New Year’s gaming – no designing

We had a houseful for Christmas and New Year’s – the entertaining did not stop.  I wanted to continue working on Small Talk but my wife turned off my computer with an Excel file I had not saved still open – aaaarggghh!  My bad!

Anyway – fun was still had.  We had an open house for gaming (for friends who are non-serious games) on the 29th and had gaming all New Year’s weekend.

On the 29th – Qwirkle, Sorry Sliders and Daytona 500 were the hits.   New Year’s – Cloud 9, Saboteur, For Sale, Qwirkle and Bananagrams were played – the hit with the kids was Wii’s Just Dance 2!

Great holidays and now back to designing!

Another light bulb moment…

Game: Euro, worker placement/resource management

Another idea for a game – so many ideas not enough time…

In England there are the famous Blackpool illuminations.  These are colourful lights along the seafront – often called the Golden Mile.  These lights are in patterns and often create images.  My idea is that each player has to create a set of lights along a boulevard – or two sets, one down each side of the boulevard.  The more lights the more power needed and the more money needed to pay for the lights.  The more lights the greater the patrons who drive up and down the boulevard to see the show.  The more patrons the more money.  The most money wins at the end.  Now I need mechanics and details.

Anyone want to co-design?

Mechanics I wish I had ‘invented’

There are some very clever people out there.  Way cleverer than me and I like to think I am smart!  How Uwe Rosenburg came up with Agricola and how Stefan Feld came up with In the Year of the Dragon and Macao makes my mind want to explode – even though they may have borrowed mechanics from previous games.

Here are some of the mechanics I wish I had thought of (they might not be the original use of the mechanic but were my first introduction):

1) The tool mechanic in Stone Age – fits perfectly with the theme

2) The reshuffling of cards and replacing them on top of the deck in Pandemic – brilliant!

3) The movement (vector) mechanic in Bolide – the game is slow but the mechanic awesome!

4) Using a role to perform a certain task a la Citadels and Mission Red Planet

5) Worker placement!  Enough said!

6) Tile placement as in Carcassonne, where the map is always changing.

These are but a few of my favourite mechanics.

Small Talk!

Game: Party game, cards, timer, quick thinking

I am not a huge party game fan.  I like Apples to Apples, have laughed hysterically during Cranium (my friend was charading Model Airplane – I got the airplane part but the way he was walking up and down the living room made me say gay airplane, queer jet…he certainly is no Heidi Klum!)

Anyway, while on geekchat the other day, I had a brainwave – an idea that I thought would make a good party game that with the right group could be very funny.  I am writing the rules and will post them (along with the all the other sets of rules I am working on) soon.  I don’t want to explain the game play until I have something more concrete.

Inspired and re-energized

Game: Race game, bidding, minor tile placement

Thanks to two fellow geeks (who I met on geekchat), I am re-energized into working on my ‘space race’ game.  This game is not about the 60’s space race but a game about building a space ship and then racing it across a course delivering passengers and cargo.

Below are the ship player board and two of the course pieces:

The red, yellow, green and blue lines are departure points.  As space is 3-dimensional, instead of colliding with the exploding ice planet the players ship may loop back and join the race at a previous point – the nearest red, yellow, green or blue line.

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The asteroid field has to be maneuvered around – as your ship is based on a 4×4 grid, the small asteroids hit either the port, starboard, or central two sections of the players ship depending on where the asteroid is placed in the grid.  A big asteroid damages all sections.   Lasers and shields can protect ships.

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The player mat is where the ship is built and tiles placed.  The ship is 12 tiles big and can be built in an formation the player desires.  Remember engines should be balanced as best as possible.

Not quite the prisoner’s dilemma = trading game

Game: Card game, simulatenous bidding

This original idea was posted on the board game design forum at www.boardgamegeek.com to get some feedback:

I was at a leadership/personal development session for work and we played the following game.
There were six tables each with a red and green flag. When told to we would spend 30 seconds debating on whether your table would hold up a red or green flag.

If all tables held up a red flag then all tables received 10 points
If all tables held up a green flag then all tables lost 10 points
If there were both red and green flags showing then the red flags lost 10 points and the green flags gained ten points.

After a number of rounds the winner with the most points above zero won.

I immediately realized that if we played the green flag every time we could not lose. We would either lose 10 points if everyone went green (but so would every one else) or we would gain 10 points if there were a split decision (but not every one would – only the green flags).

This led me to thinking about how I could use this pattern in a game. My initial thought was for the players to select a card or worker placement using a blind bidding system. But maybe having a penalty for choosing the same option so many times in a row (?).  Or to incorporate it in a cooperative game where every one is working for the good of the community but there can only be one victor.

