The basic concept: players are a crew on a pirate ship vying for the captain's spot. Missions happen during the voyage that rewards the whole ship, but the player who is captain when the ship docks get a bigger share. Ship goes out again and again a few times until the pirates are old enough to retire, and the winner is the one who has amassed the most loot.
First: are there any similar games I can look at for inspiration? The closest to what I am making that I've played is battlestar galactica, except instead of a hidden traitor, everyone is a potential traitor.
Second: I'm struggling a bit with how the actual game works and where to put the abstraction. My first idea (and I already went a bit crazy and printed out 100 cards or so for it that didn't work at all) is a worker placement on the ship that is also area control. The places you go operate ship functions (repairing damage, cooking food, firing cannons), but also let you convert the crew tokens that are there to your side. When morale is low, you flip the tokens and see if any player has more support from the crew than the captain, and then they become the new captain. My problem here was in balancing the two types of gameplay, and figuring out what the actual battles are like.
I felt like there weren't enough interesting things to do on the ship at this resolution. Oh, we are in combat? Everyone go to the canon space to shoot. If Billy is already on the canon space, uh... you can go cook some more food? In the middle of a fight?
I'm trying a few different things here in my head, and I think it may be workable and just not there yet.
On the other hand, I have been coming up with an alternative that might be simpler. It would be more of a deck-builder style game, where you buy cards for your deck each time you go to port. You balance playing cards that help with shared ship resources and cards that increase your faction strength and make it more likely for you to become captain. Perhaps the cannons have a certain amount of time before they can fire again, and some of the cards can speed that along.
I don't really know what I'm asking. I guess, should I keep persuing the more granular adventure style game where you move your tokens around on a ship, or would it be better to stick with cards? Do you see any glaring problems with the main mechanic of players working together to achieve victory in battle, while simultaneously trying to become captain? (And then repeating that a few times so it's not just "yay I'm the captain so I win!")
It did give me some new ideas actually. This is probably the simplest version of the idea, so I might start here, even though I was aiming for a bigger more complex game, it might be a good way to start to experiment with the base mechanic:
* Shared deck of cards "ship" deck.
* Contains encounters, crew members, and ship locations
* Everyone draws a hand
* On your turn, you play all of the cards in your hand
* encounters and ship locations are played in the center
* if there are multiple encounters, they are played face down under each other
* crew members can be played on the encounter, on the ship, or on a player
* when played on a player he will affect that player's faction strength, when played on a ship location or an encounter, will affect those cards (making cannons stronger, increasing loot on a plunder encounter etc)
* at the end of a round:
* if an encounter was played: the encounter is resolved. the captain can now rearrange the crew cards on the ship or encounter; as well as trading them for his own faction cards if desired, to maximize faction strength and plunder. Plunder is sent to the captain, but he can distribute some to the other players.
* after the encounter is resolved, a mutiny occurs. each player's faction is pitted against each other. winner becomes captain, and remaining faction cards are discarded
The only real question mark for me in this design (before I start making cards and finding more questions!) is how the mutiny works. Crews could simply be numbers, you add them up and just go with the highest number. But what about if a player knows they aren't going to win the bid... Should they be allowed to save their crew for later rather than trying to win the captainship? So you could play low crew members when you think the reward isn't going to be good enough, and then build a stronger crew to be captain for better plunder. Also, does everyone just compare numbers in one go? Or is their a head to head where the weakest crew members are lost and it is a battle of attrition?