Working title: Xenoterra

New game idea, the main mechanic has been stewing around my head for about a month now. Finally brain designed it far enough that I need to write this down and hopefully start really working on a prototype.

Overview:

1. Euro style civ / engine building game. 
2. Set on foreign planet in the future, humans land from different ships escaping from a dying earth. 
3. Lots of indirect conflict though diminishing opportunity selections, currently zero direct conflict and I hope to keep it that way. 
4. Best civ once all the cards have been drawn wins. 

Mechanisms:

On a players turn they can take one of three actions before always doing an upkeep:

1. Draw a card (or cards depending on their engine)
2. Play a card (or cards depending on their engine)
3. Discard a resource card on that turns location and take the appropriate resources. 

During upkeep the players will:

1. Gain or lose resources based on the Fatigue track, as well as from buildings and technology the player has researched
2. Freely add one (or more based on their engine) level to each active technology or construction cards as long as the appropriate costs can be fulfilled. 

Each card has four sections to it:

1. Name of the technology, building, or special action. 
2. Victory point value for completing the card.
3. Construction/Research track showing the levels and costs in actions and resources to complete the card.
4. Details of the technology, building, or special action. 
5. A set of resources, always having a number of ore and then a variety of two or three other specialized resources. 

Each player has a player board which let's them track:

1. Population cubes set in a tiered grid with the longest row on top and the lowest row near the bottom. Each spot along the rows has a population cube on it, and each row has a negative effect to fatigue on it based on how far down it is. First row is -1 per cube, second is -2 etc.
2. A zone to put population cubes that have been short term spent and will come back on the following turn.  Cubes will go here from drawing cards as well as completing construction/research.
3. three locations where resource dice will be placed, associated with the three resources in the game. Players will set the dice to equal their current amount that they have. Currently thinking they will be d10s.

Central Card row and Resource zone

1. Cards will feed out onto a sliding row with population cube costs associated with them.  The oldest cards will have the lowest population cube cost and the newest card will have the highest cost.
2. When a round is over, the oldest cards will slide off the track and into the resource zone.  In this zone the cards are rotated so that their resources are on the top instead of the bottom, and they now become available only to be taken as the "gather resource action".  The rest of the card is unused from now on and the card is discarded when a player uses it to gather.

Fatigue Track

1. A central theme of this game is that the more you are able to do, the more fatigued the player's population is going to be and this will set you back.  Almost every building made and most technologies will come with a negative impact on the player's fatigue level.  
2. The fatigue level directly correlates with turn order, so the less fatigued a player is, the earlier in turn order they will be able to play.  
3. There will also be resource and other penalties associated with dipping very far down the fatigue track.  This is to stall out run away leaders, since the better a player is doing the farther back in player order they will most likely be.

Turn order Rondel

1. This will be a Rondel with 8 or so slots in it.
2. Each player will have a piece associated with them on the rondel, no slot will ever have more then one player piece.
3. When establishing turn order, players will look to the fatigue track and start "leap frogging" their pieces to the very front of the rondel.  They will start with the player with the lowest fatigue.
4. If two players have equal fatigue then it is the player whose piece that was farther forward on the Rondel which leap frogs first.  This means that players with equal fatigue will alternate who goes first between them each turn for as long as they are on the same fatigue level.

That's a pretty good summary of where I'm at currently.  It feels good to have it written down, though I doubt it'll make much sense to someone reading it cold. I started writing this a week ago and have already revised this document significantly.

Mutation: starting to tighten this thing up

I had a couple productive playtests of Mutation yesterday, below is the feedback I received:

• Change removal rule to "Remove, then place. You can't place where you removed".  This is a far more elegant and simple rule to explain over the "only remove when adjacent to a chain of at least 2 dice" rule i've used for years.
• Variable end game condition, most likely first to 10 (value to be tested) or largest strain after 20 turns.
• Test a partner variant where you work together and win as a team when one of you has the longest strain.
• Work on 2 player game more.  
• Perhaps both players play two colors in much the same way a partnership game would play out.  
• Perhaps you roll four dice at a time (2 of each color) and place both on your turn.
• Asymmetric 2 player mode, one player is the bacteria and the other is an immune system or antibiotic fighting back. 
• Players have different actions available to them, bacteria spreads fast but the opponent is "Stronger" somehow.
• Tested some cardplay options. Nothing has really clicked yet, though I like the idea of a variant that uses card play to slightly modify dice and perhaps restrict double total numbers. 
• Tried 6 cards, one of each value, and you can spend them to induce a double or break the level 1 adjacency rule.
• Issues here are how it can slow down the game and potentially have odd stalemate moments where the first to spend the card will surely lose becasue the opponent can spend theres to come back and then both will lack the card and the second player will have the desired board position.

General consensus is that I DO have something here and it is close to done.  I just need to tighten up some of the rules, and increase the possible variant options to add value to the overall game.  There was also a feeling from everyone that Mutation isn't necessarily detracted by being a pure dice game.  I don't want potential customers to be turned off by the apparent lack of proprietary content.