype and am finding some intriguing similarities/improvements there too.) Which tells me we're on to something that interests more people than just ourselves, if we can get our games finished!

I like the added strategy of certain skills opening you up to vulnerabilities, but I'm worried it might add too much bookkeeping, which my game already needs to cut down on. It also reminds me of one of my horror game designs, where the characters "stats" are really their resistances to different sources of terror, and they have to be "spent" to control monsters/spirits associated with those terror sources. Spending those resistances slides you down into weaknesses to those terror sources, and hence, maybe even fear of your own creatures. It might work well if I can find a way to get the skill-icons-as-actual-tokens mechanic to work, nice and streamlined. The skill tokens could have the skill on one side, and a random, but thematic, negative effect on the other, depending on what skill/how powerful of a skill it is. So when you play, say, 3 Skill tokens on an action, the effect requires you to flip one at random to its "vulnerable" side and that's what penalty you have until your next turn or something. I might toy with that.

Right now, I'm sort of leaning towards that mix of ideas I mentioned at the end: static/base character skills on their character card, plus 1 dynamic modifier card always in play per character, and those set the capabilities of your character, which you then roll to try and activate.

I don't think it's the general idea of a stat/skill icon system that's the problem, it's just finding that sweetspot of balance between "a variety of interesting and useful skills to consider" and "I'm looking at way too many icons per turn to really care about what's happening."

EDIT - Oh, and I have Items, Vehicles, Allies, and Henches in my game to help add more variety of sources for bonus skill icons and special abilities. I just didn't mention them because it's unnecessary added detail. Plus, I was already struggling with having way too many cards in earlier iterations of the design, so I moved Items, Vehicles, and Allies to tokens on player boards, making them always available, but exhaustible. And they need different things to be "refreshed" and used again, like action cubes, money spent, certain skill icons, etc.

JMBosch fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Feb 5, 2016

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 19:54

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

sector_corrector posted:

You could do Token Banks. Keep the colors, but instead of icons do simple 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Making a check lets you take a certain number of tokens from that character's corresponding bank. Players set up their specific character by making those banks of tokens, with some characters having better distributions than others (Rusty seems to be good at sneaking, so he might get 2 2's 2 3's and a 4, or something). Players then have draw cubes in different values: Draw N -1, Draw N -2, Draw N -3. The N is the total number of tokens in the bank. Each check requires them to spent a cube to draw the appropriate number of tokens from any bank they'd like. Add up the values. See if you make the check.

This is a really interesting suggestion, thanks! I was just thinking about replacing cards all together with hands of small tokens for that base character card + modifier card idea, but your idea might be better. It's like a modified chit-pull mechanic for war game unit selection, but for stat checks. Having lots of small tokens instead of cards could let me do some interesting things with stat/skill distributions.
But

quote:

If you wanted to keep skill icons and get rid of tokens altogether, you could do the same thing, and just have the draw cubes randomize what they can draw. So if Rusty needs 2 magnifying glasses and a Wrench to fix a teleporter, his yellow token bank has 2 magnifying glasses, 2 wrenches, and 3 hammers, then they'd want to use their N -1 cube to attempt that, since it nearly guarantees them success.

I don't quite get this suggestion, of "draw cubes randomizing what they draw."

Each payer has 4 characters and each has 4 stats, so would I need separate token banks for each character and stat combination? It might be a bit too much setup for each player to make 16 little shuffled stacks of tokens, and not knock them over during play. (I really don't want tons of little cloth bags to draw from.) Or maybe each token drawn could have a number or skill icon for each stat, so the same supply can be used for checking any stat. How else would/could you visualize this on the table?

quote:

Either way, I think you want to cut down the columns (so, either unique numbers, or unique skills) from 5 to 3 or 4, if that still works for your game.

Maybe give players a way to upgrade their token banks, or get more high value draw cubes, and skill cards that let you redraw or something.

Either way, you're getting the tension of a dice roll without the tedium of rolling dice.

I could definitely cut down to 4 skills per stat really easily, so I should push it more and cut down to 3 at least.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 22:05

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

jmzero posted:

From a thematic perspective, it seems weird to have the core Venture Bros characters (other than Brock) be good at things, and be employing their legitimate skills to solve problems and defeat bad guys or pass tests or something. Having Rusty be good at science and Dean be good at sneaking (or whatever) makes it so you can impose "normal" game mechanics onto this setting, but the resulting game will be the opposite of how and why the show works.

I like adventure-y games, and I love Venture Bros - but I think you need some much more serious wrinkles if you're going to bring them together like this. Like, you could take any fantasy game and make the wizard Rusty, the elf Hank, and the barbarian Brock (essentially) and it might kind of work - but it wouldn't feel like a Venture Bros game in any interesting way. Rusty can't just roll high and punch out Phantom Limb or, really, win honestly at much of anything. He shouldn't have points in science, he should have points in futility and maybe luck?

