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.

More Mutation Musings

I tried a couple things out. Want to get some stuff down in writing.

Rolling 2 dice, using on on the board and one into the mutation pool seems interesting so far.

I tried a scenario where leveling up cost mutation points equal to the level attained.  Also you needed to roll a die pip that matches something in your pool to go up level.  If you miss then by definition you can add another die to your mutation pool and become even more likely next turn to level.  I put in an added "you can immediately legally place a number of die from your mutation pool equal to the Mutation Pool value - New Level attained" i order to try and mitigate getting behind from a bad roll not letting you level up at your first opportunity.  This seemed cool, but other players who DID get it on their first turn had a permanent lead on that unfortunate player and it wasn't good enough.

This led me to thinking about some sort of penalty for stacking, for instance paying a mutation point, but i'm worried that could really slow the game down. I am also thinking about possibly aiding the stacked player in some way, but "giving them a mutation point" seems odd and what value would it be set to? Perhaps they just roll X additional dice on their next turn where X equals the number of stacked die they had between turns.

A different Idea involves the Mutation pool collecting sets of dice with certain values.  For instance maybe you have to cash in X doubles from the mutation pool where X is equal to the new level.  This may have a bad effect of spreading out who has leveled based on luck even more.

Or perhaps you can always stack, but your level gives you a discount on mutation points for payment of the stacking?

Mutation Musings

This game is cool, it's just too simple. Thoughts:

• Have a pool where you can put dice to show your "mutation points".  Spend mutation points to level up your organism as a whole. You can't have two dice with the same value in the mutation point pool.
• Three overall levels for the organism.  The game always has the same 3 level up bonuses and then 3 random ones that are associated with each.  The 3 main ones are:
• Level 1 - No stacking (starting point)
• Level 2 - Can stack up to total height of 2
• Level 3 - Can Stack up to total height of 3
• "Random bonuses" are a stack of cards, three are dealt out at the start of the game randomly, they are associated with the three levels.  This means from the beginning of the game everyone will have a bonus that will likely differ from previous starting settings making each game start off feeling different.
• Take out "doubles = removal", they simply allow a reroll
• Possibly spend Mutation points (maybe die needs to match?) to do a standard removal action.
• Variable game end conditon, not sure what this is yet.

New Project: Slaughternight FEVER

What is it?
This new project is a big attempt by me to create a deck building, character leveling, fast paced action game with variable player powers and lots of ridiculousness.  The game is currently themed as a future dystopian death pit game show where each player must kill off waves of various enemies and they get points according to how well and flashy they do it.

The Deck
The backbone of the system is deck building, which isn't anything new but I feel will work well for this theme.  Your deck is your carrying capacity as well as all your available skills.  You still pull some items out and equip them, thus taking them out of the deck pool.  So if you start taking on too many items/weapons/misc then your deck will start to get sluggish due to being overburdened.  In addition to this, you will take wounds as negative cards right into your deck so they will also slow down how well you can do things in the arena by clogging your hand.

The most interesting mechanic i've come up with so far is a way to have a feeling of randomness in combat while completely eliminating dice from the equation.  I want this randomness to be controllable by the player, and this mechanic resolved itself into "combat stats" on every single card that can be put into your deck.  They are three modifiers which lie on the bottom of the card, as seen on an example card below:

So whenever you make an attack, you figure out what your current attack power is (explosion symbol) and if you have the correct range to the target.  Then you do your "combat draw" which is simply drawing the top card from your deck and using ONLY these modifiers on the bottom of the card to see if you did enough damage or even hit the target.  With melee attacks you effectively always "hit" the target, but you might not do enough damage to overcome their defense.  With ranged weapons you have to have the range equal the distance away.  So you might have been 3 spaces away from the target with a range of 4, and missed because you pulled this card as your combat draw making your range actually 2 and therefor not enough.  

This is important because you for the most part have total control over what cards go into your deck, so you KNOW if you are putting crappy range modifiers into your deck, but this might be good enough because you need the extra defense modifier for when you are attacked...or you just love the idea of that +2 to your damage when you draw the card.  You don't need to worry about accidentally rolling low on a bunch of dice and feeling like you eventually lost the game due to bad luck.  Sure there is the luck of the draw, but you have the burden of making sure your deck isn't going to backfire on you.

