Routplanning around traffic lights / 12 trials of Hercules

I really like the Hercules theme and Scurra's ideas about gods contesting over the influence on various tasks, making hotly contested tasks more valuable.

Here's my take:

There's a board with 12 tasks depicted on it. Each round the players fight over one task. Each task has one of two colors associated with it: red or blue. There are various different "chips", perhaps, say, six different types. The tasks have spaces for these chips: two chips for the player who "wins" that task, and one chip for the player who comes in second. Tasks also have a space for a (face up) discard pile.

There's a deck of cards numbered 3 to 7. Cards with the numbers 3 or 4 are always white cards (jokers). Cards with numbers 5, 6 or 7 correspond to one of the tasks and are of the same corresponding color. Players start the game with a number of randomly drawn cards.

All tasks are visited in a fixed order. The goal of the game is to have the most victory points at the end of the game.

A starting player is selected. Play goes in clockwise direction round the table.

During a round players "bid" for the task by playing cards.

When it's a player's turn he may do one of the following things:
- Increase his bid by playing a card
- Pass

If a player wants to increase his bid he plays a card face up in front of him. The card must be of the same color as the current task, or a white card. The player does not necessarily have to make the highest bid, but his total bid may not be the same number as someone else's bid. If the task depicted on the played card is the same task as the current one, the player may immediately add one other card to his bid.

If a player passes, he drops out of the bidding and draws cards (*see drawing cards later on). However, his bid stands, which means he could still win something in this round, he just cannot add cards to his bid anymore for the current task.

A round ends when everyone has passed. The player with the highest bid wins first place and takes two chips from the task. The player in second place takes the remaining chip. These chips score points at the end of the game The highest bidder, second highest bidder and third highest bidder all score a number of points equal to the total number of cards player by all players.

Then, all played cards are placed in the face-up draw pile next to their corresponding tasks, but only for tasks that haven't been visited yet. Cards for tasks that already have been visited are simply discarded to a general discard pile.

Drawing cards. When a player drops out of the bidding he draws cards. He takes one card from the normal face down draw pile. Then he looks through the face up draw pile for the current task and chooses one card to add to his hand (as long as there are still any cards left). If there are four or more cards in the draw pile for the current task he may take two cards.

At the end of the game there's a bonus for the player with the highest total number on the cards in hand (perhaps second highest also). The chips also score in some way or other. The scoring for the chips should be pretty significant, so that you really want to win 1st or 2nd place during a task. Perhaps chips of type A, and B score points for whoever has the most of that type and negative points for whoever has least, and you score points for collecting a set of chips of types C, D, E, and F (more points if you have more sets).

Re: traffic lights. This sounds like it would be a very nice looking game, and I think it wouldn’t be that hard to create something like this. But the real issue is that you first need to create a game that demands the gizmo before it will be worth the hassle. I wouldn’t worry a bit about how to actually create the thing until you’ve built a game around traffic lights. Some things to think about: do the lights change according to a schedule when the button is pressed, or is it randomly determined? Are all lights subject to the same schedule/randomness, or does that vary?

One thing that could be neat is to have the lights change randomly in time; this would add a real-time element to the game that could be fun.

Re: Herakles. I thought about this very theme when we had the discussion a while back about risk/reward and difficuly/reward. My idea was never very fleshed out, but it basically involved different labors requiring a blend of strength and cunning to solve, and needing to achieve a proper balance of those. I never got very far with the game, though, because in doing some research about the actual labors, many of them contain logical absurdities. For example, the hydra had one head that could not be cut off, yet Herakles cuts it off. I just couldn’t see a good way to develop a game with interesting sources of tension that were motivated by the stories, because there is no tension in the stories: Herakles performs the labors -- even the impossible ones -- with no problem at all. The other difficulty was in making the labors mechanically similar yet thematically different. Zaiga’s and David’s ideas sound just fine as a game, but they also sound like games that could be about pretty much anything -- which is not at all a bad thing, but it’s not the kind of game I like to create. I think that the “hydra” challenge should feel different from the “sphinx” challenge, but I was never sure how to do it (beyond the obvious blending of strength and cunning as I mentioned). My take on the scope of the game would be to array the 12 challenges, and players each try to complete the most, but the game ends when all 12 have been completed by someone. So you want to target challenges that play to your strengths, but there’s a time pressure that also affects you in some way.

As I said, I never really got far with the project. I think there’s potential for a decent game in there, but the devil will be in the details...

-J

A friend of mine passed this very theme off to me about ayear ago, but, like jwarrend, I didn't do much with it. My take on it was that the various gods who interfere in the lives of mortals (or heros like Heracles) did so in different ways because they were concerned with various aspects of reality. I reflected this by giving the players one "role" from (if I remember it correctly) a possible 12 gods. Each god had a different aspect of the tasks they could control more than others, and each dominated in a single task. But the influence of the various gods, when combined, made the otherwise foregone conclusion (the heros suceed) more interesting, as it changed the order of the tasks, and so on. Since the players invest their power as they gat it, before the heros arrive on the scene, the object becomes to outwit your fellow gods to gain advantage from rescource layouts made a turn or two earlier.

funny, but whenever I start talking about a design I've put aside, it suddenly intruiges me again... I think I'll run with this for a bot as well, to see where it goes! :idea: