My idea for this is a little different than the solo Dice Quest.

There are 6 resources–one corresponding to every number.

Phase 1: Everyone rolls their dice in standard Yahtzee/To Court The King style. After all your rolling, you get to “harvest” any one resource; for example, if you have four 5’s, you can take four of the resource that corresponds to 5.

Phase 2: VPs are awarded. Four of the resources award one VP each. They then decay in different ways. Throwing out random ideas: one is a blind bid, one goes to the winner then the winner loses one, one goes to the winner then everyone loses half, one goes to the winner than the winner loses the second place’s total.

Phase 3: New abilities are gained. A certain number of abilities will be revealed, and they will be distributed somehow–maybe auctioned off, maybe purchased for a flat fee starting with the player with the lowest score. Resources are used as currency to buy abilities–any can be used for this purpose. Most abilities would be geared towards modification rather than extra dice; the target number of dice is 4-8 rather than 3-12.

Of the remaining 2 resources, one counts more (probably double) for buying abilities, and the other is spent to allow you to “harvest” a second number. For example, if your roll is 5, 5, 5, 5, 2, 2, you can spend one of these resources to harvest four of the resource corresponding to 5 and two of the resource corresponding to 2.

For some reason, the game is not “speaking” to me right now so I’m not going to rush out and flesh it out. One specific issue I see: In both Yahtzee and TCtK, watching other players roll the dice is boring. I would like to have everyone roll the dice at the same time, but with such a strong area-majority foundation, waiting until you saw what the other players doing would be a great advantage in many cases. One possible solution is to roll the dice in secret. Another is to roll in a specific predefined order, maybe based on score.

I’m more excited about the solitaire game because the action is nonstop! I’ll flesh out this one only if I get further inspired or bored.

Here were the parameters in my head when I started trying to hash out the design for Solo Dice Quest:

• Like in To Court The King, you start with 3 dice and gain both dice-adding and dice-modifying abilities.
• Both dice-adding and dice-modifying abilities should be necessary.
• Unlike in To Court the King, in the course of a single “round” the number of rolls you get is fixed. This should make dice-modifying abilities relatively more useful. One problem with TCtK is that no dice-adding ability is ever worse than “reroll all your dice.”
• The final goal will be to try to roll a large n-of-a-kind. The number required will be decided during the game.
• Half the “rounds” will be “quests” in which you try to match one of a small number of patterns. When you match a pattern, you take its card and gain the associated ability. (This is like TCtK except that not all of the patterns are available to you on any given turn.) The power and difficulty of the quests increases as the game progresses. Getting abilities from earlier in the game should make the difficulty of later quests manageable.
• The other half of the rounds will be “trials” in which you attempt to fulfill a certain condition. The catch is that this condition becomes more difficult as you get more dice, such as “all of your dice are 4 or greater”. Thus, choosing only dice-adding powers and eschewing dice-modifying abilities means you will fail at trials. Failing at trials has no immediate consequence, but it increases the difficulty of the endgame.
• The win rate should be 30-50%, increasable by some kind of “easy mode”. Winning should feel like an accomplishment even for a seasoned player.
• Winning a “round” as the game progresses should be expected but not guaranteed. Losing 0 or 1 rounds total should make the endgame very manageable–as long as you didn’t take only dice-modifying abilities and now you don’t have enough dice to win! Losing 2 to 4 rounds should make it dicey. Losing more rounds should make winning the endgame a long shot.

Near future: The outline for a multiplayer game based on the same framework, and the problems it is going to have; also, refinements of these ideas along with specifics; where it went when I started taking Sharpie to cardbord.