The leveling

The next idea is actually taken from one of my first game development projects "Reliquary".  Its the idea of having a skill upgrade map that you move around in order to modify your base skills.  The original idea came from the video game Final Fantasy X.  Below is the current layout for the character sheet:

As you can see, you start in the center of the hex grid map, and as you level up you can increase various mixes of the three main attributes. The exact mechanics for how you move around is still being worked on.

The Arena

Lastly we have the playing arena where this game takes place.  Eventually I want it to be modular, but for now its the grid you see below with various white hex shapes to create obstacles:

The idea is that each player "controls" one type of enemy mob.  They don't actually dictate where they go, but these mobs only move on that players turn much like Castle Ravenloft.  In addition to this, that player has a responsibility to kill more of "their" mobs then others by way of a bonus point system.  If they kill more of that mob then anyone else then they get X bonus points but if someone else beats them in the kill count then they LOSE X bonus points.  This is currently the only real player interaction in the game, just denying the other players their bonus points. 

This photo was taken during the half hour first ever prototype game I played with Owen tonight.  It turned out to be way too hard for the players, and we were swiftly overwhelmed by hobbits and killbots (awesome mobs, I know).  This playtest illustrated that I have not given the players enough room to DO stuff on their turns.  I'll be modifying many of the base cards for the next play test, mostly consisting of adding in action chains so that after you play a card like "run" you can get another action back to do something instead of using most of your turn just to try and reposition yourself.

This game is about SLAUGHTER after all, gotta emphasize the action!  I know I have been somewhat light on actual mechanics so far in this post, but that is mostly due to them being very preliminary so far.  Hopefully i'll get some more work done on this as the month progresses and I can get more specific info up for you guys :)

Nanogrid 3.0

Really? another massive revision?

Well, sort of. I knew I loved the card play mechanic that was introduced in the last post but I also went abit crazy trying to figure out how to balance it so it wasn't so easily breakable. Mak, in our test game, proved he could just horde replicates and dominate with a win as soon as he was within boosted replication reach of his end goal. In addition to this, I had "boring turn" syndrome where energizing was simply not "cool" and it took your entire turn. I always did like it when you got to do two things on your turn.

which led me to the following revalation: By placing a card onto the public tableau, and then bringing a different card back into my hand I am in essence choosing TWO different actions. What if you perform the action of the card you play as well as the card you pick up all in the same turn? And in the order you choose? Holy crap that sounds interesting! I honestly had this idea very shortly after the last play test, but I didn't get around to trying it until about a week ago.

Why'd it take so long to try this?

My frustration with other parts of the game honestly kept me away for a while. It wasn't until a week ago that I had the second big idea that I got myself in gear and built it out into a new prototype: What if your cubes on the board can move? Not only that, what if they don't actually hold a value at all... they are simply movable playing pieces? Now I don't have to get my brain hurting with transfer distances, and swimming my eyes over a sea of pips on top of crazy connecting lines. PLUS it gives me a great excuse to use all those blank dice I purchased over a year ago!

After one quick playtest with movable cubes and the new two for one action mechanism I knew I was ready to try it with my friends. Below is a picture of the end of the first game with others. It might not be obvious on first glance, but yellow won the game by getting to the 6th green upgrade (he forgot to push up the skill since it was inevitable so everyone forfeited their turns).

This game was played with Geoff, Evan, and Erick and it was really interesting.  Firstly, they all said they not only enjoyed it but want to be a part of future tests.  As a designer there really isn't a better compliment then that.  There were definitely problems still however, most notably bieng the ability for one or two people to totally lock down the movement of pieces...which can completely nullify other peoples turns since they can't actually DO anything.

So a significant amount of brainstorming with everyone went into how to force people to actually play the cards in their hands instead of hoarding all the replicates while everyone else stagnates.  My solution for this so far has been to make the Primary (playing card down) action and the secondary (picking card up) actions more and more different.  In some cases like replication I am trying to make it actually slightly painful to pick up so that you can't just easily grab them to screw everyone else.  I want you to still be able to block in this way, but it has to hurt a bit.  I added a "spend energy to move a cube" action to the energize role as well in order to get more moving going on the board.

A second playtest happened two nights later and it was also very successful.  This time one big issue was that I reduced energy input far too much and we all hit a drought of energy which we couldn't get out of.  We house ruled it halfway through the game to keep going, but this lead to a great train of conversation on how small changes in one portion of this game can trickle through several other mechanics.

