Turnless Civic-Management Token Game
-
Here's what we came up with in the parent thread: The game takes exactly five players. The goal is to keep a city in the midst of decay from collapsing entirely by eliminating stagnation, crime and corruption, while obtaining the most credit for the relief effort for yourself. There are a set of tokens or cards passed around the table, each with a set of a few actions on it; when you get a token in your queue, you can take any action except the one its previous holder took, then send it off on one of four alternating routes. Tokens may hit a bottleneck if one player has trouble deciding what to do, and if his or her queue is long enough, new tokens may skip to the next player along. You have to use and pass the earliest token in your queue before you can get to the next one.
All of that is open to amendment, but I think it's a good starting point. There are still a lot of questions to answer:
What are the different areas of control? (Archer's Goon provides one possible division of power.) What actions does each of these allow?
How do you keep score? What's the game's end condition?
How do the actions taken affect the state of the game and/or the other players to generate complexity?
Is there a "bad" token, which requires you to advance the city's breakdown, or another mechanic to do so? -
I'm still not getting a really good idea of the shape of this game, but your question about the breakdown caught me.
What breaks down anything? The answer is time. Have a sand-timer, that while the top isn't empty, you can play. Once the top empties, you stop play briefly, advance entropy, then flip it and begin playing again.
Maybe when the sand timer empties, all tokens are collected back up, then redistributed when the timer's flipped. This would keep the tokens from bottling up at any one point.
Also, a quick search for sand timers turned up this: http://www.gameparts.net/sand_timers.htm?gclid=CO6L3au6upkCFRC7ZwodTEQN7Q
"gameparts.net" seems like it'd be an amazing resource for this community.
edit: on closer examination, it looks like you've got to buy in bulk, minimum order size of 100. If there's no flex room, then this may not be the best resource. -
I loved Archer's Goon.
Re: the "bad" token, I really liked the mechanic in Pandemic, in which you were required to draw cards - most of which were good and useful - after every action, but drawing the "bad" card caused the disease to explode with new virulence. Having said that, this mechanic is particularly effective there because of the non-competitive nature of the game, meaning that the experience of having an arbitrary and capricious mechanic as an adversary builds tension rather than frustration. It seems like this game would benefit from having these negative consequences as a result of player (in)action - possibly as an effect of pursuing individual glory at the expense of city-oriented goals. If that seems a bit vague then it's because, like Wolfe, I find the idea is still a bit hazy for me. -
"The goal is to keep a city in the midst of decay from collapsing entirely by eliminating stagnation, crime and corruption, while obtaining the most credit for the relief effort for yourself."
Blue Moon City is maybe an interesting model for this. The premise as I remember it is that a city has collapsed, and is being gradually rebuilt. To contribute to the rebuilding effort, you place tokens on one of the board's tiles (which show parts of a fallen-down city); once a tile has had enough tokens contributed to it, it gets flipped over, and everyone who contributed gets rewarded (but the person who contributed most gets the most back). It's got a slightly co-op feel while being competitive, which is maybe good for a turnless game (people would maybe be frustrated by finding their work undone, but finding their work completed would be less annoying).
Maybe there's a tiled board showing a happily thriving city, and an egg timer, and every time the egg timer runs out, any tile that hasn't fulfilled certain preconditions is flipped over to urban decay? -
Once again a game I thought was a collective original effort is revealed to be metastasized elsewhere already. This was a common occurrence on the old Dispatch blog: you can never really steal an idea, because there are no new ideas to have.
Blue Moon City sounds neat and it is yet another game I want to pick up now. The tile-flipping mechanic is good; I'm uncertain of how an egg timer would interact with a game where the players are already under implicit time pressure. It would put additional pressure on any player who was causing a bottleneck, but might do so in a redundant and unhelpful way.
What if there's a decay token that queues up with all the other tokens, and each time you pass it off you have to either remove "good" contributions from several tiles or pick one to flip over? As the game moves into the end stages, you could start introducing multiple decay tokens, emphasizing the difficulty of saving everything simultaneously rather than concentrating on the places with the best chance of survival. -
Okay, Brendan..
Can you tell me more what the color of this game is? You know, the fictional content? All but the most abstract boardgames (Pente, Go, my recently posted Trian) have some minor fiction, from being real estate moguls in Monopoly, to being kings leading opposing armies in Chess. A game like what you're proposing has a moderately strong fictional element though, and I'm really having a hard time imagining what play would look like without it.
So far: We have a city in the midst of decay. Who are the players? What's their stake in the reconstruction and revitalization of the city? What actions might they take to stem the tide of entropy?
That aside, if not an egg-timer, maybe a track of decay.. Every time a player takes an action, they advance the decay token one step along the track. At the end of the track, entropize the city. Maybe at certain points along the track, smaller breakdowns happen, possibly events that cause problems, but also create opportunities.
Alternately, your decay token goes around the table, and it allows the players to decay their opponent's contributions. It adds a strategic element to the breakdown of the city, which I'm not sure is what is desired. -
What if it was sort of like BMC in reverse? (I agree, that DEFINITELY sounds like a game I want. :) )
Expanding on the "tiles" idea -- all tiles start out face down (slummy) and to "clean up" the tile, there has to be a certain number of resources on it. Each player can apply X resources per turn, and at the end of each turn, an "entropy bomb" hits one tile randomly, removing 2-3 (or maybe all?) tokens from the one tile, and also one token each from all adjacent tiles. The last person to apply a resource token to a tile is the one that takes all the credit / points for it.
Each tile should probably have a variable requirement for how many resources it needs to be repaired, perhaps even different TYPES of tokens. Players should probably also get a variable number of tokens per turn, as well. Maybe the tiles provide players with bonus tokens?
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!