Dear Me...I sure need a Theme

I thought about your basic game mechanics and I think I have something, along the lines of one of the ideas you proposed, the alternate dimensions. The game could be magically/fantasy based, where players are gathering magic or "mana" points with the 5d6 resourcing rolls, and using the points to build up spiritual power cards to "call" their deity to Earth, this game would require different alignments for all players. If they sacrifice a die they can collect a mythical deity, the more die sacrificed the stronger the divinity invoked, there would have to be numerous types available. When the die pool reaches 5d6 total, the die pool is available to the players with deity cards in their hand, enabling stronger magics, and it can also boost permanents/instants in all the player hands. The other players can spend their resource points building spell hands(instants) or artifact hands(permanents), towards banishing or destroying the deity cards which will eventually come into play, for this idea all 6 sided dice only.

This wasn't totally clear from the initial description...
Would each player have recognizable (different colored) dice such that it would be clear who had contributed what to the common pool?

Hey there,

Since I tend to think of themes before mechanics maybe I can help you out. Ill just toss a few ideas out there off the top of my head and feel free to keep or toss them.

Creation
Talking about the critical mass made me think of the big bang. So what if you are all celestial beings pitching in to creation. The end result being the big bang that crates the universe.

Manhattan
You are all scientists working on the Atom Bomb. While you are all working together to create the final product, only one of you can be the Einstein who gets the credit. (This could be any scientific goal, FTL, Time Travel, etc...)

Atlantis
The end is coming, will you achieve your goals before it arrives? (Alternately you could do this with the city of Pompeii as well). No sure what the objective is... Save the most people, gather wealth and artifacts, ensure your rivals are buried in the rubble instead of you.

I like your thought of bridged Alternate Universes...what if there was some kind of accident with experimenting with that and the goal is to separate the two. Or you could do the Accident as the first game and the separation as an expansion or the second game.

OK, thats enough of my ramblings. Best of luck!

--Eric
http://warprime.blogspot.com/

I think I understand the mechanics and will try to help applying a theme. How about an arms or technology race? Each player is a race/civilization/research group vying for technical superiority. Think of a multiple player cold war scenario with a common set of technological goals. Each card represents a certain technology and requires different combinations of technological levels to be grabbed by the player according to their roll of the dice. Each player would have their own advancement track and would advance individual tech types according to their die roll. The players could allocate varying numbers of dice to each technological "avenue". If you made 5 technological avenues the players are always going to have to decide whether to spread the dice or focus on some more then others. It would get even more interesting if you chained the cards in a way that they built upon one another. I do think it would be a cool design aspect for the first player to get the right combination gets to snatch the technology up first from a mutual pool in the center of the table. When snatched all the players would then have to pay more than the original value to nullify the card after it has been played, a sorta extra "retro engineering" or "countermeasure" cost to stay competitive in that field.

Two ideas for reserve dice pool idea. One is that it is used for secret projects. The reserve dice pool points can be used to purchase one card in a generic fashion, or sorta secret research group.

The second idea is that it is a mobilization pool. This pool represents the player gearing up and equipping for war. It's going to make everyone at the table very nervous when the player starts reserving dice for this because no matter how good your technology may be it's not going to matter if you haven't mobilized, you lose by default. The limited span of turns means that the gearing up is likely to happen. The players are then going to try decide to match the mobilization or try to get that last technological advantage. Hope this helps.