The exile has returned…

I haven’t even been away from boardgaming; I’ve been largely posting my thoughts at the ‘Geek, in many ways a better place to write because the audience is larger and individual writings can be smaller. But I don’t want to let Rule 0 die! After some thought, I’ve decided that I’d like to turn Rule 0 into a design journal. After making this decision, it was just a matter of waiting until I had another design that excited me…

The inspiration came when I played To Court The King. Capsule summary: Yahtzee with card that give you extra powers, like rolling more dice and changing the dice you roll. It’s a fine game, quick and playable (2+++ I think) that suffers from a couple of flaws:

• It’s pretty much non-interactive. There’s a lot of sitting around and waiting.
• You get so many chances to roll that die-manipulator effects are embarrassingly poor next to die-adding effects.

But I found the actual playing pretty compelling, so I set off to create a design that meets the following parameters:

1. Solitaire. This will be an explicitly solo game.
2. Will follow To Court The King’s basic pattern of starting with a small number of dice, and using them to make ever-bigger patterns and gain additional powers
3. Both die-adding and die-manipulating powers should be important
4. The game should be winnable/losable; not just a score but a binary yes/no. The ending should be tense. Even a good player should not always win. A way to “dial down” the difficulty should not be difficult to add.

My working title for this game is “Solo Dice Quest”–something non-inane to follow–and there should be more updates in the days ahead.

Here are the design goals I have for Invasion. Hopefully, my intuition and playing-in-my-head has taken taken the game most of the way and playtesting and brainstorming can finish this into a great, enjoyable design.

Summary: Area-control game with emphasis on risk management and bidding for opportunities.

Weight: Light, just north of filler. I would like the playtime to be 20-30 minutes.

Players: 3-5. If it can fit a 6th without descending into chaos or dragging that would be great. Likewise, if it happens to work well with 2 that would be gravy. If tweaks to the map are required to make it work with 3 or 5 that would be OK but inelegant.

Feel: The game should feel chaotic–players should be able to plan for the current turn and a general strategy for the future, but not specific actions for next turn. However, the feeling should be chaos: “Events are going to come up that we’re all going to have to deal with” rather than favor “I got a bad roll, player B got a good roll.”

Inasmuch as it would be possible for a player to get a good roll or bad roll, it should be a deliberate risk-management choice: for instance, a player is falling behind on score so he narrows his focus to a certain small area, ignoring all others. Then in the unlikely event that region is scored several times in a row he can win; more likely, his hopes don’t come true and the plan falls flat.

Here you go. First, most of the components (not pictured: the Move/Deploy deck and the smaller size of scoring tokens)

A close-up of the game board, showing off my sketchy photographic skills as well as my sketchy graphic design skills:

In my defense, I deliberately put as little effort as possible into the graphic design of this first prototype to avoid emotional attachment. Here’s the “playmat” where the state of the turn is tracked… you can see that this whole thing is a work-in-progress…

And finally, when I was looking through the components I happened across my old idea for a board: hexes that could be arranged into any one of several shapes. In theory, this is a far superior design for a board, because it adds to the variety of possible games and is generally far more versatile. In practice, I can’t get as excited about the hexes as about the world map. Also, I kind of think that coming up with a good map is my job as the designer… the players shouldn’t have to do that work.  Besides: Expansion!

Just in case you were interested. Luckily:

• I have a day job
• Buying fiddly things makes me happy
• Many of them aren’t used up and can be applied to another prototype

And the list:

• $3.50: 9″x12″ foam board
• $5.50: 20″x30″ blue foam board (cut up, only about 1/3 used)
• $2: printing
• $17: plastic centimeter cubes (I got 1000–they’re hard to not get in bulk. And will be easy, I hope, to use for other games.)
• $2: blank white cards
• $7.50: Utility knife for cutting foam board (High-quality; should last for years; I could have got a cheap one for $2)
• $2: Dice (approximately–6 are used, plus a couple that I had laying around as generic counters)
• $4.50: small zinc washers (scoring chits)
• $3: large zinc washers (scoring chits)
• $4: gold spray paint

Total: $51, about the cost of a new game. (And this discounts probably $10 worth of bits I probably won’t end up using–colored paperclips and cardstock.) I’m definitely not complaining; I’ve had a great time putting Invasion together, I plan to have a great time refining and playing it, and I’m very pleased with the way it looks and feels. And maybe this will be the one that wins me the SdJ. Just reflecting a little on what goes into it.