If I imagine a Venture game, it'd be like: it's a co-op where the Venture family is doing stupid crap (blindly running towards whatever is shiny on the map) and you have to somehow keep them alive. Or they're sort of one faction (player or not) in a game with a bunch of villains/OSI/sphinx/whatever that keep each other balanced by having conflicting objectives.

Your mechanics may be fine, but - to the extent I understand what you're aiming for - I don't know that they fit the setting you're working with.

I do like your suggestion, of playing to try and keep the magpie-like Ventures alive as they chase the macguffin. I have several different ideas of ways to approach a Venture Bros board game appropriately, but I was mostly at a loss as to how to model the type of frequent failure and personality flaws so standard to the VB characters in a compelling game structure that might appeal to other, non-VB board game niches. But keep in mind that I'm only posting about the core mechanic of resolving checks and direct conflicts in this design, not the rest of the game's content and mechanics which will address these issues a little more.

That said, your concerns are all something I've been through with myself already, and still reconsider from time to time. Since I started thinking about a Venture Bros based boardgame, I went through several different ideas for designs that approached different key elements of how the show's characters interact. I brainstormed a semi-coop card game, where players play a round cooperating as individual Venture family members to avoid/escape/resolve The Monarch and The Guild's plots and various avenging, and then play the next round as The Monarch and Guild members trying to foil/arch/whatever Venture and his family (all with cards played into common stacks and shuffled, so no one knows who is playing what villain until the end). I brainstormed a competitive game where drawn cards or tiles formed branching and intersecting tracks for exploring different locations or advancing/regressing along different plots, with Ventures trying to work up and forward towards happy/successful resolution and the antagonists trying to push them down and back on the tracks, with various card types. And a few others.

But while I never really hit on a perfect mechanical structure to apply to the show's peculiar tone and characters, I thought of the prevalent advice to try designing the game you'd most like to play, and I settled on just that: a large, sandbox-style Venture game with multiple compelling and thematic routes to victory and some heavier, strategy mechanics (as modular as possible, so players can mix and match to create their own custom factions and adventures). I outlined some of my reasoning for this design in the design diary post I linked to on the last page, but in summary, the aim of this design is to let players be free to pursue:

the game's Adventure/Plot Twist system, where searching/working/influencing can get you multi-act adventure cards tailored to the characters and locations in the current game. (I'm also playing with different ideas on how to connect these cards to make them more thematic.) These adventure cards also have a Plot Twist at the top, intending to involve the same characters, where the adventure card can be played as a Plot Twist instead if a condition is met, that adds a take-that mechanic to trying to link thematic circumstances to plot arcs. This is where the magpies chase the shinies and the antagonists try to arch and crush them.
player's own goals to have their characters harass, hurt, steal from, kidnap, or kill other faction's characters.
spreading their faction's influence to progress toward the game end. Influence is a resource used in recruiting allies, and resolving some searches and adventures. I'm using it as a game-pacing mechanic as well to keep the game length in check and provide a path towards victory of growing your organization, through whatever means good or bad.

I'm trying to incentivize all of these paths somewhat with a "victory points salad" approach. This way, players can either pursue modular, pre-written plots or what they think the more thematic and compulsive actions the characters might do are.

Additionally, I intend for this game to have 6 factions to start, with more expandable, all with their own adventure/plot twist cards tailored to those characters and whatever other characters are chosen for each game. There are lots of locations from the show that provide different types of adventures and tactical advantages. There's opportunistic profiteering to pay for fancy vehicles and flashy gadgets. I'm trying to tailor the "combat" system to be about far more than fighting, where any of the 4 stats can be chosen for a round of combat, and the result is tailored to not only who won, but also what stat was used by each side. (Exploring characters can flee instead of fighting and leave a hinderance/penalty on their attacker. Sneaking characters can use the combat as a chance to go into hiding and try to stage an ambush, or steal an attacker's item or vehicle. Thinking characters can try to capture an attacker/defender as a hostage, or disable an attacker's item.) I'm hoping to tweak it more, with good stat/skill balancing, so that outcomes like you worry about, say Doc just punching out Phantom Limb, can't happen on their own, and require coordination between teaming-up characters, or other advantageous circumstances. I also cut more mechanics around building new labs and other buildings that would become hotly contested points of interest, mechanics around researching in different fields for different bonuses and inventions, mechanics to affect team interaction and individual characters' relationships with each other, and more. It was all too much.

I understand how it seems a bit odd to have a sandbox strategy adventure game themed on the Venture Bros, but it's not the only game I have I could theme on it, and it makes it easier to re-theme it if a publisher wants a different IP. Also, there might be enough room in the market for a heavy strategy VB game and a lighter, more closely thematically matched VB game. But I welcome all ideas and suggestions.