I am happy to say that at this point I feel I am finally out of the "innovate" phase of this game and now into the "balancing" phase.  I feel the card play mechanic is interesting and enjoyable, and now am going to be striving to get all these moving pieces to work smoother together.  I expect numerous small revisions in the next couple months as I tweek it, but its definitely going places.  

Nanogrid 2.0

After over a month of taking a brain break from Nanogrid development I have jumped back in. The issue I was running into was that the game was really just an interesting area control mechanic. So it wasn't FUN, just pretty. My previous couple posts were ways to make it more strategic but they all fell flat when I tested it with myself, thus me taking a break to distance myself from the game for clarity.

Nanogrid 2.0
The nitty gritty of the issues Nanogrid had was that it was for the most part multiplayer solitaire where each turn almost always had an easily deduced best outcome and no restrictions on what you could do. A few nights ago I was thinking about ways to restrict the players options on their turn when I came up with what I think is a great card play mechanism. Keep in mind the base game is virtually unchanged in this rev.

Each player always has a hand of 4 cards, and there is always a community pool of three cards on the board. There are 4 different card types, one for each of the actions possible (energize, transfer, replicate, place tile). A player can only do an action that they have in their hand at the beginning of their turn, and when they play that card it goes into the communal pool where they then take a different card out and put that into their hand for later. In this way you have the strategic implications of doing what you want to do now but not wanting to feed your left hand opponent exactly what they need. Added onto that, you are thinking about what you will be wanting to do NEXT turn, and that will influence what cards you bring back up from the public pool. Awesome.

I added onto this the ability to play 2 cards of the same color at once into the pool. This "boosts" that action, which lets you execute that action as if you had the next upgrade level already (ex .Your table says you energize for 3 pips, but you do a boosted energize so you actually add 4 pips to your dice). I also had a special combo of one transfer card and one replicate card, in order to do a replication one farther away then you are currently allowed.

I also changed the end game condition. Getting all your dice out just turned the game into a race, and that never felt right to me. Now the end game condition is tied directly in with the skill table. You win immediately if you either get your 6th upgrade of one color, or have all three color skills up to the 4th skill level at least.

The last significant change was eliminating the "hostile replication" and I attached the combat aspect of the game to the Transfer action. Now you transfer energy into an opponent, and they loose pips according to a simple difference between each of your Transfer skill levels. So if I have a transfer skill of 3 and my opponent has a skill of 4, then its a 1:1+1 situation and so my one pip of power kills 2 pips of theirs. This is meant to be a "beat up on the leader" mechanic, so the player with the lesser transfer skill actually gets the upper hand.

Playtest with people
Below is the end of the first game played with others.

Yellow : Mac
Red : Brad
Blue : Paula
Green : Me



Paula won by grabbing 6 of the green Transfer skill, it was getting close. I was one orange Energize upgrade from winning in the previous round but this was too much of a threat and Mac destroyed three of my dice with one transfer action, ouch!

One thing I really liked is that in order for Paula to win, she NEEDED to have 2 replicate cards so that she could "boost" the replication and lay down two dice. Since we can't see her hand, we didn't have one of those annoying end game situations where you can say for sure "Paula will win this turn guys". You can just say "she MIGHT be able to, depending on how she has built her hand". Plus no one noticed anyway, she was sneaky :P

Conclusions
Everyone enjoyed it, but I feel that the game went a little longer then it should have. It lasted abit over 2 hours. Here is a list of the input I got:

1. Energize is too slow and uninteresting, do something to increase the energy flow into your system
2. Having an end condition based on the number of energize locations you control would be cool
3. Transfer rate is perhaps too easy to get to ridiculously high numbers
4. Mac commented on the card mechanic being "rondel-like", and I see where he is coming from and don't have a problem with this.

So i'll be adding a new end game condition and probably changing energize to add that number of pips to more then one energize so you essentially get a 2x multiplier on your energize when you expand into more energize locations. Perhaps overkill? Only testing will find out.

I think i'm going to modify the Transfer skill tree as well, make it have a little slower of an escalation into huge transfer numbers.

All in all a great success, you all will hopefully be seeing me carrying this around and trying to get you to test it more often :)