Columbus Day is just around the corner! I’m taking the day off work.

Did Columbus discover America? Certainly not. People had been here for thousands of years before he arrived.

Did Columbus discover America for the Europeans? Well, probably not–the Norse were in Newfoundland probably and Greenland definitely before Columbus.

What Columbus definitely did was bring back the idea that the New World could be exploited. And without European exploitation of the rest of the world, where would we be? Certainly without such fantastic games as Puerto Rico, Goa, and Taj Mahal, just to name a few. So let’s pause for a moment to remember… well, I’ll call him Lolumbus, in honor of the fact that rape and exploitation is actually nothing to base a holiday around.

Notwithstanding! Speaking of exploitation, I have finally finished the prototype of Invasion. The tables are turned, and aliens are exploiting Earth. The Earthlings try to fight back, but not with much success.

The story of the design is this: The original design for the game had about 7 separate decks of cards, one each for each of seven different game mechanics. Well, it turns out making cards is actually kind of a pain, what with creating a custom script to output a PDF, printing them, cutting them out, sleeving them… and I was in eternal procrastination mode. Well, then I bought these awesome plastic centimeter cubes in 10 different colors from an educational supply place (highly recommended) and it made me want to finish the game so I could play with them. But how to make those irksome cards? I was thinking about ways to substitute a die roll for the card draw when it finally occurred to me: the die roll is better because all the possible outcomes are right there, no need for players to be surprised when a card comes up! The dice are color-coded so you roll them all at once and then put them in the appropriate place on a playmat (printout taped to foamboard).

Photos will follow in a day or two.

How do you split a cookie between two people? One person cuts, the other one chooses. Great.

OK, Solomon, help me out with this one. I wish to assign starting positions on, essentially, a map board. Assume that the map board has no particular symmetry and, in particular, no rotational symmetry. Resources may be unevenly distributed. Furthermore, I would like to adhere as closely as possible to the following parameters:

• From 3-5 players will be choosing locations. Each player will choose basically one location.
• It’s OK if the locations are not quite equal, but no position should be hopelessly bad. In particular, it is not OK to have every player choose one location and then randomize who gets what location.
• Two players should not be able to collude to give one of them an excellent location.
  (Likewise, there should be no frustration that an inexperienced player has inadvertently handed out a gift.)
• It should not take too long–nothing very mathematical. The Settlers of Catan initial settlement placement is the outside limit for how long this should take.
• Since this will take place before a new player gets to see the game, it should be possible for experienced players to offer meaningful advice to a new player without having to worry about who among them will be helped or hindered by the placement.

If you can’t guess, I’m fishing for ideas to see if this basic layout can be made to work. I think it would be a lot more flavorful than a clever board with rotational symmetry for 3, 4, or 5 people; yet I still want the basic balance I’ve come to expect from Euros.

I’ve posted the first game I designed, Satori, in complete print-and-playable format; it has a special place of honor in the sidebar. If you’re not in the habit of scanning the sidebar every day for changes (go figure), here’s the announcement.

Nefarious reader Fu Leng pointed me to the way alliances work in Dune. I like it a lot. Broadly:

• There is a formal game mechanic for alliances. Alliances can win as a team, help each other in certain special ways, and allies may not attack one another.
• Intermittently throughout the game, an event happens where all alliances are automatically dissolved. They must be created again–then there is no more opportunity to create then until the next such event.

This appeals greatly to me because it allows for a shifting web of allies and enemies without the constant worry of a knife in the back (or the need to backstab for victory); I think I could get much more into this game than, say, A Game of Thrones or Diplomacy. I would definitely use this mechanic, or something similar, if I wanted to design a game where alliances between players factored significantly.