EDIT

sector_corrector posted:

Does the theming have the characters working as a team? If so, then I can see a big pile of tokens for the entire team (separated by color). This represents the collective skills of the entire team being applied to various tasks. That cuts down on table space and fiddly accounting, but still gives you the same mechanic.

Well the issue is that while characters in the same place can team-up for actions, most of the time, players will be able to freely have all their characters go different places and do different things. So it might be kind of weird if, for example you got a big fight token from a strong character, but you draw it when a weak character is making their check alone. I'm still brainstorming ways to try and streamline controlling 4 characters individually.

I'm definitely keeping your mechanic in mind though, either for this or another project.

JMBosch fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Feb 5, 2016

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 23:28

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Your mechanic ideas are good, and I'm enjoying finding places amongst my other designs where they would fit well, if you don't mind.

For this VB game though, after another brainstorming session where I was testing out some of these ideas, I think I may just go back to numbers for each stat and leave the skill icon basics for a different design. If I can keep the numbers fairly low, (like 0-2 points per stat on the static character card, and 1-5 on the one skill card you can play per character per action) then the math will be fairly light. And low numbers would help me reinforce that individual characters are mostly weak on their own (except Brock), and that while you can split up, cover a lot more ground, and try to let characters have their own adventures, it's dangerous. But cutting out icon matching altogether and just replacing it with basic numbers is a lot quicker, if the math is small. I can also still have 1 or 2 action/skill spaces on the character cards where a cube can be spent for 1 or 2 points in some stat or another. If I remove some low costs I had on most simple actions, and just limit the number of actions more directly, gameplay flows quicker, and I can thematically have some characters completely useless in one stat and reliant on other characters, items, vehicles, henches, or allies for it. (Like Dean and Hank getting maybe 1 Fight point across all their cards, and Doc maybe 2.)

To foster more conversation:
Anyone have any ideas or discussion points for an asymmetrical, dystopian espionage and terrorism/policing game with an interview/border crossing mechanic like Sheriff of Nottingham, or anything else where you question other players about in-game information as a game mechanic? I did some decent work on a 3-5 player design like that, originally inspired by Papers, Please, The Resistance, and Euphoria, where players, with public allegiance to 1 of 3 factions but private allegiance to who knows, oversee multiple agents of similarly questionable loyalty in vying for control of various mega-city sectors. Players have to publicly semi-cooperate to keep the 5 pillars of society from collapsing (5 non player, interdependent factions represented by tracks that produce different resources and things), while privately advancing their own goals by positioning their loyal agents in the right sectors with the right resources to pull off missions and trying to identify their disloyal agents and get rid of them. I had some good progress until I hit a brick wall when it came to the the interview mechanic that actually inspired the idea in the first place. My idea was that the controller of a border has the option to interview a player when that player's agent crosses their border and they want to challenge the player's reason for it. I haven't worked on it in awhile, but it's been in my head for awhile lately. And I still can't crack it.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 05:53

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Misandu posted:

I think getting rid of the skill icons is a good move. I'm still not even 100% sure if the actual icon meant anything or if it was just the picture? Your Rusty example has him with some skills at two but uses two of the level one icons? It looks like those icons in the circle should be triangles according to the stuff about the skill icon reference card.

The idea was that icons were not interchangeable, and represented different named "skills" within each stat. So some requirements would need, say 2 Investigates (the yellow circle with magnifying glass) and 1 Plan (the yellow triangle with Xs and Os). You couldn't use 2 Investigates to equal 1 Plan. Although that was another iteration I went through brainstorming yesterday, where the icons are interchangeable: 2 rank 1 skills could equal a rank 2 skill, 2 rank 2 skills could equal a rank 4 skill, etc. But that was needlessly complicated and, if that's the way I wanted to go, I was just basically using numbers again with an extra unnecessary layer of complexity. So I cut the icons.

I still like the idea in theory as a way to show different strengths and weaknesses within a character's stat, (some intelligent characters are good at building things, others at solving problems and puzzles, others at plotting to catch their enemies, etc.), but I need a simpler design in another theme to fit that idea in.

Misandu posted:

Poison Mushroom posted:
Space 4x!

I really like the idea of an ideological/diplomatic conquest space game, other than those that have come before. (How much of that is there in Eclipse or Race for the Galaxy? Haven't played it, but Cosmic Encounters seems like a bit of a mess.) As an experiment, letting players freely create their own edicts and treaties and whatnot is interesting, but in practice it might get a little too crazy or time consuming. I would recommend cards, like Misandu's suggestion.

It reminds me that I've wanted to put an expanded version of the relationships system in Fiasco into a boardgame. In Fiasco, players, each a character in the story, start with a simple notecard in between them and each of the players on either side of them, which dictate some general aspect of the relationship between the characters or their past together. Things like "< Coworkers >" or "< lawyer / client >" or " < ex-lovers >". In Fiasco it's simply an aid to help the players improvise scenes between the characters, but in a bigger, negotiation type of game, you might be able to have some fun with forcing the players to incorporate past, pre-game histories between their empires or something. Like the player to your left's empire was responsible for a terrible genocide 400 years ago, including some victims from your people. How does that affect negotiation? You can leave all those types of things up to the players in the moment to come up with as justifications for their decisions, but I think codifying it in a simple system, or even just flavor cards the players are free to use or not, would add a sense of history to the groups the players are playing as.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 19:21

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:

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.

