New game idea, inspired by the game design contest.
Players compete to develop real estate along the coasts of cities in three hurricane alleys - the Gulf coast, Florida-Carolina, and the Northeast. Players can take a variety of actions, from building denser housing to developing seafront property and draining swamps that can increase the satisfaction of people living in the cities and gain points. Players can also build preventive structures like dunes and levees, but these are expensive and interfere with real estate dev. Finally, players can also take immediate precautionary actions like ordering evacuations or shutting down transit systems. These make people unsatisfied and can cost victory points.
Players choose actions based on a rondel that is divided into all of the available actions, as well as a 'storm phase' that cannot be skipped. A player may advance the marker on the rondel one space, and place one Gale cube in a draw bag, or move two spaces for three cubes, or three spaces for six cubes. In the storm phase, five cubes are drawn from the bag, which is initially seeded with some regular cubes (not Gale cubes). The more Gale cubes drawn, the more intense the storm that hits. Players suffer consequences based on damage done to their holdings, as well as suffering from dissatisfaction of the people.
The idea is that each individual player is incentivized to spread themselves around the board and to choose whichever action is ideal for them on their turn, irrespective of gale cubes placed in the bag, but if players play that way, they won't score any points because of the storms' impacts.
What do you guys think? Interesting mechanism? Is the theme too close to home?
15 views and no responses makes me think this one is not a winner.
:(