The game in my head continues to take shape…

Components. I spent about $20 on Wednesday buying what I need: a sheet of poster board for the board, colorful paper clips for player tokens. (I intend to eventually get little wooden cubes.) For scoring counters, I bought washers. Pencil and paper would work but I like the tactile feel of washers. A lot. I spray-painted some of them metallic gold, and it looks really nice.

Theme. Fuleng wanted samurai. Alyx wanted aliens. Samurai aliens? Nah. I went to bed last night thinking of something non-PC and vaguely topical having to do with illegal aliens at the Mexican border. Luckily I awoke with my senses. For the prototype, I’m going to stick with an invaders-from-outer-space theme (you’re one of the alien races, competing for Earth’s resources. The Earthlings are a mere annoyance.).

Rules. A little more concrete now:

Setup: Lay out the regions—between 7 and 10, I think. Each player gets a “home” (or “mothership”) marker where any new aliens will be deployed, and puts it in a region. Regions have varying values of 2, 4, or 6.

At the beginning of each turn, three things are decided randomly. They will be a card draw in the beginning, but it may be a die roll eventually.

1. What is the base number of action points this round? Anything from 4-8 is possible.
2. What regions will be scored this round? It could be all of them, only the regions with motherships, or every player chooses one region.
3. How many aliens will the Earthlings chase off? It depends what they choose to fight with: none (tanks and planes), one per race per region (nukes), one third (bacteria), or half (seawater).

After that, players secretly choose a number of points to bid between going first and getting 0 extra action points, or going last and getting 4. The exact options available will vary from round to round.

Taking Actions: The actions available to you vary based on the cards you draw. In general, deploying 2 aliens, or moving 2 aliens 1 region, costs 1 action point. (So moving 4 costs 2, moving 6 costs 3). Moving to any region, instead of an adjacent region, costs +1 point. Moving your opponent’s aliens instead of your own allows you to move 1 fewer alien. Moving your mothership costs 1 action.

You also have half-efficiency versions of these (move or deploy 1 alien for 1 action point) that you can use even if you don’t have any appropriate cards. This keeps you from being stuck if you happen to draw all the wrong cards.

Any action cards you don’t happen to use can be saved or discarded to draw fresh ones. In general, this mechanic is to force you to adapt to different abilities to marshal your forces at different times.

Scoring a Region: Winner gets the region’s value in “gold points,” which are used for winning. Second place gets the region’s value in “iron points” which are only used for bidding. As long as there are at least 4 players, third place gets half that many iron points.

Game End: 40 gold points? We’ll see how this paces.