Not bad at all. I currently have the agent tokens' top showing their declared faction loyalty (and hence which faction controls them), and their bottom showing their actual loyalty (which may or may not match, agent tokens are picked randomly at the start of the game). But your suggestion would tighten the system up a good bit. I thought it would be thematic that all players, who are playing as upper-level planners in their faction, would know what faction each agent says they belong to automatically, hence their declared loyalty going on the top of agent tokens. But it's much more tense and thematic in the "web of spies" sense if there is no declared loyalty at all, and players don't know without having a chance to glance at the agents' other side.

This would also make for quite an easy set-up for a quick interview mechanic. I originally was trying to think of complex combos of missions and targets that players had to grill each other over, like an intense interviewer trying to find key information and whether or not it matches with their own intel. But with your idea, the interview mechanic can be as simple as the border controller trying to determine whose agent it is at their border. Even if a player has absolutely nothing to do with the agent, simply responding with "That is definitely not my agent. I have no clue who they are." would seem pretty suspicious.

You guys are good at simplifying my needlessly overcomplicated ideas! Now I just need to figure out a good and thematic AI movement system for the agents, since they don't have a public loyalty or controller anymore, and some interesting mechanics for influencing them secretly. I also gotta determine when and how agent tokens are revealed to everyone, when they're replaced with new agents, etc. Maybe agents are "activated" by a player playing a card and declaring the agent color and district color match the card they're playing before actually checking. So you play a Sabotage card or something that requires "blue agent in red district," and turn over an agent token in a red district your PRETTY SURE is blue, but if they're not there's some penalty on the Sabotage card for picking an agent for the task that doesn't listen to you.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 21:22

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Casnorf posted:

If, thematically, agents are controlled via dead drops or other asymmetrical media, why not just let anyone control every agent? Not all at once, but you know, half the game could be figuring out who's really loyal to you....

What's coming out my head right now is multiple variables. Agents have a color and a number on the hidden side and are placed at random at the start. Turns have essentially two phases: intel and action. I would keep it soft so actions can come unexpectedly. Players get a hand of cards with colors or numbers which is open knowledge. Players play a card with a color on an agent in the matching colored district to reveal that agent to the owner of that district. A player can move any agent to any other district instead of revealing an agent. At any point during a player's turn they can declare an action against another player using a specific agent in that player's district. That agent is revealed to both players, and if the color matches the player who took the action the action succeeds unless the affected player has a card matching the agent's number. In that case the action fails and the agent is returned to the board loyalty-side down. Point grab actions are declared pass or fail to the other players not involved in the action.

Actions are generic point grabs. Each player starts with a pool of points (influence), and the goal is to gather enough to gain control of the city/state/country.

Canceling an action I'm still undecided on "has" or "plays." That would depend on the amount of numbers available. If every agent is unique then you'd only need to have his number to control him. This would allow some trade actions. Perhaps a player can always trade a number card for a number card as his turn's action and does not require the other player's permission to do so.

This is just a quick brainstorm. Still struggling with successful actions giving partial perfect information, but I suppose that's the nature of the beast.

I like where you're going with this, using colors for agent capabilities and numbers for their loyalties, with players holding number cards and even trading them. Maybe the best way to do it is numbered agent tokens (number on the bottom), and then separate, one-sided color tokens representing different agent capabilities. Players will be able to add capabilities to different agents as actions, and an agent can have a max of like 4 capability tokens on them. This is so there can be some slightly more complex missions, requiring say "1 red and 2 of any other color, but no yellow" or something. But any agent with 2 or more is gonna quickly attract attention and be a highly valued asset players will struggle for control over. (Maybe a good distraction/bluff would be stockpiling an agent you don't want to use with capabilities you don't need so everyone focuses on them while you maneuver an unnoticed agent towards their target.) When a player wants to "activate" an agent and perform a mission, they reveal all capability tokens on the agent. (I'm wondering if there needs to be a cost to revealing the agent token's number though. It would be easier to bluff if the number wasn't revealed automatically, and would add more tension to the decision of whether or not to reveal it.) But keeping the color tokens separate like that would allow for more strategizing and make it impossible to memorize what agent number and color combos are in the game.

rchandra posted:

The skill icons in polygons is a really neat choice. The star/sawblade shapes are less clear.

Ya, I was worried they'd kinda blend together over time. I have an idea of how to use skill icons similarly, but more simply, in another design, so I'll keep the simpler polygon shapes for those.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 20:05

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Misandu posted:

I don't get why they were associated with numbers on the reference card. Why associate Skill C with the number 3 if the skills associated with 1 and 2 can't be assigned together as the skill associated with 3?

