Hi all,
It all started with a theme. I wanted to develop a game where you assume control of a pack of dogs looking to gain dominance over the local park. Now, months later, I am now at my third full iteration and am begging to be saved from myself.
My three self-imposed requirements were as follows:
Scale – The game should be very enjoyable for two players before examining how to support more.
Accessibility – The game cannot be too complicated to teach or learn.
Charm – Rival dogs must never die, or be seen to die. They should instead be made submissive or otherwise useless.
First, I was planning on a risk-like game territory capture game where the defender must correctly guess exactly how much variable attack-strength (referred to as “confidence”, which caps at 7) the attacker was going to commit to a given battle to eliminate that much confidence from the attacker. Fail to guess correctly, and the attacker robs you of that many defenders. If you’re all thinking, “Huh?” right now, I don’t blame you, but guessing the exact amount of confidence required equal parts logic, psychology and luck. An attacker having lots of confidence makes it more difficult for the defender to anticipate how much will be spent, but also increases the overall impact to morale if caught off-guard by a sly or lucky defender. Full rules are available if anyone thinks that I was on to something here.
The problems with this were:
- It felt gimmicky;
- It was extremely difficult to put any character into unique dogs at this scale;
- The idea of one dog leaving behind confidence (marking his territory) like you would leave behind an infantry unit in Risk and having another dog pick it up later was good for gameplay but didn’t fit the theme well; and
- The geography of the board seemed to be an afterthought, rather than the focus.
So then I got on this deck-building kick and redesigned the whole thing as a card-game. While this would have made prototyping breezy, the game felt a little too dicey in playtesting, and the theme seemed, at times, a little tacked-on.
Then I started kicking around the idea of the game being focused on area-control and unit displacement. Dogs themselves are printed onto hex tokens, and are facing a defined direction. Players would alternate turns. In each turn, a player could either place a dog, move/re-orient a dog, play a special event card or score points for every objective where you have an adjacent friendly dog, and no rivals. The challenge is that all unobstructed rival dogs, with equal or less confidence, directly ahead of your own dogs are displaced, and dogs gain +1 confidence for every rival dog they displace. Displaced units must move to an adjacent hex and may re-orient. Even with sufficient special event cards in place to help balance the game, this lends itself to runaway victories, and I’m not getting the “fun” vibe from any of it, which is a good sign it’s a terrible idea.
So I’ll throw it out there – what mechanical expectations would you have from a game that combines dogs, suburban parks, and a theatre of war?
