When browsing a geek list, I stumbled on a old game called stellar conquest and I thought it could be a good thing to remake a lighter or express version of the game.
By thinking about was was the concept of the game, I remembered that there were a lot of hidden information and people told me that the objective of the game was to find the best planets and control them in secret. The other part of the game is a simple economic where you buy and build stuff.
The problem was the the original game required pen and paper, now I was wondering if it was possible to do it with components.
For the map, I thought that locations would each contain a planet marked by a token which contains the planet info on the face down side. So people can explore the galaxy and remember what the planet info are. Since there is only 1 planet per location, it would be easier to remember.
Then, players could be allowed to place a colony token under it or a specialized extraction facility. The idea is that every time a system is explored, the player must always place a token to make sure other players did not know what happened. If population is placed, there will be a token indicating the turn the planet was colonized, then at the end of the game, you could calculate how much population there is on the planet according to it's climate and the number of turns it was colonized.
For the production, it is a bit more complicated because in the original game, it was relative to your population. I thought that your tokens could be hidden behind a screen, Specialized colonies Could allow you to do more research and production. So you can count the number of token you are missing to know your production level in these fields.
Then each player will draw X cards, the number of cards drawn increase with time. Players will keep Y cards. For example, each research facility will allow you to keep 1 card. There will be some cards that will have no requirements so that the players could not guess your strength according to the number of cards you kept.
Cards will contains anything from technologies, defenses, upgrades, Fleets, weaponry, etc. So other players really do not know what you have purchased, until you enter a battle.
I think it could even be possible to have a battle resolution where only the 2 dueling player would see each other's technology and ship. So that in the end, a 3rd players does not know what happened.
Ship would not appear on the map, so a player will simply say, I move to that planet, and players do not know where he came from.
Since it could be hard to localize ships, maybe ships are global to your empire and can be moved anywhere as you wish.
Any other ideas?
