I have been looking a lot into dice drafting games recently for 2 reasons:
1. I Love rolling dice
2. I read an article which suggested all worker placement games are essentially drafting and it was a bit like seeing the matrix.
I also read a post from Seth Jaffee on his blog about the above contest and thought about how I might attempt it.
Hopefully this game isn't considered a rip off of his idea I think its gone in a different direction from his concept but if anyone feels otherwise let me know.
The Basics
2N+1 Dice with custom faces all workers
1.Labourer
2.Scientist
3.Engineer
4.Hazmat Worker(Insert much better name)
5.Politician
6.General
Players take turns drafting workers from the dice set with both players having the final dice to a maximum of 3 workers per round. (drafting mechanic taken from La Granja No Siesta)
on a player board you have a set of actions that you can perform.
A labourer can be used to take a yellow cake cube.
A yellow cake and scientist can create plutonium.
Plutonium and engineers can create a bomb.
A bomb, General Politician can Test a bomb.
ECT.
Dice Mitigation
In these sorts of games it is important to have a method of mitigating the randomness inherent in the dice.
My idea is to have the option to not use a worker in a round and turn them into "funding" you may use the funding to adjust the worker eg. you have a scientist if you spend a funding you could have either a labourer or a engineer.
Scoring
There would be some main objective or timer of some description. Either the first player to 5 bombs or something. Additional end game scoring coming from a 'UN' situation, pollution and/or achievement tiles that could be collected throughout the game. Similar(perhaps to similar) to Energy Empire.
So that's the basics I will add some pictures as I scope out several prototypes and add notes as I'm going through the design process.
NB. This is my first real game design, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing but we shall see.....
Jim
Comments
Actions
**Update**
Actions
Actions are the meat and bones of any game and deciding how many and how easy they are to understand and do seems to be a deciding factor in what is a good game.
In this project I have broken down the actions into 3 categories
1. Simple Actions.
These can be performed with only one dice draft and gain an instant reward. for Example Mine yellow cake requires a Labourer. from that you get a yellow cake cube and gain a pollution. Nuclear Waste management requires a Hazmat worker and removes 1 pollution.
2.Complex actions
These are actions that require more than one worker to execute and thus could take multiple turns to do.
Example. Enrichment Plant. To make Uranium at the enrichment plant you need 2 yellow cake a scientist and 1 money.
3.Chain Actions
These actions require you to have completed complex actions before you can do them thus taking a while to complete.
Example Plutonium Bomb. To create a Pbomb you need to have a plutonium and have 2 engineers.
The balance of these actions is quite important as players would need to feel that they are doing thing on each of their turns whilst progressing toward the end game condition.
In the current iteration We have 10 Actions
4 Are Basic Actions 3 are Complex and 3 Are Chain Actions.