jwarrend wrote:
This is partly why I have stayed out of this discussion so far: I have a tendency to want to produce a whole game rather than discuss a mechanic or two and see where it goes. It's something my play-test group love and hate to equal degrees I think :)
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Maybe I'm just feeling that this discussion is in the wrong section of the fora now, given that it has grown well beyond a mechanics discussion.
In a sense, Jeff's Civ-lite game has been edging that way too.
I think this is just a reflection of the fact that it's tough to discuss a mechanic in isolation. You can really only appreciate the viability of a mechanic as it relates to and interweaves with the larger picture of the game. For example, I just played New England for the first time the other day. A very cool game! If I were to talk about the bidding mechanic for that, one might say "yeah, that's cool, but where do you get the money from? What are the actions that you'll have to pay for? How do you know which actions will be available?" etc etc. You can say "the bid mechanic is to choose a number, then players take their turn in number order, and you pay the value of your number to take actions", and you can say "that's a cool mechanic", but the discussion won't go anywhere unless you give some more detail about how the mechanic actually fits into the game.
I tried to keep the conversations about my combat and political mechanics confined to the mechanics themselves, but it turned out that there was just too much information I was leaving out to make the discussion sensible. I haven't really followed this thread except until very recently, so I couldn't comment on how this discussion has evolved, although my impression is more that they're not just discussing a mechanic, but trying to create a game from scratch. But that seems ok. Not sure which forum one should go to to do that. I rarely read anything in the forums anyway, tending to just read whatever's up on the "recent" list, so it doesn't matter to me...
-Jeff
I just found out about the game Fifth Avenue on BoardGameGeek. It's supposed to be released this month.
It sounds like it's very similar to what I was working on with City Builder. Players acquire building resources and then bid on the best building sites in the city. It seems to have my theme exactly and a lot of similar mechanics.
Jason