[GDS] General questions and comments

I knew I was going to miss the deadline on this but I did like the challenge.

I had an idea for this one that I might pursue. It's pretty similar to Fertile Crescent (as in: rolling dice in real time to make sets in a civ-building setting), but I don't think it'll be as chaotic as FC sounds. And I don't make people move because I hate moving. It's too much like work. :)

Yeah, I think both of our approaches are legit, just focused differently.

Like you said, chaos would be a part of the game no matter what. So I wasn't guarding against it as much as I was "trying not to overfeed it".

I had envisioned first that it would take several seconds for a player to make a set, so the pace would be a lot slower than, say, Pit. I was thinking 3-5 dice to start, maybe growing to 7 dice max throughout the game, with most of the sets being "all the dice have to be 'resource x'".

There would be 3 stacks of cards, face up, in the center of the table. The cards would be the buildings, technologies, etc, that you'd find in a civ-building game. Each card would require different amounts of resources, but for simplicity's sake, each card would only require one resource type. So, one building might require 4 Ore, another 5 Ore, but none of them would require "3 Ore + 1 Food". I made this decision so it would be easier for players to quickly examine their options, goals, and progress to those goals.

Anyway, players would be rolling and rerolling their dice going for the top-most cards on the decks. As soon as they have enough of the right resource, they take the card.

I was going to throw in a few wrinkles, though.

Right away I knew there might be cases where a player couldn't possibly obtain a card (if the card requires 5 resources and the player only has 4 dice, for example), so I was going to have a mechanic that I called Exploration/Research, where a player could try to make all his dice show the Explore icon. When he did, he could slide the top card off of any deck and place an Explore token on it. The card was still up for grabs by anybody, but the card that had been underneath it was now also available. In addition, that Explore token counted as one of the required resources on that card for the player. This did a few things: It gave any player the capacity to "skip" past a card he couldn't possibly obtain (favoring the players with the fewest dice, who would probably be the ones who were behind anyway), and made the unobtainable card potentially obtainable by that same player.

Players would have a limited supply of these exploration tokens, to keep the board from getting too messy with tons of cards all over the place, and to give some tension to the decision to explore.

Another twist was going to be in how War/Conquest worked.

There would be a "Military" die side. But instead of buying cards directly with Military die results, the players would earn Military tokens (usually by making a set of Military die results -- the number of which was required being determine by the player's own civ, tech, special abilities, etc). Each time they made a set, they'd take a token and place it on one of their Barracks-type cards. This would represent their standing armies. Players would be limited in how many of these tokens they could have in their Barracks (probably just 2 or 3 to start with). Then, going back to the stacks of cards in the middle of the table, when a War/Conquest card was revealed, players would spend tokens to try to win the War. The War cards would have costs that were higher than players' standing armies, so the players would have to spend their tokens (place them on the War card) and then try to earn more tokens (by getting Military die results) to get enough to claim the card. This provided one aspect of the game where players could "save up" from one turn to the next. At the cost of time, of course. I was a little worried that moving tokens around in real-time would be unmanageable, so that was an area of risk. Probably solvable, though.

Of course there would be different Civilization cards that players started with to grant them special abilities, and ways to grow their dice pools, their max standing army size, raise armies faster, explore more, etc.

That's about as far as I got.

Congratulations Andy :)
It was a nice pitch. I liked the moving around in a room, part. I thought this was a great challenge so I am sorry I did not participate. I recently played a game called Captain Sonar - a submarine battle between 2 teams real time. It has a nice feature that if you act too quick without thinking the damages on the boat will be a severe issue.