Job Agency: Focusing the idea

As I was walking on the beach, thinking about my latest game idea, as I often do, I came upon an interesting theme which informed some of my game mechanics.

The idea is that players would take the role of recruiting agencies, competing to place new recruits into a limited number of available spots, promote employees to higher positions, block other players, collect money and more.

Since the cards to do all these things would be shuffled into a deck and drawn randomly, individual pieces may move in unpredictable ways, and hopefully make things fun.

The Deck That Plays Itself

Another game night behind me, and some new ideas coming from my experiences.
Among the games I played were the familiar Dominion, father of all deckbuilders, and my first play of Troyes, a game with an "automatic" neutral player.

Thinking of these "artificial intelligence" systems in which a set of rules is designed into the game to dictate the movement of neutral pieces for the players to deal with, gave me an idea.

My idea is to create a game in which players need to create their own AI systems, hoping to achieve their goals in the most efficient matter, similar to the PC game Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom, in which players could build building and hire adventurers, which would then go adventuring without direct player interaction, though the player could set rewards to entice his adventurers to go to certain locations.

The way I see my game working is in 2 phases.
In half the game, players would acquire cards. I have a few ideas floating around on this, from playing cards for their monetary value to purchase cards that are worth more, to bidding on cards using money chips gained during the second phase of the game, to placing workers to acquire certain cards, create certain combos and block other players.

In the second half, players would shuffle their purchased cards, and flip cards over one at a time in turns, moving their piece or pieces according to whatever is indicated on the card. In a well thought out deck, the instructions on the cards would work well together to get more money to help the player develop his economic engine even further until some set goal is reached, such as a turn number, monetary goal or something else.

I have some more thinking to do about theme. Fantasy was the obvious choice, but I like to explore less familiar, and writing this post made me think of an idea - perhaps playing as parents sending children on errands.

I also need to think about how the instruction system would work: one idea is to have a grid and have turn left twice and go straight one square instructions, while another idea would be to have instructions based on landmarks, such as going towards the nearest enemy or a location on the map.

Racing with Shapes

A game idea popped into my head as I was driving home after the regularly scheduled game night, though it had little to do with the games I actually played.

As I was trying to think of an alternate mechanic from the other racing games I know, I came up with an idea to use different shapes to represent how a player moves his vehicle around a track.
There would be several categories, such as tight curves, open corners, s-curves and a straight or two. Each category would have a number of similar curves shapes, each placed in a separate bag.
A player would choose a bag to pull from, perhaps by using some other mechanic, such as a card from his hand, and attempt to place the curve on the track, starting from his vehicle, hoping to make it fit on the track he is racing on. If he cannot, there will be a damage system in place, which may lead to his elimination.
Curves will be double sided, so that a right turn can be flipped to make a left turn.

I'm leaning towards a sci-fi theme, including weapons.

I also think a campaign mode would work well here. Different race tracks would be provided.
After one is complete, players will assess how they did in the races in a variety of ways, such as the number of curves needed to finish, weapon use, damage taken, etc. and use this information to improve driver skills (one example of an improved skill: pull 2 shapes from the bag, choosing the one believed to be a better fit.)
Winning a race will equal points for the season as well as money to allow for even more personalization.