Theme too offensive?

In the abstract, the design concept reminds me of two games: ingenious and colossal arena. In colossal arena you bet on creatures to survive the competition and in the end only bets on three of those bets payoff. In ingenious, like many Knizia games, the goal is to have the most of the least... So even collection of colors is rewarded.

As a hedge against chance, a wise person would diversify his bets amongst all of the god equally, like ingenious. But if you could somehow find out information about which ones are more likely to survive, then you can focus your bets more intelligently on specific gods. It's not clear from your description exactly how players will obtain information on the 'real' god. But, I think that whichever god that turns out to be, it will only be interesting if that god is determined somehow by the collective decisions of the players over the game.

As far as the theme is concerned, I'm not sure you have a meaningful game without the theme. But, you'll have to embrace the parody fully and play on it through out the whole design. Nobody wants to plY a serious game about religion.

Speaker: Hello, newcomers, and welcome. Can everybody hear me? [taps the mic a few times] Hello? Can everybuh-? Okay. [the crowd quiets down] Uh, I'm the hell director. Uh, it looks like we have about 8,615 of you newbies today, and for those of you who are a little confused, uh, you are dead, and this is hell, so, abandon all hope and uh yada yada yada. Uh, we are now going to start the orientation process, which will last about-
Man 4: Hey, wait a minute, I shouldn't be here. I was a totally strict and devout Protestant! I thought we went to heaven!
Hell Director: Yes, well I'm afraid you were wrong.
Soldier: I was a practicing Jehovah's Witness.
Hell Director: Uh, you picked the wrong religion as well.
Man 5: Well, who was right? Who gets into heaven?
Hell Director: I'm afraid it was the Mormons. Yes, the Mormons were the correct answer.
Crowd: [disappointed] Awww.

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But I agree with the previous poster. You'd be best off using long-dead religions. And rather than Clue, where the "answer" is determined ahead of time, individual choices making the final "religion" the most powerful is the most interesting from a gameplay point of view. This also allows you to ditch the religion thing entirely, if you want, since if you are throwing your allegiance behind game group X (be that Protestantism, The Cult of Isis, whatever) it could just as easily be a political party, or a competing culture, or a specific form of plant life on an alien planet. sky's the limit!

of course, if mormonism IS the right answer, as the show jokes above, then at least you're latching on to the biggest religious board game market in the US.

Mechanically i don't have a problem with the religion being chosen ahead of time so that the players must deduce what it is.

Thematically its fresh and certainly will offend some. You can’t do religion or politics without getting someone’s panties in a bunch. Personally I like the theme.

I don't think having players influence the final "correct" answer is too out of theme, especially if the game uses ancient religions instead of modern ones. After all, if players "support" Zeus over Athena (whatever that "support" means in your game) then it would make sense that Zeus is going to be the most powerful god on Olympus by game end.

Digression alert: Basically it comes down to the original form of monotheism - that there are many gods, it's just that mine is the most powerful of them - vs the later belief that there is only one real god, and the others don't exist at all, and their followers are deluded/lying/tools of an evil force. You can see this change in attitude in the Tanach (which Christians call the Old Testament): most of the first five books posit God as simply the deity Hebrews happen to worship (the 10 Plagues being a systematic smackdown of the Egyptian pantheon, Pharaoh's sorcerers able to do sone miracle-wrangling themselves); the later books describing the Prophets show that other gods (notably, Ba'al) don't answer the requests of their followers, and therefore don't exist.

Sorry, this sort of digression is what you get when you ask a Jewish History teacher about a religious game. :)

You could get he polytheistic pantheon to work by doing a Neil Gaimanesque take. All the gods are real, and their degree of power depends upon how many people acknowledge their existence and worship them. So you could have them competing for attention.

You could do modern religions, if you separate them operationally. An example would be Interventionist-Deist, Good-Neutral-Evil, Free Will-Deterministic.

On to mechanics. All the god cards are dealt out to the players at the beginning of the game. Each card describes how players would be scored if that god ends up winning. During the game you have rounds where you commit certain types of actions to earn certain types of points(this could be simply be cubes of color).

Every few rounds each player would then simultaneously cast out one of their cards. Whichever god(s) came up with the most cards would then be ejected from the game(they turned out not to be real). Anyone who has that god still in their hand must discard it. On the round someone lets out their last card, then these rounds continue until only a single god or pantheon of gods composed of the least number of cards exist.

Scoring in the case of a god is easy to see on the card. In a pantheon you would simply score for each god and then combine that score.

I am a Hasidic Hebrew and i find this of great offense, this makes me think of the atrocities of the past 100 years.

two responses showing exactly what you were afraid of -- out of proportion to your intent, and distracting from what you're trying to do.

one person seems to have joined bgdf solely so he could leave the comment that this game made him think of the holocaust (why? does EVERY discussion of religion make you think of the holocaust? if not, why this particular one?)

the second seems to think your intent is to mock his faith, and then based on a glancing breeze-through dismisses all the thoughtful responses as consisting of elements of other games, mostly so he can post about his indignant reaction to the game. again, little information but a lot of emotion.

this isn't to say that these comments are garbage for being emotional and fact-free, but they do reflect the sort of responses you're likely to get, and why it's important to stay away from current modern religions.

Funny, I wasn't particularly emotional when I wrote my comment, but that is unfortunately one of the weaknesses of internet forums--no opportunity to hear tone of voice or read body language.

I was actually trying to look at this from an objective standpoint, even though I also wanted to be honest about my own personal position. Believe it or not, I am actually offering helpful feedback--not as a sampling of those who would overreact, but by putting myself in the role of a discerning gamer/designer/publisher.

I've had enough experience with criticism, both as an architect and game designer, to know how to take it constructively, even when it is not exactly what I was expecting. "What's the point?" is a fair question, especially when designing and critiquing a game, and from the brief description offered, my comments reflect what seems to be the message of your design. For example:

People have worldviews because they believe them to be true and "right", not because they randomly select them and hope for the best. I can't imagine anyone would want to celebrate their own ignorance in a game, whether or not it is a parody.

If that is not your point, then you might reconsider your design choices--not because you are worried about an "oversensitive" audience, but rather, because your game is not communicating the intended message.

As for the mechanics, it is, of course, not necessary to have something completely original. Most games include variations of known mechanics, and I would even recommend surrounding innovative mechanics with well-known ones, in order to increase accessibility. Deduction games are great, but very difficult to design as there don't seem to be as many possible variations with the mechanic as, say, worker placement, etc. And, like trick-taking games, they are very difficult to sell, as there are so many already, and most are very similar in their gameplay. In my humble opinion, although the comments have most certainly been thoughtful and well-meaning, I did not see anything that, for me, would elevate this above other deduction games. I could be wrong, of course.

And that's where I made the conclusion that this game was much more inspired by theme than mechanics, which brings me back to the original question and the intended message of the game (if, for example, your real point was to demonstrate that literally no one has the answers to life's big questions, and it will be decided randomly at the end of the world/game, then why not include atheists, esoterics, etc. in the mix?).

If there was any emotion in my comment, it might be more from the frustration that any thoughtful critique of potentially controversial themes are often unilaterally dismissed, rather than taken advantage of as a doorway into a healthy conversation, better understanding, and, of course, improving game design skills. That was my intent.

The answer to the conspiracy theory game would always end up as Aliens or the Illuminati. Seriously though that sounds like a cool idea, do you have a seperate post hiding somewhere with more on this game?