Each player is a spider with their own board. The board consists of a 6 x 6 square grid.
There are 2 phases to the game:
~ The spider phase
~ The bug phase
I)BUILD A WEB
During the spider phase, the spiders will move around the board, spin new silk and repair damaged silk, and capture the bugs that landed in a prior bug phase.
Movement is allowed in the following ways:
1) Crawl along the bottom, top or up the sides of the grid.
2) Crawl along lines of silk that have been laid previously.
3) Drop from the top freely while laying silk.
Spiders lay silk by indicating that they have anchored their thread to a given spot. They then move to the spot where the want the thread to end and draw a line between the two points. Silk can be anchored to any point that the spider can walk to.
II)RELEASE THE BUGS
The bugs are drawn from a deck of cards. As each bug is drawn, 2 dice are rolled to determine which square in the grid it flies through and a bug token is placed in that grid. The strength of the bug, a value between 1 and 6, is compared to the number of threads running through the grid that was rolled.
~If the bug's strength is less than the number of threads passing through the grid, the bug has been snared, and can be collected during the spider phase in the next round.
~If the bug's strength is equal to or 1 greater than the number of threads, the bug is not snared and thus cannot be collected during the next round.
~Some bugs will damage the web if they are too strong for the web.
~ If a grid takes damage, there should be damage to neighboring grids. If a grid fumbles a bug and it has only 1 or 2 threads, then only they are damaged, but if a thread has more, it should cascade into neighboring grids as well.
CAPTURING THE BUGS
The next time around, the players can harvest the bugs that were snared during the previous bug phase in addition to building more web strands and repairing any damage from escaped bugs.
Harvesting a bug consists of moving to its location and spending one movement point to swath it in silk, at which point the player collects points equal to the bug's strength.
Any bugs that are not harvested during this phase will prevent other bugs from being captured in that spot. Further, they add 1 to the cost to capture a bug in any adjacent grid. Note that this adjacency rule does not change the chance of breakage, only reduces the chance of capture.
The goal of the game is to be the first player to collect enough points to lay an egg sac.
Comments
I like it. Ideas like this
I like it. Ideas like this remind me of SimAnt which was excellent.
I suggest adding a few more modes of play...
Predator Mode: Creatures that eat spiders attack making it more difficult to win the game.
Rival Mode: Spider webs connect allowing rival spiders to compete over space and even fight each other.
Thinking more about the rivalry mode....
It's amazing the things my mind will do to push off work.
I definitely need to keep this in mind and make sure I don't make any decisions for the single/multi player solitaire version that are broken in a shared board format.
If the 4 players each have their own corner of a shared space, play can get deep. I'd probably give each player a balance between area they control completely and contested or shared space. Building up community space raises the payoff available to everyone, but at an opportunity cost for building your own area that you dominate. Same thing with weighing the value of repairing your own web vs pushing into your opponents' territory to grab their bugs.
It would call for bigger bugs that are rare but have the potential to harm everyone if they are not anticipated.
Man, I really appreciate the suggestion a lot!
Thanks!
I'm a Will Wright fan, so even reminding people of SimAnt makes me glad.
I hadn't given much thought to the conflict aspects, but I did want to get some sort of player interaction going beyond the "get the most points" eventually. I like designing games that have multiple ways of playing, but more finely tuned than your average open sandbox. This recent trend of multiple scenario cards offering different goals and rules in games like Robinson Crusoe and Mage Knight is right up my alley. I'll keep your modes in mind when I finish with my first one!
One of the variables I'm playing with is the shape and size of the board, the frequency variations of each square in the board's grid that I should consider when determining dice and strength of bugs, point totals. I've been thinking about adding branches in the middle of the board and eliminating the edges on occasion. I also considered a chance for a baseball card to be drawn, which knocks out multiple grids.
The goal is to try to stay within the bounds of what feels most natural and true to the theme, including a calmness about the game. When I envision the game in my mind, I feel the same sense of serenity and wonder I get when I watch a spider making a web.