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Refresh

Because the legacy microgame will have a fluctuating deck size...how does one refresh the deck as cards are removed from the game...permanently?

My initial thinking is...the starting deck starts with 20 cards. At the end of game, if the deck size is less than 16 cards, you add a new set of "fresh" 8 cards. So....let's say that the game comes packed with a 20 card starting deck, and 20 expansion decks of 8 cards. So, that's 180 cards total. That's not unreasonable.

The new fresh cards would be thought of a sort of a CCG expansion pack; most of the cards would be duplicate versions of the default starting (and boring ) cards. But one card would be a neat surprise, already started with some wacky rules on it.

And each of the 20 expansion decks would have a single, different mystery "rare". Working through the game to rip enough cards to open the next expansion to see what the next rare card is could be fun; opening the next set of goodies in Risk Legacy was always the best part of the game to me.

Thinking

So, I'm working on a mash-up of a micro card game and a legacy-style game. Stay with me here. It's an odd combination.

The base game is a small deck of cards that you play through once. You score. Then you mark up the cards with stickers. Maybe you get to rip up some cards. At some point, when the deck gets low, you replenish the deck with a new subset of fresh, unmarked cards. Rinse and repeat.

Ultimately, the fun of the game is manipulating the deck and cards to the player's whims. Claiming ownership of certain cards, and figuring out ways to destroy the powerful cards that other players have claimed and built. Every time you play the deck will be somewhat different, based on how you've manipulated the deck and cards.

As far as what the stickers and "write-on-the-cards" kind of thing do, I think that's fairly easy to come up with stuff. It's mostly just giving the players some weird ways to control the game a little bit. And trying to come up with bizarre ways to combo stuff.

But I don't think that's the BIG issue that needs to be solved.

I think the real trick is figuring out the pacing of mucking up the cards and deck. Ideally, you want the ability to enhance or destroy a card to be a relatively special event...so a single player shouldn't be able to do it every game. Maybe every third game, on average? Every fifth game might be too far out. Or maybe not, depending on how fast the game itself is....these little micro-games play pretty darn fast.

Things

Recent things and/or musings I've been working on.

Hot Tin Roof. A story game based on Tennessee Williams plays, in wacky mini-book format.
My Little Vineyard. Updated with the idea to start submitting it to publishers again.

I've been working on a solitaire, choose-your-own path adventure story-slash-mapping hybrid to make playing "Dungeon Roll" a little more interesting when playing solitaire. even though I'm almost finished with it (well, first pass anyway), the branching in one section has made my head hurt.

I keep wanting to come back to "Leviathan" which is a solo game where you get to be a sea monster attacking ships during the age of tall sails. There's some kind of neat things going on in it...but I get discouraged when it comes to working on the evolution/tech tree aspects of it.

Blogger interface is awful on iPad.

"Gates of Atlantis" is still there, which needs tweaking. But that game is a headache to design for, due to the mechanical hidden information gimmicks.

Card games have suddenly interested me, due to the uprising of pretty decent POD card shops now...so...

3-player only card game, slightly quasi-deckbuilding attributes, loosely based on the journey of Oddyseus.
Revising "Great Sardini is Dead" to a playable state, a battle of old-timey magicians to take over the job of the Magician who has recently passed away at the exclusive Copa Club.
2-player card/story game, "Knight Flyer". Imagine a game based on Knight Rider, except that instead of a sentient talking car and his driver, it's about a sentient bi-plane and it's flyer during WWI.

Dungeon

So, this year's One-Page Dungeon Contest....

Here's my entry. Feel free to give it whirl. I'll try to be spoiler-free as much as possible if you want to keep the "surprise" of the game as surprise-y as possible.

I've been wanting to do something interesting with the mini-book format for a while, and a choose-your-own-adventure system seemed like a good fit for it...especially since the mini-book format dovetails perfectly into the one-page design requirements of trying to fit a dungeon on to one side of one page of paper. The fun thing in this design is in the use of ripping tabs off the paper as a way to denote status changes in the dungeon. This allows for a little back-and-forth into the same areas, but with different effects.

As usual, I continue to be interested in the mechanical aspect of hiding and obfuscating linked information by way of windows on cards when placed on one another (as I've talked about before). And, again, the minibook format became a fun playground to mess around with that idea. There's quite a few layering tricks employed in this book with regards to revealing and hiding information. Having done this the first time, I'm sort of looking forward to trying it again from scratch to see what other nonsense the format could pull off.

As far as the dungeon itself is concerned, it's naturally quite small. There's only so much room you can fit on a sheet of paper while handling the status changes within the game. However, I'm pretty pleased with the amount of "weight" the story. Given how little information is given with regards to the story, I think that there's enough of a twist to make you think about your given mission.

Play-wise, the game has a very distilled and raw resolution system, tied to two different colors of dice. (The dice are also used as a way to track you health, yay for dual purpose components! )The main decisions that the player will make will involve deciding which color set of dice to roll during combat. Initially, both color sets were balanced with the exact same rules (a die's color is more powerful against an obstacle it's same color), which became a very simple mathematical enterprise to determine which color set to use. In this version, the color types are rather unbalanced...which adds a little bit more thinkiness when determining your course of action when going into battle.

And again, there's really not much to battle, given the size and scope. And the game is balanced enough to make sure that you will win more than lose...if you really have a desire to play it more than once. I would probably work in a couple of extra colors of dice for more choices....but hey, it works right now for a first pass at an idea.

*edit* link for the file now goes to the RGPGeek entry.

Robbing

I know people have issues with the way dice work in Settlers of Catan; just because 6's and 8's should come up more often than 4's, doesn't mean that they do over the short-term. So, they use a a deck of cards that exactly matches the probabilities of the results of two dice. I think one of the charms of Settlers is that, over the short-term, your expected chances of getting that valuable 6 region to pay off might not happen. 

But after falling way behind in a recent "Settlers Trails to Rails" game, I was more concerned with the way rolling a 7 just extends the pain. With every roll of 7, no resources get produced for a turn...effectively pushing out the game one extra turn. So, not only was I falling further behind because of wacky, non-expectant dice rolls...the game was just getting longer due to the 7s.

So, is there something that can be done to change that?

Now, I also don't think the robber should change...stealing a card from the leader (and shutting down one of his hexes), and keeping someone from hording cards are important to the game. But what if, after a player rolls a 7 and performs his duties as a robber, the player does an additional action...he simply keeps rolling until he rolls a non-7, pays out the regions on that number, and the game continues as normal?

Basic probabilities here.... 6 out 36 possible rolls will result in a 7. So, every sixth roll will result in a robber action...producing no goods, which, based on my theory, extends the game by another turn. If we let a player still payoff regions, that would mean the game doesn't have those extended turns, and we've reduced the length of the game by 1/6.

Assuming a game of Settlers takes 120 minutes. 1/6 of that time is 20 minutes. So, now the game is reduced down to a game that takes 100 minutes. That seems somewhat substantial.

So, let's roll with this rules change. Does it affect, in any way, that the game gets played? The game probably becomes looser in the end game, since every turn will produce supplies, and therefore starting out a turn short of cards won't happen very often. The robber rules will still be in effect limiting hand sizes, though.

Does trading change? Since your hand size will be larger, it will be easier for you to build what you want...but you will also have more cards to trade, and I think, there will be more incentive to trade to keep under the robber 7-card level.

Because of this, I think that game even speeds up more, because it will be easier to hit the winning conditions (even though that may be offset by the slower player turns, due to having more cards in hand...which will create more decisions to be made). But I don't think anything fundamentally changes.

It's worth a try at some point. I think.