Using numbers on the reference card my have confused more than it clarified. Letters might have worked better. While the icons weren't meant as interchangeable, it was important to show that some icons (the "higher numbered" ones) were more powerful, in that they were more difficult to generate and could be spent on bigger, more powerful actions. You couldn't add skills together to make better ones, but the reference card was supposed to communicate that it was still important to remember which skills were "stronger" than others.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 00:58

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Misandu posted:

Oh that makes sense! I agree that it's important to communicate that to the player but that maybe wasn't the best way to go about it. I think that system would cause a lot of frustration for players. If I have a card that produces rare resources then I am going to be inclined to save it for when I need the rare resources. That could work great in a Venture Brothers type game though! Maybe the cards all represent equipment or training that your character has, and have a combination of Rare and Common Skills. The problem is that they're all MADDENINGLY SPECIFIC. So maybe you have a Shrink Ray that can permanently generate 1x Technobabble, but can also be discard to generate 1x Power Source (you rip the battery out of it). If you spend the whole adventure carrying around a Shrink Ray just in case it's super rare icon comes up the other players get annoyed that you're not contributing as much as you could, but the second a Tecnobabble icon comes up after you discarded the Shrink Ray everyone gets to feel like an rear end in a top hat.

Then you could have it where Brock can use anything as his type of icons, but has to discard it. Maybe Dean can grab random cards off the top of someone else's deck, convert one to his icons, then discard all of them. Basically the entire game is built around being well prepared 10% of the time and just sort of randomly smashing square pegs through round holes at the cost of efficiency the other 90%?

These aren't bad ideas for a smaller, maybe co-op card game or something. For this design though, I'm definitely cutting the skill icons completely. With the current scope and mechanics, it's just too much analysis on each player's turn, and it slows an already big game down too much. I'm building up a new prototype using just lower numbers as the base system to see if I can get the gameplay flowing right (items might be a little more boring now, we'll see), but if I just can't get it to work maybe I'll take another look at a different, simpler implementation of similar icons. But I'm more excited to use an idea sort of like yours for the questing system in my JRPG-inspired game, where all characters a player controls conveniently stick together as one unit.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 20:47

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Harvey Mantaco posted:

Maybe when (in a game with a similar structure, ultimately, if hopefully executed better and differently) a location is visited there are less cards, but they are all revealed in a grid that lets players "pick at" from the outside-in to actually provide choice? Any good ideas? Any way this has been done before that isn't poo poo?

Building on this, I've often been a fan of that mechanic where you have a grid of options which require different costs based on what side of the grid you're coming from and/or how far away from you the option you're trying to choose is.

So imagine a 3x3 grid of cards or tokens at the location (face-up or face-down, depending on your game). If you have 4 stats total, for example, in 2 sets of polar opposing stats, you could have cards in the bottom row cost 1 strength or 3 intelligence, and cards in the top row cost 3 strength or 1 intelligence. And vice versa for left/right and the other 2 stats.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 03:59

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

I kind of like Jamey Stegmaier's achievement stars system for ending a game (in Euphoria and Scythe). It allows you to set the game time a little more precisely by changing the number of achievements necessary, and the finality of the game ending immediately when a player places their last achievement star helps players get a sense of the pace of the game as it goes. Also players can get a bit of a sense of how well everyone's doing, but the winner usually isn't super clear until the final scores are tallied.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2017 06:19

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

jmzero posted:

I like the idea of a "horror movie" 1vAll game with hidden movement... well... now I have sort of a game idea:

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. I usually overcomplicate my designs trying to shove too many systems/mechanics into them. But with the Near and Far-style spiral-bound scenario book, I think I've got a good, simple base system that I can try to iterate on with a couple additional mechanics for each scenario, styling them after different kinds of horror movie sub-genres. It would theoretically allow for each scenario to have different ways for players to discover what's going on, what the threat is, and how to win. Not to mention, it basically lets every scenario be a different game with different rules tailored to the sub-genre experience.

2-5 player game. 1 player is the horror/antagonist player, and all others are protagonist players that collectively control all the "survivor/victim" meeples on the map. A starting number of meeples in 4 different colors are placed on the spiral-bound map, and a certain amount of them are placed aside as a general supply that can possibly supplement them (different for each scenario). A victory condition for the horror player in every scenario will be to eliminate all meeples available in the general supply, but they can also have scenario-specific victory conditions. On each protagonist player's turn, they choose a location on the map with 1+ meeples and either move and/or perform an action with the meeples from that location in either order. The base meeple actions available will be different each scenario as shown in the spiral-bound book, but they have a condition to perform based on what meeples are together in that location. (1 red meeple and 2 blue meeples in the same location can perform action X, etc.) What kinds of people the different color meeples represent can also be different each scenario. (In the slasher scenario, red meeples are jocks. In the zombie scenario, they are national guard soldiers, etc.)

