Yesterday i came up with a simple binding idea for me to start with. I would go with similar die placement rules with Mutaiton, but instead of rolling dice the player would simply place the blank die on the board and there would be no "values". I would create a payment structure for every die placement that would actually force the players to pay to other players different currencies in order to do what they want. I ran out to the store and bought a couple hundred glass pebble things for $8.
I started messing around with 25 blank dice (now called cubes) of 4 colors and then a pile of glass resources that matched each player color. I must have messed around with 5 different ideas and 4 hours before I found one set of rules that started to work together. The player just paid the cost of the number of sides the cube touches and the colors of those adjacent sides. I won't go into the details, but the end product was a very cool idea. The player could not increase their own network of cubes by themselves because they could never generate resources of their own color. The only way for that to happen was to have an opponent place near your color and then generate it into their resource pool. Then they would have to stack next to or on top of your own piece and then PAY you your resource color. NOW you have your own color resources to increase your network.
I'm sure that came out too confusing. Simply, you need your opponents to generate the resources you need for you. It creates this awesome cycle of resources through all the players and sets up very interesting dynamics of what players can and cannot do depending on how much they want to pay their opponents. It ended up feeling abit like Hansa Teutonica in that you had to get into other peoples business and block them in order to have them get rid of you and in the process pay you resources which is what you really wanted in the first place.
COOL.
Today Owen and Charles came over to my place and we played through a couple game prototypes including one from the internet and a cool space cat/mouse game that Owen is working on. We ended up playing through a 23 round game of my new game and made several changes right away.
1. Stacking was too cheap, so an added cost of 1 random resource per cube level was added.
2. Stacked cubes had their network value changed from 1 to whatever level they are at.
There were several other small changes, but we ended up getting through the full game. Charles won on a tie breaker, having the same value network as me but having ONE more resource in his pool at the end of the game. Below are a couple pictures:
I have plans for this game, i'm not sure how many and which will actually work. My first is I will actually create a "board" on which it is played. I want to build into that board a bank of some sort which you can pay various resources in order to unlock different cube placements. I intend to play a couple games of this by myself tomorrow and then try and lock down a "current" set of rules and then post them. Currently it is abit to wishy washy to bother trying to put them down into words.
I have a feeling this game will be much harder to get my head around then Mutation was. I look forward to the challenge.
