Well, I've started toying with a new idea.
As all new ideas start it's rough. Really rough. Though for me these things always start based on theme or story. I'm thinking of time travel. Mostly two works that inspire me. One is back to the future and the other is the Green Futures of Tycho.
The latter had a large impact on me when I was younger although the two together do affect how I think of time and decision points along that time.
Now all of this together has given me an inkling of a time traveling, route building, goods delivering game.
How does this work? I see the players competing to control the timeline. This timeline is our route. Always rooted at one end in the past and the other end at some point in the future. Along this line are delivered "possibility points". The player who controls enough of them wins by forcing the future into their desired state.
At this point I have a bit of an idea of a board and a little bit about player motivation. But mostly I wish to combine my idea of how time works with a game that player's compete in.
It's a rough idea. Really rough. But it's a place to start. I suppose I really should consider why the player's or their character's would want to do this anyways?
Comments
Motivation is important.
Motivation is important. I had a game I did years ago called; And The Horse You Rode In On, about horse rustling. Players would try to steal from each other’s herds without getting caught while at the same time trying to protect their own herds.
The problem was the players spent most of their effort trying to protect their herds rather than stealing from the others. They just were not motivated so the game wound up being quite dull.
This reminds me a great deal
This reminds me a great deal of the game "Chrononauts" by Looneylabs. You may want to look into it. I would really like to see what you come up with, I imagine that something as serious as time-travel and the scientific theory behind it (quantum physics etc) would be very interesting to try and put into simple gaming terms.
Personally, I have not played Chrononauts, but others in my group have, and they have given me a brief overview. Unfortunately, it sounds similar to yours - players play their cards in an attempt to direct the future towards their desired end.
I don't imagine a card
I don't imagine a card mechanic at all.
I imagine a route building game using sticks that link various events. I see the board as a tree sprouting from a singular past event such as "Civilization begins!" to the various present paths.
In my head I see players being able to send back time travelers to the past. These travelers though using their machines can visit other "possible" timelines that might currently be less stable than the current flow. As such those travelers can only stay in unstable time zones for X rounds.
But if a player changes the flow of time, then we get an immediate time wave that flows forward re routing the path along new possibility routes. Time travelers that are in the right possibility find their alternate reality the current true reality. This allows them to control the flow of time out of that path.
So you have a real board, using sticks to mark the decisions paths and probably meeples of some sort to represent your time travelers.
So players can send travelers back but the farther they are from the true timeline the less they get to stay on the board. Plus the farther back you send them the fewer you get to put out in that round. The key would be to hold nodes as much as you can and get the path to connect to your 'win' path in the present. Every round the path stays unchanged you collect points. But the rest of the players are trying to change the path all the time so it's a route building game where the players must share a single path they build together.
Oh, got it. That actually
Oh, got it. That actually sounds really cool - I'd play that. Like I said, I don't play Chrononauts, so you've already got a leg-up there.
Next question then - how does the "ripple" work? We all start at pointA (civilization begins), and start playing meeples to control the next set of points. Can the tree branch out in multiple directions, or is it set as a "player wins, gets to place the stick"? So we play for another few rounds, and now we're on pointF. If I send a guy back to pointB and change the outcome (through your mechanics, I know it's a rough concept atm) does that then change the placement of every stick from B-E?
Sorry for all the questions, but I think that this is a very neat idea and want to see how it progresses. At least the questions might help you brainstorm!