Solo Amusement Park Builder (name undecided) is a solo game meant to be played in a short time frame. The components and game are small with the intent to keep the game in a small box.
In it you play as an amusement park company attempting to build the best park possible within one year.
It uses the Shake and Make mechanic, as well as dice and cards to track your progress and success.
Contents:
- Board with nine locations and 14 connections
- 3 coloured dice
- 1d6
- 10 event cards
- 10 setback cards
- 27 customer cards
- 30 resource cards (10 each wood, metal, money)
- Box with two interior ridges
- 5 tokens (1 green, 2 brown, 2 white)
- 10 double sided amusement tokens (1 on one side, 2 or 3 on the other)
- 14 road markers
- Turn Track
- Turn track token
Dice are in three colours, white, blue and red.
All dice have two customers and one setback.
White die has one failure and is rolled for minor attractions
Blue die has two failures and is rolled with the white die for medium attractions.
Red die has three failures and is rolled with the other two dices for major attractions.
Box is split into three equal sections by the ridges: 1, 2, 1.
Setup:
- Place the board on a solid surface
- separate cards into their respective piles
- put markers in box
- put lid on box
- separate roads and amusements into piles
Play:
- Begin by shaking the box. Read your results and take the appropriate number of resource cards
- You may now use these resources to build on the board.
- Build
- You may build roads for 2 metal and 1 wood.
- Roads must be attached to an attraction to be placed
- You may build minor attractions for 2 wood and 1 metal
- You may build medium attractions for 3 wood and 2 metal
- You may build major attractions 4 wood and 3 metal
- All attractions give you one event card
Attractions must be connected to one another by roads - You may spend 2 money in order to gain 1 of either other resource.
- Roll
- Each time you build an attraction you must roll between 1 and 3 dice.
- 1 white die for a minor attraction, 1 white, 1 red die for a medium and all three colours for a major
- If all the dice rolled read failure, your building FAILs and you lose the resources.
- You may pay 3 money for each die face that reads failure to mitigate that failure and build your attraction anyway. (3 for a minor, 6 for a medium, 9 for a major)
- For every die that says Setback draw one set back card and follow its instructions, or your building will FAIL (see above)
- For every die that reads customer, draw one customer card
- Play event cards
- Continue the next turn from Step 1
- The game ends after 12 turns have elapsed.
You may play event cards at any time, unless stated otherwise on the card.
Events may change die rolls, give you customers, force you to spend money or any number of things
Scoring:
When the game ends, count your customers and your remaining money cards.
Each set of 5 money cards equals 1 point.
Each customer equals 1 point
Each minor attraction earns 1 point
Each medium attraction earns 2 points
Each major attraction earns 3 points
Events: Each time you build an amusement draw an evnt card.
eg:
- Marketing
- Roll 1d6, add 1 for every major attraction you own
1-3: Your marketing campaign fails, lose ½ your money, rounded up
3-5: You are moderately successful in marketing, earn 1 customer
6+ : Amazing! Your park becomes really popular, gain 2 customers - Grand Opening
- Play immediately
You gain 3 money and may roll up to 2 customer dice - Negative Feedback
- The next customer you roll also gains you a Setback card. If you cannot resolve the Setback, you must relinquish the customers earned from this attraction. The attraction does not, however, fail to build.
Setbacks: Setbacks are gained by rolling a Setback on the customer dice. They cause you to have to fulfill requirements other than just the resource cost in order to build your structure.
Ex.
- Bigger than it looks:
- Pay an extra 1 wood and 2 metal to complete this attraction or the building FAILs
Comments
Some minor changes were
Some minor changes were made:
Changed the road rules to clarify when they can be placed, and where.
Changed attraction rules to clarify where they can be built.
Changed events to only draw one per attraction.
I've now played three games by these rules (and one by my mum) and scores are reasonably consistent. High score was 20, lowest 14.
It is more fun than the original version, and I think it is coming along nicely. I still feel something is missing, but I don't know what. I want to make better bits than the ones I am playing with, as well.
Changes were made:
Changes were made:
Size of board? Other questions.
Have you determined the size of your board? And please correct me if I'm wrong: this game board will be a square grid, yes?
Have you thought about having the road already placed, and the player simply determines where and which attractions will appear?
For rolling dice, I think that with your current dice ratio it's more difficult to create a minor attraction than a major one. Since all you need to do to FAIL at a minor attraction is roll one die, there's no second or third die to protect it from all dice showing FAIL. Have you considered this? Maybe you want to reward the player and/or make it easier to make major attractions, but at this rate, there seems to be no incentive to go for a minor attraction at all (as there's no time limit to the game). Players would just save up their resources to build major attractions each time.
An alternative is to let the player roll all three dice for each type of attraction, but the reward/penalty for each result is relative to the size of the attraction. For example, rolling Customer on a die results in +1 Customer for a minor attraction, +2 Customers for a medium, and +3 for a major attraction being built. Same with Setback cards: the more complex an attraction, the more setbacks can be expected during construction. This would incentivize minor attractions over major.
Another alternative I hinted to above would be to have a turn limit. Like the player has 12 months or 36 weeks or whatever to build a park, and once the time limit is reached the game is over. Again, this incentivizes playing for major attractions when one can, and then having minor attractions as a "plan B" should time be running out.
Good luck on this game idea! It definitely had me thinking about it. :)
I have determined the size of
I have determined the size of my board, for now, yes. It is a set of nine locations with fourteen road lines connecting some of the locations.
And image of the (now outdated) components can be found here, the board I'm currently using is in the upper left.
A square grid might be more efficient, however, so I'll look into that.
I hadn't thought of having roads already placed, mainly from a thematic standpoint. But it is certainly a thought to consider.
It is more difficult to make a minor attraction from a dice stand point. Thanks for pointing that out! I suppose it could be talked away thematically, but I will instead try and tweak the rules (no sense in lazy designing!) Right now the dice are colour coded, with each die added having a higher chance of failure, which I think was the mitigating factor, but as I didn't describe the dice, that was an unknown.
I had a time limit in the original design, of twelve turns. I was trying to find a way to remove that, actually, as I am not the biggest fan of hard limits. But it does make sense and might worm its way back in.
Thank you for your time, you gave me a lot to think about!