Game Concept:
At thier core, tabletop games contain only 4 major elements - Cards/Tiles, Dice, Tokens/pawns and boards.
Using this knowledge, we should be able to create a pool of components that can be used to design a theoretically infinite number of different styles and types of games drawing some or all of the components from a set pool.
The price of components being what it is, Microgames have become the next big thing in game design. Keeping games at an affordable price point is more difficult than ever. A component pool that fits into a game box the size of the game Citadels or smaller and costing less than $30 USD is an excellent way to help a game become successful. In such a game box, I’ve managed to comfortably fit 100 cards, 12d6, and 100 colored wooden cubes (10 of each color).
Boards are often created with tiles, and so a map made of approximately 4 cards with several spaces (totalling 26) can be used and each zone will be labeled with an english letter of the alphabet.
Due to language barriers, games often use imagery instead of language to express game mechanics. This would allow the deck of cards to be modular and flexible for multiple different games.
The nature of the game would be open source, it would come with a rulebook outlining several games, but anyone would be welcome to release rulebooks for different ways to use the components of this box to play different games of all styles and types.
At its core, the game’s success would entirely be based on community support and designers’ interest in contributing to a project of this nature. What do you guys think? Sound interesting?
My rebuttal to that would be games like Pandemic, Agricola and a buch of others where all the pieces are just colored cubes. You could easily make both of those games (or scaled down versions) with the mentioned model...The consumer appeal being a small box containing a large number of game options that are in a euro-game style.
Think those "100 dice games" tubes of dice that have several rules sets and only use a few dice to play...except with good games instead of boring games of chance.
Wouldn't you buy a game that was several games all in the same box if they were fun games? With the rising costs of board games, I would think it would appeal to many board gamers.....I could be wrong though.
The idea stems from the popularity of MODS to popular video games, and from D&D 3.5 edition/pathfinder which was one of the most successful RPG's because anyone could produce content.