Rethemeing

Over the weekend we played some more games of Council of Verona as well as a game of Creative Accounting. Both games were well received. Creative Accounting has reached a fairly stable point (in terms of rule changes.) I am ready to start to come up with a better theme for the game. The accounting theme is apparently scary and boring to many people.

Let me tell you, coming up with a theme that is both scary and boring at the same time should be considered a feat in and of itself, but that doesn't help the game to be approachable, so I have to change it anyway.

I am thinking that it should be set in space - perhaps in an asteroid mining operation where people are finding valuable things and attempting to smuggle them to a place to sell them. The company that owns the whole mining operation wants to curtail this black market selling of the valuable objects, so they have a mole planted in the crew of the ship. The mole can search people's stuff and try to find smuggled objects, but people will begin to suspect after a while, so he can't search to much. Perhaps the captain and the first mate of the ship are obviously not the mole (they would serve the same role as the hippies in the original theme), but perhaps there will be fugitives or something that would fill that role.

The action cards would be named: Smuggle, Play it Safe, and Investigate.
The role cards would be: Crew, Disgruntled Crew, Mole, Captain, and First Mate (or Fugitive)

Each round would be one trip to the asteroids and back to civilization. The 'work dumping' would be replaced by a 'leave people behind in the asteroids to reserve your claim' phase but would behave exactly the same.

Perhaps this would be less scary.

Also: I found a new kickstarter. Coup Reformation

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Automatown and getting ready for SaltCon

Image
Alison and I played Automatown with many of the discussed changes last night. We liked some of them, and others we did not. The game ended up ending in 6 rounds, and it took about 80 minutes. The later rounds were longer than the first few rounds. We also were being distracted by kids, so perhaps we could have gone faster. Alison ended up with 7 workers and 9 points while I had 9 workers and 28 points (more about that later). Having fewer types of resources was very good. It made the economy less confusing, and setup and cleanup much faster. The mats worked well, and during the game, we thought of more things to put on them - (the three starting workers can be added here, as well as a reminder of what level is what in terms of dots.) Here is the mat that we played with: We started with 3 scrap, which was not enough given that we were also playing with the rule that made upgrades cost a scrap. In fact, that rule made us strapped for scrap the whole game. We decided that m...
Read more

Probably joining the BGDG

Image
I have started on some artwork for witch hunt . It still is not complete by any means, but it is closer to what I want than the white paper with black writing that I used to have. The cards were designed by me, and the art was drawn by Kit Cox. I found it on the Discworld Wiki . I am currently tracking down Kit and asking him permission to use it, but I have not succeeded so far in contacting him. (He is no longer active on the wiki, and the last time he posted there was 6 years ago). I think that I have found him on Facebook, but it remains to be seen weather it really is him or not. I am trying to come up with ways to speed up the game, and I think that lowering the number of testimony cards will do that. Perhaps that will be enough, but perhaps I will have to do more. I am being quoted on another Kickstarter campaign (this time by tasty minstrel games, so a bigger campaign than last time). I have not gotten as many games of Harbour in as I would have liked recently. Wit...
Read more

NaGaDeMon 2013 Day 30: The End

Image
Today is the end of National Game Design Month. Over the course of the month I designed Moar Moai and Roguelike . I would say that Moar Moai is pretty darn playable, and that Roguelike is at least barely playable. Moar Moai has one open point of contention right now, and that is the exact way in which artifacts turn into control over the adventurers. I think that I will end up with players having perfect control over what 'cards' they get (although they might end up as tokens on a specific part of the mat instead of cards), but not know what 'cards' other players have until the scoring round actually starts. Roguelike is still largely unbalanced, and I have never played games with the new weapon cards that I have invented because I have never printed them up (here in California I do not have access to my card creation equipment). Perhaps next week I will do that. It does seem to work without the tokens (+1 etc), but needs a mat to be printed up to make it reall...
Read more