Board Game Designers Forum

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

This blog entry represents a public record of work being done on "Pidgin," the tentative title of my deck-building word game. The game is best described as "Dominion meets Scrabble," where players must spell words in order to purchase new letters or victory points. For transparency, the primary game mechanic is credited to Donald X. Vaccarino's "Dominion," and the inspiration for the design came from an early build of Karl Heuer's "Webster's Ghost," which is still a work in progress.

Pidgin
2-5 players

The objective of Pidgin is to finish the game with the most victory points in your deck. The gameplay, setup, and feel of the game will be very similar to Dominion, so instead of going through the game I will piece-by-piece detail the differences.

Pidgin is a word game, and instead of using treasure and action cards, you have letters. Hands begin at 7 cards, not 5. Every English word that you spell with your hand of seven cards entitles you to purchase the top card of a stack with a cost equal to or less than the value of the word (every letter has a value from 1-7; the value of a word is the sum of the values of the letters used, and costs range from 0-14 for each stack). At the end of your turn, discard everything that you used and anything in your hand that you don't wish to keep, then draw up to a 7-card hand.

There is one exception to the above: when you purchase a VP card, the word does not get discarded - it gets trashed (take out of play) instead. Dominion veterans should be able to understand how this alters the play of the game. VP cards are also 0-value wilds, so when you gain VPs you have more fluidity in your deck but a lot less purchasing power.

The game ends when ONE pile of card (see below) has been exhausted. There are 11 piles of cards available:

3 piles of vowels, shuffled ($1 value)
3 piles of VP cards (1VP, 3VP, and 6VP, for the time being)
5 piles of consonants, shuffled:
- Two piles of $2 value cards (S, R, T, N, D, L).
- One pile of $3 value cards (C, P, M, H)
- One pile of $4 value cards (B, F, G, W, Y)
- One pile of $5/6/7 value cards (K, V, J, Q, X, Z)

Each player starts with a set of 22 cards (4 from each vowel pile and 2 from each consonant pile), of which they instantly trash 8 (three vowels, two $2 consonants, one $3, one $4, and one $5-7) to create their starting deck of 14.

The three vowel piles start at 35 cards.
The five consonant piles start at 25 cards.
The three VP piles start at 15 cards.
Before the game, the piles are all whittled down to 15 cards each, through initial (pre-game) deck building and random removal - obviously the VP cards will not need any additional removal.

Additionally, each pile is given a different cost, from 0-14 - there is a set of 15 cards number this way, and you select 11 of them, setting aside four. The highest cost card is attached to the 6 VP pile, and the lowest three are attached to the three vowel piles - placement of those cost cards in relation to the piles is questionable for the other seven.

Other rules are still works in progress. Here are options:

1. Actions attached to lower-frequency letters in a set of same-value cards (like U, W, D, and most of the $5-7 value cards). Actions could be "discard to draw an extra card next turn." There will be no "+card" uses like in Dominion because I want every player to have a full round of opponent turns to figure out what they are playing - this cuts down on analysis paralysis and down-time.
2. VP cards are replaced with a set-collection mechanism.
3. The endgame is replaced with a "first-past-the-post" requirement - the first to reveal some number of victory points from their hand (at least 25 in the current build) is the winner.
4. 2 and 3 above, combined.

Toodles.