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. Some locations have scenario-specific actions printed on the map that can be performed there by protagonist players. Nothing is spent for most of these basic meeple actions provided to the protagonists by the scenario. It's just the dangerous puzzle of trying to get the right meeples to the right places while not letting them get killed by the horror, and obviously the better/bigger actions will require larger collections of meeples. Meeples can also be laid down for different mechanics in each scenario. (Imagine a Freddy Kruger/nightmare world scenario where one page of the map is the waking world and the other is the dream world copy of it, with a horror that gets stronger the more meeples are sleeping, but meeples have to sleep in order to directly confront the horror in the dream world. [Although there could also be another way to win in the waking world to discover]. Or a body-harvester scenario where killed meeples remain on the map and can be collected by the horror to grow stronger. Etc.)

To help the quarterbacking co-op issue, each player could also have a small unique powerset either on a little player board or in a hand of cards, maybe based on some virtue or positive force helping the meeples and each using a unique resource. (Something like bravery, compassion, discipline, wisdom, or something.) Maybe these actions can be done at any time as an instant for a kind of divine intervention feel.

The horror player's mechanics could be quite different in each scenario, keeping the protagonists on their toes trying to figure out what is and isn't possible in each scenario. The horror player will get their book with a 2 page spread for each scenario, including a miniature map, and many of their abilities can revolve around spending a generic "threat/danger" token that they generate/gain in different ways each scenario (staying unseen by protagonists, scaring protagonists, keeping them in certain locations, etc.). However there's tons of room to iterate different mechanics they can use to move around (hidden or not) and kill off the meeples. A Slasher scenario could spend threat tokens to do that "teleport" movement when not seen up to that many locations away. While a Deadly Virus scenario could use a small pencil and pad to let the horror player track what meeples have made contact with the infected meeple for how many rounds and spend threat based on that to make them sick (laid down) and eventually die if they aren't cured. On/Off light tokens in each location in a scenario could establish the power base of a shadow monster, strengthened by the number of adjacent locations without lights on, and allow them to spend threat to extinguish lights. Hell, you could throw the players a curveball in scale with a kaiju scenario based around players either trying to evacuate the city or take down the monster (both possible victories, up to the players to decide which to pursue.)

It would definitely still be a really big project, especially to balance, but I think a simple base system like this that you can iterate on is a good foundation to make it a doable project. If production could allow for it, it would be great (and much easier for the horror player) if the horror player's special components for each scenario were in a different little tuckbox in the game box, ensuring the protagonist players don't accidentally catch sight of what they may be facing, and new components are taken out as they are used for maximum reveal/surprise.

The main goal of the experience for the protagonists, I think, would not be to rely on the sort of narrative crumbs read out to them by the horror player as you suggested (although this may still be required to actually connect some dots), but for them to use the sudden and deadly in-game actions of the horror player and the scenario's map, meeple character archetypes, and meeple actions to figure out what horror subgenre movie they are in, and to try to use those genre rules to find and achieve the victory condition. And of course, to keep things interesting, there would have to be some curveballs and red herrings thrown in so the win condition isn't too obvious for the bigger horror nerds.

This is definitely making me want to set aside my countless other half-finished designs/prototypes and figure this one out.

JMBosch fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Jan 2, 2018

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 09:09

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

jmzero posted:

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

Exactly. I wanted movement to be a core mechanic and also drive these thematic points home hard.

jmzero posted:

The other tough nut might be combat; if you can find something satisfying for that, I think it could really come together.

Right now I'm thinking there won't be a single combat system that is shared between all scenarios. Instead, combat would be highly scenario dependant, and protagonist players won't be able to just straight up widdle down the horror's health (except maybe in 1 scenario). I want to focus more on puzzle-y gameplay, figuring out how to slow/misdirect and stop the horror, rather than just wound it until death. On the horror player's side, again it'll be very different per scenario. In the slasher one, where the horror is a seemingly unstoppable slow brute, his "combat" is simply using his turn to "wound" a meeple in his location (lay it down), or kill a wounded meeple at his location. But maybe in the Nightmare scenario, the horror has some cards with different attacks that give X threat tokens to a meeple, placing them under the meeple (or maybe giving them to a protagonist player directly), and when Y have been accumulated, the meeple dies. Just really trying to approach each scenario differently, like a different type of horror movie, and figure out what conflict mechanics can leverage the themes for that scenario.

jmzero posted:

Anywho, please post about it if you end up going further with this.

Will do.

