One issue I had with the older prototype was that it didn't feel like the expanding board was "big" enough from a playing option stand point. There was this big grid, but not that many actual pieces out there, and it seemed to me that in order to fix this the game would simply get too big. The other issue I had was a "carcasonne-esque" player problem of having a hand of tiles and no where beneficial to actually play them. Within about ten minutes of working on this yesterday I came up with a solution to both of these problems. Every tile will have four positions on it instead of just one, and each of these four will always have two connecting paths leading out to the next available card. I can put in variations of paths between these four, but every tile will always be legally placeable orthogonally adjacent to any other tile in the game.
I proceeded to give a sample four player game a shot with very simple rules. On a turn you get two actions, and get to choose from the following pool:
1. Place a tile from your hand and draw a new tile
2. "Energize" a die on the board, adding 2 pips to its value
3. "Transfer energy" from one die on the board to any other in the connected network
4. "Replicate" a new die, reducing the pip value of one die and placing a new die on the grid adjacent to the original.
After a few rounds this is what I had, when I started brainstorming again:
It felt REALLY slow. I like keeping the number of viable options on each turn to be small and manageable to reduce Analysis Paralysis, but this was glacial.
I started thinking about a very interesting Designer Diary I read earlier in the day: The Endless Creation of Perpetual-Motion Machine. This game is a poker hand set creating game with an interesting Hansa T-esque skill development system. This is one of my favorite parts of Hansa T, why not try and put skill improvements into this game? Looking back at my last post in December it appears I had this idea then, but totally forgot about it. For simplicities sake I kept it to three different improvable skills to start. "Replication" would make creating new dice on the grid more efficient, allowing the player to eventually make 2 or three new dice from a single pip's worth of energy. "Energize" would gradually allow the player to add more pips then the standard 2 to a dice on the board. "Transfer" would allow the player to send their energy farther in the grid as it improved.
I put in a simple skill improvement condition, when you get four dice into a square pattern you could use an action to sacrifice one to the skill tracker and there-by make that skill better. Below is several rounds into this play test, sorry the image quality is pretty crap:
I like where this game is going, but it's still too rough to even call it an alpha design...still more of a proof of concept. My next ideas involve differentiating the cards a bit more. Perhaps only certain cards will have a skill boosting station? And other cards will have an Energizing station? Less sought after locations can have a modifier on them allowing a replicated die which starts there getting an extra pip? These are all ideas jostling around in my head, and I am definitely going to keep working at this.
I like the idea of the game ending once a player has used all of the dice in their stores, but also want to make investing in skill upgrades have a time penalty. So sacrificing a dice to put it on the skill board is a little too streamlined into being what everyone should obviously do as soon as possible. I'd rather that die went back into the players store, and the skill tree gets modified some other way...but this doesn't feel elegant to me.
The working title is "Nanogrid", I like the tentative theme of nano-bots vying for control by moving around and self replicating on a variable grid. It continues to be hard to work on these things alone, i'd like to sit down with at least one other person and start working through some of these problems, and to see if it is actually interesting/potentially fun for other people and not just me.
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