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.