There was a good discussion about the mechanic and how it was close to the prisoner’s dilemma. Also, it was suggested that this could be used or converted to some kind of economic game – I ran with that idea for a few days and came up with a ‘simple’ card game.

Each player has a hand of cards – the cards are buy, sell, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and cards representing commodities (up to five commodities depending on the number of players – always one less commodity that the number of players).  The players also have a  preset amount of money and commodities.  The game plays 3 to 5 players.  There are 12 turns (each a month of the year).  On a turn a player would select a commodity card, a value card (0-5) and a buy or sell card and place them face down in front of them.  Once everyone has chosen their cards they are revealed and players either buy or sell their commodity. The person to make the most money over the year by buying and selling commodities wins.

How does this fit into the “prisoners’ dilemma” – well, if people play the same action (buy or sell) and the same commodity then the price fluctuates depending on (1) the number of people performing the same action and (2) the number of the commodity available in the pool.  Different actions = better reward, same actions = lower reward.  The ‘fun’ in this game comes in the guessing of what other players will be trading and when best to buy or sell your commodities.

I will post a picture of the buy/sell chart shortly and have a set of rules on the geek in the New Year.  This might make a good PnP.

I still am going to try and develop the prisoners’ dilemma further – I thing there is much potential there.

Deep Sea Diving

Game: Dice-rolling, push your luck

My second game uses the Can’t Stop dice rolling system but adds a theme (albeit a bit of a paste-on).  In Deep Sea Diving you play a team of deep sea divers trying to get a pre-determined amount of treasure before your opponent.  In this game the 2 and 12 tracks are missing – if a player rolls ‘snake eyes’ or ‘box cars’ they must roll the shark die.  If they roll a shark fin then the player misses a turn – if not they continue with their turn.  If a player does not roll a pair of dice that add up to one of the tracks their diver is on they roll a a D6 with values 1 to 3 to determine how much their diver(s) must rise.

How the theme works – each diver requires air to be pumped down to him by his team on the boat.  The further from the boat the more effort required (the track immediately below the boat is the 7 track).  If the dice do not equal the number track then the divers must rise to equalize their air pressure.  Their are some pictures below of the demo that is being playtested and the rules will be posted along with the game to ‘the geek’ soon.

Ant’s Picnic

Game: Abstract, strategy, 2-player

My first game design came out of a game design exercise.  Take a chess board and checker pieces and come up with a game.  Immediately – and I don’t know why – the checker pattern of the board reminded me of a picnic table cloth and so Ant’s Picnic was born.

Ant’s Picnic is a two player game in which the players have two ants which they use to get as much food as possible.  Ants are allowed to move any direction orthogonally up to 7 squares.  When a player maneuvers his/her ants on matching good types those food counters are removed from the picnic table.  Pop cans, gum, paper towels etc… hinder ant movement.  Originally a roll of two d8 determined movement but with feedback from a fellow gamer the dice roll for movement was removed.

The game has three modes:

1) Basic – for kids – race to get your food off the board.

2) Regular play – race to get your food off the table.  However, at regular intervals event cards are played that hinder movement, add a spider or a bee to the table, or lower the value of the food counters.  Food counters values depend upon where they lie on the table cloth (for example – food collected from two white squares are more valuable than food from two pink squares – there are twice as many pink squares as white or red therefore the combination of two pink is more common)

3) Advanced play – this is the same as regular with the addition of a memory mechanic.  Each food counter of a specific type has a value of 1 to 4.  On a player’s turn they may look at the underside of certain counters depending on the location of their ants.

More pictures and a first draft of the rules (which needs to be updated to eliminate the roll and move option) are available at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70563/ants-picnic

Why design a board game?

At some time or another, we all think we can do better than another person.  We play a game and think certain rules don’t work, certain mechanics don’t work, that games are broken and that maybe we could do better.  I don’t know whether these thoughts prompted me to start designing board games.  (I must stress that this is a ‘hobby’ and that I do not expect to be the next Knizia, Moon or Feld.)  What I do know is that in chatting with a fellow gamer we discussed the idea of forming a local board game design group.  Which is right now a group of one!  Mitch moved.

This discussion led to some ideas on how we might develop ‘simple’ games through a series of tasks.  The first task was to come up with a game that used a chess board and checker pieces.  This task led to my first prototyped game, Ant’s Picnic (see next post).

Welcome

I have tried blogging on many subjects and life gets in the way…or maybe I have nothing to say.
I am an avid board gamer and am on the geek (clive65) and as such have many ideas about what makes a good game and what might make a good game. As such, I try to invent and reinvent games. In this blog you will find games I have designed, games I have re-themed, comments about game design, game designers and published games and basically the ramblings of an amateur, non-published, wannabe game designer.

I hope you enjoy.