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How should my game be played?

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Chicken
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Joined: 06/03/2020

Hi All,

I have been playing board games for most of my life and recently my friend and I decided to design a game for us to play (us being our usual group of friends)

The game is a tile laying-dungeon crawling style of game. Using the same tile placement menchanism like Betrayal at House on the Hill, 2-6 players will navigate a dungeon finding loot, dodging traps, fighting monsters and hopefully not dying?

We have designed all the characters, Monsters and Items.

We are now about to start the scenarios, but i personally have hit a brick wall on how we should actually play the game.
The idea we have is - there are different scenarios you can play, for examlpe one might be _ kill all goblin monsters in the monster deck, so you run around the dungeon trying to kill goblins in a certain number of rounds. Scenarios could range from search and destroy missions, kill all 'x' monster, search for 'x' item...all with different plot hooks.

Could there be a better way to play a tile laying dungeon crawler?
With the randomness of the tiles i feel like it makes it semi difficult to have different scenarios (maybe we add in tiles for certain scenarios?)

Otherwise i was thinking of having a linear story with possibly an event deck to shake things up?

If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to comment

Juzek
Juzek's picture
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Joined: 06/19/2017
Just a brainstorm, or maybe a

Just a brainstorm, or maybe a brain vomit....

I think having items could be fun too. A deck of events, and depending on held items it changes the event, then the items can be symbols or numbers on the tiles to pick up when you are in that area, or crafted from other items.

Some items or events could "unlock" certain tiles to prevent too much randomness about finding the boss too early

What about a rogue like dungeon crawler, where you reset the dungeon a few times through the game

You could have a small number of scenarios like 5ish that you don't know at first which will happen, but as events and tiles are revealed, they add to one of the events in a tracker so you get some foreshadowing about if you should prepare for zombies or starvation or whatever

let-off studios
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Joined: 02/07/2011
Variety of Goals

Beyond Betrayal, two other games come to mind as you describe what you've done here.

The first is Dungeon Crawl, absolutely my favourite "rogue-like" computer game. Provides plenty of player options, advancement, complexity, randomness, and surprises. It's been in development since the late '90s and is a load of fun. You can learn more here, and even play games online:

https://crawl.develz.org

The second is a game I learned about here at BGDF: Into the Black: Boarding Party. I bring this up because although it is similar mechanically to Betrayal it also includes "mini-objectives" for each character/player to achieve and gain victory. the combat system works very well, also.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/190047/black-boarding-party

I'd suggest you have a look at Into the Black because it's a recent game, uses random layouts, and seems to have combined these random layouts with objectives that are adaptable to whatever layout comes along.

I suggest you look at Dungeon Crawl because it has one major over-arching objective (to "retrieve the Orb of Zot") while allowing the player a broad range of self-determined objectives and goals, similar to the way Minecraft had done (at least back in the day, when I played it). Quality "rogue-likes" will work to achieve this design goal.

In both of these cases, the player has something to pursue, regardless of who they are or where they are, irrespective of whatever situation they find themselves. This works to keep any player engaged.

Hopefully these suggestions will be helpful. :)

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