Oligarch: High Tide of Revolution (The game where everyone loses!)
The people's anger has coalesced in a strongman. The rhetoric is harsh, the 'justice' swift, merciless and arbitary. Status and wealth, your birthrights, are no longer secure. But despite the vitriol, the regime needs money and its official crave approval only you can give. Play your cards right to preserve your birthright through these dark times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/world/americas/28venez.html?ref=global...
I'm seeing this as a card game where players start with rather large decks and will participate in building a regime deck. In general cards will flow from players to the regime deck either voluntarily as the players try to protect their birthright cards against the deck or involunarily as the regime deck lashes out at its political foes. The regime deck will gain power as it takes more and more cards from the players. Players may choose to give up status in exchange for wealth in the new regime, or they may give up their property, and perhaps even their lives and freedom, in order to stand against the regime.
Anyway, needless to say this will be an incredibly dark game (corruption, murder, torture, rape), hopefully mildly illuminated with some magical surrealism. I'm not even sure what the 'victory' conditions would be. The fact that people are naturally more adverse to loss than gain, and this is a game about loss, might mean there is no need to designate a winner? By the end, everyone should be so bruised and battered by the regime, they should be happy to have any scrap of dignity or wealth and not be dead.
Sounds real marketable eh? :)
I'm also thinking of a game called Favela based on the raids in Rio. Would play as either an insurgent/counterinsurgent (gang versus cops) or a gang versus gang game in which gang warfare might trigger a counterinsurgency.
Comments
Plague & Pestilence
There are a number of 'dark' card games where the winner is the last man standing and it is the system, not the players who do the eliminating. Plague & Pestilence is one. So is Falling! Nuclear War is similar. And, I'm sure there are more.
As opposed to card games like Bang! and multiplayer Magic where you have to choose your victim, a last man standing game where the Regime is against you can avoid a lot of animosity and degenerate metagame discussions. Since everyone knows that the other players are simply trying to hang on, there usually aren't very many hard feelings when people get passed the hot potato. Instead, it becomes a momentary feeling of frustration that you can't pass it along again yourself.
However, as with any elimination game, there are a few issues that you will want to address: 1. if players are able to target anyone, then you will create a gang up on the leader dynamic. 2. if all players have to be eliminated, someone eliminated early on could end up waiting a long time for the game to end, and 3. if resourcese/capacities are dependent upon your promixity to defeat/victory, then players will experience a snowball effect of compounded (dis)advantage that may prove to be very unforgiving of early mistakes.
Depending upon how long you want the game to last, you will need to figure out how the Regime deck works, how often you add cards to it and what the power of cards in the Regime do compared to the cards in your hand/deck. Plague & Pestilence has a strict pre-plague population growth by die roll vs. post-death ship population loss by die roll mechanic. All the cards can be used during either phase so their effects do not change depending upon the stage of the game. So, you will have to figure out whether you want a build stage as well as a destroy stage or whether you begin on the top and there's no where to go but down.
Ideally, I think this game would last no more than 30 minutes. I don't think people want to invest too much time in a 'dark' game where players are going to be eliminated by the mechanic. In fact, I think perhaps multiple rounds of 5 minutes would be even better... to help recalibrate capacity each time. But, the play time, scope and object of the game will ultimately be a decision for the designer in light of the experience that you hope to attain.