I currently have very loose thematic ideas for around 18 scenarios, so if anyone wants to throw more ideas out for mechanics or themes that could fit these scenarios well, or can open up ideas for new scenarios, I'd appreciate the contribution. Currently, I'm looking at:

Slasher
Escape the lab with lab creature on the loose
Haunting
Cult group (either trying to summon a dark god or trying to convert protagonist meeples, or both)
Gremlins/Goblins (Some sort of small, fast, vicious creature that there are many of)
Possession or Mind Control (may be too close to the haunting and/or cult group to be it's own scenario)
Nightmare invader
Serial Killer (this one might be a bit different. Longer fictional timeline, more procedural and investigative.)
Covert Alien Invasion (The Thing/Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
Angry environmental/nature spirit (Like an island trying to kill the protags as they escape)
Rural mutant family/spree killers (Texas chainsaw/hills have eyes/devil's rejects etc.)
Kaiju
Coven/Magic users/Summoners (may be too close to the cultists)
Home invasion (a much smaller and more tense scenario, with far fewer meeples, but they are more reslient and can fight back easier)
Classic Monster Mashup (All the classic monsters at once? Vampire, werewolf, mummy, frankenstein, etc.)
Undead (I hesitate to do straight up zombie scenario, but players will probably expect it and there might be room for a fun twist or two on the played out theme.)
Virus/Infection (Players will really have to figure out what the hell is going on in this one, as the horror will simply occasionally tell them "this meeple dies")
Animal or Infestation (A more mundane scenario, fighting a more realistic animal or killer insect infestation? Jaws/kujo/arachnophobia or something)
Shadow monster?
Dimensional horror? (some quirky mechanics around time travel/looping or inter-dimensional creatures.)

JMBosch fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jan 2, 2018

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 19:27

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Foolster41 posted:

It makes me think of something like Sherif of Notingham, with the mechanic of deception, but making trades and figuring it out by weight whether or not you're getting cheated. That could be really neat.

Exactly. Balancing a scale with friends isn't fun. Trying to screw over your friends by offering them random goods they don't need that weigh somewhere around what they do need can definitely be fun.

Something like this maybe: If players have a chance to feel both bags in a proposed trade at once, it both kills the magic, because they'll almost always reject something that feels lighter than what they're giving, and extends the game. You probably need a structure for ordering trades and limiting the number of "hand weighings" to create imperfect information. Say the active player puts what they want to trade away into their cloth bag and passes it around the table. Each player gets a chance (either a very brief countdown or a set 1 or 2 jostlings of the bag in their hand) to get a feel for it before passing it to the next player. Once a player has felt the weight of the offer, they can choose to slip whatever tokens of theirs that they want to trade for the offer into their bag. The active player will get a chance to feel the weight of each proposed offer once, in the set order, and then maybe can feel the weight of their own offer one more time. Then they have to accept 1 specific offer or reject all offers, triggering some other effect. You can throw in some powers or special resources that let players break the rules by getting extra hand weighings or look at tokens on offer, etc.

As said, it would be a bit of a pricey gimmick, but you could build a nice bluffing game around it.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 06:25

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Baronash posted:

I have been kicking around this idea for a board game where the players function as the arms dealers for a bunch of NPCs duking it out in a Risk-style conflict. I'm waffling on the complexity, but the idea would be that players are competing to obtain cheap resources from the NPC factions, use those resources to build weapons of war and sell them at a profit, and end up with the most money at the end of the game.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of an existing Risk-style game that might have NPC movement logic that I could take a look at? It seems like I'll need some sort of movement flowchart, and I'm not even sure if that will be possible without having the "NPC movement" section of each turn take forever.

This sounds pretty close to Imperial or Imperial 2030 with resource, order fulfillment, and NPC systems added in, which might complicate gameplay and get in the way more than they help, unless you're aiming for a specific, different player experience.

For some NPC logic in a complex territorial war game, maybe look at the various COIN series games? Cube Libre, Fire in the Lake, Labyrinth: The War on Terror, etc. Haven't played them, but I don't think they have rules for moving armies around. Instead, the space/territory that a non-player faction acts on is either determined by the events happening that turn or through random dice rolls.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 22:50

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

CodfishCartographer posted:

Anyone have much experience designing worker placement games? I have an idea for one, where the �workers� are cards that have various effects. However, I�m having difficulty settling on what resources to have and how many places there should be to place workers.

You might want to look at G�gōng and Underwater Cities, two recent games that have made a splash that essentially boil down to card-worker placement. As you're probably seeing as you draw out the theme and mechanics more, the decision of how many resources and worker placement spots depends on the higher level questions of what is it you want players to be able to do when they have whatever resources they need to accomplish the more interesting actions in your game. Then work backward from there to see how many steps of preparation you think a player needs to take before being able to do those more interesting actions, or how often you want each player to be able to do those actions.

Be careful with the idea of letting players battle with their workers to take worker placement spots, unless that's the primary mechanic/goal of your game. I haven't played Carson City, but to my understanding the dueling mechanic they have that essentially does that causes the game to drag on as the decision space for the player almost never shrinks on their turn. Normally in worker placement, the available spots get taken up each round, limiting your options. But if you can always try to attack someone to get them off any space, then you have to consider your odds and chances at almost every action every single turn.

