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I Love a Parade

I'm working on this game theme is rival towns trying to outdo themselves to build the best four parades from local groups, bands, veterans and floats. Each parade is judged on two criteria--an aspect of the parade's theme and a secret criteria revealed after the parade is set to go.

My concept is that there would be cards with six different events: Memorial Day, Christmas Parade, New Year's Parade, Veterans Day, Spring Fling and Halloween among them. Four of the six cards would be randomly drawn and each one would have some criteria (ie Most Veteran's Units gets X VPs, Most Floats scores X VPs, Longest Parade, etc)

A deck of six to ten additional criteria cards are shuffled and randomly chosen and placed face down under each of the four parades.

The unit deck would contain different types of parade units: Ie Legions, Fire Depts, Ambulances, Floats, Sports Teams, businesses, bands, etc. There are several of each type and each has a different number of base points and costs.

My thought is that three or four are flipped up and available for drafting. A Parade Day card is slipped somewhere randomly toward the bottom of the pack to end the round.

In addition there is a deck of spectators/donors (they play dual roles: The donors help provide resources to fund/Buy units and when the parade starts (round ends), they become the audience. Interspersed in this deck are modifier/action cards that allow people to better their units or sabotage their rivals. (ie sloppy pants, tarnished instruments, flat tire, etc)

Where I'm stuck is I'm trying to decide what would be more fun to draft these units. A collection mechanic or a cost mechanic...any thoughts?

THe game ends at the end of the year/four parades with the winner being the person with the most victory points. The various parade events are numbered and just placed in order. ie (1,4,6,7 or 2,3,6,8 where the numbers correspond to different holidays or parade reasons)

I'm open to any comments.

Comments

Volunteers and money?

What if the cards had multiple currencies on them? There could be stats for:

money contributed
work hours
rare skills

Then each parade element would have a money rating AND a work hours / rare skills rating. So you could draft it if you had enough money OR volunteers to make it work. This would provide a bigger variety to the spectator/donor cards you could do.

It would also gel with the fact that volunteers often do much of the work of actually making floats and organizing things.

Inspired by real life

I was thinking about your question for a while and was trying to think about the real world trials of getting your float accepted to a parade...

The cost mechanic doesn't ring true to the theme for me.

What seemed more appropriate was a collection mechanic, where applicants are submitting their float for consideration. This helps with the explanation why you might cull un-drafted floats every so often (Lame floats have to re=apply next year!)

Was thinking about more than floats

My idea behind the mechanic is based on the money it costs to have a parade. WE hold a Memorial Day parade in town and my thinking was we need to raise funds to pay bands and such so people pledge or donate money. That was where I was coming from in that the sponsor/audience cards would be sponsors and their presence in the players' hands would let them collect or purchase certain units for their parades. Perhaps if I go this sponsor route certain cards could be businesses or organizations instead of floats and you have to match a card type to be able to "secure" a float for the parade. Or the cards could have double duty in the sense that they have multiple values: an icon for float collection or some other mechanism for raising funds for units (or using some type of set collection to secure the unit ie you have to have a certain number of a type of sponsor to play to collect a band for your parade line up.)

Let me know if any of this makes sense?

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