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.

Just another game idea

Go to game night, play a few games, preferably ones I haven't played before, and get inspired.

Walk on beach and hone the ideas.

The one floating on top right now is a dice rolling and manipulation game with an online dating theme.

In a nut shell, you would start by selecting a character card to give you an initial set of dice to roll.

Then you would go on "dates" with other character randomly pulled from a deck, and try to match as many of your dice rolls. Each failure will get you closer to your goal of being the first to match all dice results with your 'date' or getting enough cats to be a crazy cat lady.

It's a fairly simple idea, maybe I should focus on something like that and really push to bring one of these ideas to completion.

Pieces of Cloth

I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning at Bigor, the Israeli Role-Playing convention.
I practically lived in the lounge, playing different board games. Played with friends from the Technion board game club and with strangers. Played games I was familiar with (I won't be playing Galaxy Truckers for a long time, I think) and added some new ones to the my list.
Catching the last train on Friday, which leaves Modiin at a rather upsetting 13:51 so the shabbat can be kept, I headed over to my brother's apartment in Tel-Aviv as I promised him I would show up for his board game event.
Despite my exhaustion, I had a fun. Played a round of Settlers of Catan, with my brother winning as expected, as well as Carcassone, where I tied for last. Just couldn't get those farmers down.

While we were waiting for my brother's friends to arrive, I tried to teach him Perudo, and told him which games I played. I mentioned I watched Jungle Speed being played (Not a fan of dexterity or party games, so I opted out.)
Messing around with some pieces of cloth my sister-in-law had cut from curtains and left on the table, I started combining Jungle Speed and Perudo into a silly game.

The object of the "game" was to grab the dice cup (the totem) if the sum of all the pips was higher than 15. If it was you would win and pass your piece of cloth. Lose, and the piece of cloth would go back to you. Now I'm playing around with this silly idea, to see if I can make a genuine game out of it.