As for the retreating mechanic, it might not be what you're looking for, but Raiders of the North Sea mixed up the worker placement formula in an interesting way by having different worker types that weren't bound to any player, and each turn you both place workers to take an action and remove workers to take an action.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2018 23:19

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 10:13

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Frozen Peach posted:

The publisher I met with at PixelPop decided they wanted to play my prototype some more, so they're having me ship my only copy for more playtesting. This is huge and I'm freaking out. I'm so close to being published.

Congrats! I hope they see the potential in it and pick it up! I liked how surprisingly quick it played, despite being so resource-heavy.

Rexides posted:

Hey all, I want to run an idea I had with the thread. The concept of the game is middle eastern caravans transporting goods from Baghdad to the port cities of Beirut and Acre, with players accruing points for every successful trip.

An interesting idea, but there's a lot of room to develop it in many different ways, depending what you're looking for. My first thought is that you'd probably want some more paths and ports to make the logistical movement puzzle more interesting and allow for more potential to change plans. And only having one ship, showing up in a specific city once every 10 turns seem way too thin. Also, an all-or-nothing scoring mechanic in a pick-up-and-deliver Euro is preeeeeetty harsh, especially when it's half of all scoring opportunities. That can easily be tweaked to a 1st/2nd/3rd place scoring system: player with most valuable goods gets 12pts, second most valuable = 8pts, third = 4pts or something.

I'd actually shift the main scoring mechanics to the (multiple) ships themselves, not the ports, and come up with some bonus scoring opportunities for the ports and add at least one more port. Stealing from the shipping scoring in Trajan, I'd have at least 3 ships, each scoring based on different set collections (all different goods, all same goods, pairs of goods, total value of goods [the tweaked Acre scoring]). Then the first time they actually score at a port, they flip to their "lower points" opposite side, where if they score again in the next two ports, the point values are lowered. When the ship goes "out to sea" and passes a certain node on the water, it flips back to its "full value" side. With 3+ ships you might also want at least one going the opposite direction of the others, so that Beirut doesn't always have the best ship scoring opportunity every round.

With more ships, you can introduce an extra movement puzzle. After each player's turn, they move 1 ship that does not have a cube of their color on it forward by 1 space, then they place a cube of their color on it. Once a player has a cube on every ship, they remove all their cubes. This would keep the ship movement from being so rote and programmed, and give the players another lever to use to mess with the ship-to-port arrival timing. It definitely works better with at least 3 ships, though.

For the timing of scoring, all players have 2 or 3 caravan tokens, and after a player has moved a ship at the end of their turn, check if any ships are in a port where a player's caravan is. Ask each player with a caravan there, in turn order, whether they want to deliver their goods to that ship. If so, they do so and score, but the ship doesn't flip until everyone at the port on that turn has had a chance to deliver or not, and it only flips if at least one player delivered. The only exception is the ship that has the now tweaked Acre scoring. If a player says they will deliver to it, but other players have caravans in the port as well, they don't reveal their goods yet, until all players with a caravan there have had a chance to say whether they deliver. Then all delivering players reveal to see who gets 1st/2nd/3rd. This scoring allows players to hold their caravan at port, waiting for the better scoring ship for their specific load of goods to come in, but the longer they wait, the more time they're wasting not getting another caravan moving, because they only have so many caravans.

Then each port could provide bonus scoring, which could also rotate throughout the game with a stack of objective tokens/cards next to the port, such as requests for specific goods (as the ship scoring doesn't exactly care about which specific goods), an extra point for every good of certain type or certain quality, etc. You might want to be careful with the poker-inspired scoring, as that might not be too obvious to most new players unless your good tokens are just like cards (with a number/face value and a suit). You might run into issues figuring out the scoring for good qualities as well, unless maybe you tweak them to not be hierarchical. Like "quality" isn't quality level, but a certain trait of the good. Maybe make them "origins", and ports give extra points for goods from certain origins. (And any good could be from any of the available origins, just depends which good tokens you draw). You could MAYBE have each good token from the same origin be the same color, which would let players have some knowledge of the goods hidden in each town along the way. But unless you have colored wood tokens, they'd need to be laid out and not in a stack for players to see.

For more hidden scoring, you can have all players keep the good tokens they've delivered so far in the game in face-up stacks in front of them. At the start of the game, they draw or draft a secret objective card or two that will score them points for having delivered either X amount of good types or goods from certain origins, or having delivered the most of a good type or good from a certain origin. This could also set the game timer, as delivered goods don't go back into the supply to be re-drawn (I'm imagining a draw bag supply), when the supply of goods runs out, there's only X amount of turns/rounds left in the game.

Don't know how far those ideas pull away from the experience you're envisioning, but some things to chew on.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2019 18:30

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