Boogie Knights -- The Story So Far

Boogie Knights is a lightweight card game with a bit of dice rolling, aimed as a filler or (slightly geeky) family game, based on a terrible pun, and I figured it is about time I shared a bit about it here, as it is the prototype that I have so far progressed the furthest. It still has a long way to go, but I'm slowly getting there...

OK, so the story starts with a 24 game design contest on BGG nearly a year ago, where the requirement was "knight". This resulted in a bit of a punning discussion thread, during which "Boogie Knights" came out and just totally stuck in my head. How about a game that involved a combination of combat and disco dancing?

The concept grew with the thought of those kid's flip books where you combine the head, body and legs of different characters to make crazy combinations. You know the sort of thing: the head of a police officer, the body of an armoured knight, and the legs of a ballerina. We could have different sections of bodies, each helping in either combat or dancing. Then players could challenge each other in either discipline and earn victory points (prestige, as I decided) for winning these challenges.

To be a bit more specific about rules, each turn you play a card, which can either add a piece of equipment (a section of your character or an additional accessory) which will adjust your capabilities in disco and/or combat, or challenge another player. There are a couple of other card types, but they are less important. When you challenge another player, the two of you figure out your bonuses (from your equipment) in the relevant discipline and add the result of a die roll; whoever has the highest total gets a point of prestige. The game finishes at the end of a round when someone gets 5 prestige, and whoever has the most at that point wins.

Since that first version, there have been a few rounds of testing and revision, though not as many as I would like due to other things getting in the way and not enough opportunities for playtesting (partly my fault for not being sufficiently pushy). The latest playtest session was in London for one of the Playtest UK meetups, which yielded some really useful feedback which I am currently thinking about, though I would like a bit more data before making major changes.

I've attached the rules that we were using at that test event. If you would like to see the cards, the file is a little too large to upload here, but you can download the cards file from Dropbox -- it's 6 pages of cards to print, if you want to actually print & play.

So, at the moment I would like any comments I can get. The basic game seems to be reasonably sound, but the magic cards don't seem to be quite what I want, there may be some work to be done on the reward levels for challenges, and I need to know if there is an advantage for being first, last, or in any other position in the turn order. Actually, I just need data on the game in general as it probably needs another 1000 plays before I can be confident about it.

Thank you for reading!