Galactic Senate - Deck Building

The latest game thought exercise, the tutorial level thing, has brought me back to an older theme: that of a Galactic senate in which culture differences and language barriers pose obstacles to the players. Overcoming these obstacles in the best way possible is how players make points and win the game.

Originally with a worker placement mechanic, I'm now mulling over deck building to tackle the theme.
One way in which it differs from Doiminion and company is that instead of purchasing cards with a hand full of treasure, you would need a card that speaks the same "language" as a card you wish to add to your deck (or a crisis to solve?)
A second difference would be programmable actions, similar to Wings of Glory, where you need to place a card in advance to determine movement, and hope it works out the way you planned.
Finally, in similar fashion to Trains, cards will give you actions (and reactions) to make changes over the player board, such as persuading representatives to your cause, to affect scoring.

Tutorial Level

An abstract idea has popped in my head, fallout from a past Ludology podcast, I believe.

Ryan and Geoff had been talking about the difference between board and video games, and how most people would want to jump straight into the full board game experience, without messing around with truncated versions designed to teach the game...

...What if a compressed version of the basics of the game would change how the main game would play out?

A simple example could be one timed lap of a race to determine pole position, but that would have a lot of player downtime, not cool.

Single cells organisms competing with each other to evolve into complex creatures, changing the game map and gaining special abilities according to performance is more along the lines of what I'm going for.

Snake Oil

My roll and move game has a snake oil salesmen theme to it.

The basic premise involves moving around a track and choosing the action that would be most beneficial for you while being careful not to help your opponents even more.

After rolling and moving your pawn, you may choose an action, perhaps from a limited set according to location, and receive a bonus for it, which your opponents can then follow (to help eliminate down time, one of the problems of classic roll and move.)

These actions may include collecting ingredients, brewing concoctions, improving potions and equipment for a variety of bonuses and combos, and selling your product for gold and reputation.

A Roll and Move Exercise

It's been while since I've posted, hasn't it?

It's not that I haven't thought about game design, although maybe I did think about it less.
My cardinal sins card game still comes up in my thoughts, with some variations on how it would play - sometimes it has a board, other times it's pure card based; Different ideas on what each card might do, etc.

I haven't been listening to the Ludology podcast over the past few months, yet as soon as I do, the ideas start flowing back.

This time it was a question directed towards the hosts - Ryan Sturm and Geoff Engelstein about whether any game mechanics are going to disappear in the future, or fall out of vogue .
Roll and move was mentioned as an unpopular mechanic amongst the hobbyists, and yet still prevailing amongst the general populace who expect it and haven't been exposed to better things.
So I've been thinking to myself how roll and move could be improved upon. The main problem is that it doesn't give any choice and the game ends up playing you rather than you it. You have no real control over which space you fall on in Monopoly or Talisman, while you can at least split the dice results in a game of backgammon.

What if we used this random element to determine our possibilities, the way the dice roll in Catan determines what resources are handed out (or whether the robber strikes again) regardless of who rolled the dice?

Roll the dice, move your pawn around the track, and from where you land have certain choices available to you, such as selecting a role you can play this turn? Would that work? I'll play such scenarios in my mind and look for more interesting ideas. Who knows maybe I'll combine it with earlier ideas in interesting ways, maybe even to an idea I could take to play testing.