- hidden information
- communication through game play
Several ideas have (false) started, but there were two in particular that I need to record for my own reference. I started this thought process nearly a year ago, but one of Seth Jaffee's recent blog posts reminded me that I hadn't actually recorded any of these thoughts yet.
One of my ideas was a primarily a card game. The cards serve two purposes. First, each represents a certain resource, such as stone, wood, etc, with each card carrying a different quantity of that resource. Second, they depict some sort of building or improvement that you can bring into play -- I'll just refer to them as buildings for now. Each building requires a certain number of resources of one or more types to be built. The resources are separated by type into several decks, perhaps with there being multiple decks of each resource, with higher level decks providing higher value cards that have a prerequisite that must be met before a player can draw from it.
Each player starts with a small hand of one or two resource types. The first player (holding a start-player token) leads with a building that they wish to build. Each other player, in order, must contribute to constructing the building if they are able by playing a card that is represents one of the resources still needed to complete that building. If they are unable to play such a resource, they may play another resource to contribute to an incomplete building. If the building is completed after all players have played, the lead player places that building with his active buildings. Otherwise, the build remains inactive until it is completed in a future round. Following that trick, the player to the left of the start player leads, and so on. After each player has a chance to lead, the hands are replenished using the active buildings to determine which resource decks you can draw from, and how many cards you can draw. Then play continues with the start-player token being passed to the left, and the new start player leading a new trick.
Additionally, there would be one large end-game building (such as a castle) that players would contribute to building along the way. Whenever a player overpays with a resource, or is unable to contribute to any other building in play, the player helps build this end-game building instead. These contributions would have to be carefully tracked. This building would be represented with a game board with empty spaces representing the resources needed to complete it, and each player would be given tokens to mark the space(s) when they contribute a particular resource. The game would end when the end-game building is completed, and scores would be a combination of points rewarded for individual buildings completed as well as contributions to the end-game building.
I believe that this game would work just as well without partnerships as it would with, which is good because one of the hard problems of partnership games is figuring out a way to make it work for any number of players other than 4 (or 6, I suppose). I'm not sure that it would meet the goal of forcing players to communicate through game play. It certain could create some tense moments if you are holding on to a particular building with the hopes of getting it in play, and then your partner plays a building requiring the resource type that is on your building card, and it's the only one you have! It is possible that certain plays could telegraph particular intentions, but without further thought, I'm not sure how to design that into the game.
Since this post is getting a bit long, I'll save the other idea for another post. I think I like the above idea better anyway, but I should make the time to post about the other idea just for the record.
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