Defend the university

 Last night I just played a first 2 player game of an idea that I have been thinking of for a long time. The idea is sound, but it is going to be a huge amount of work getting it cleaned up, and building all of the factions.

The idea is to make a multiplayer cooperative asymmetric game. More specifically, there will be a bunch of opponents that are coming in toward a shared "end zone", and all of the players have to defend the end zone in their own way. Each person uses their own mechanics to do so, so one player might be playing a deck building game while another is playing a dice chucker, but at the end of the day they can work together to try and repel the invaders. 

The benefit of such a game is that it allows people that like disparate styles of play to be able to play together at the same game with a common goal. My son can throw down his dice while I can try and engineer a solution to a difficult knapsack problem and my wife can play her engine builder, and we are all working together and playing the same game despite that.

I have only made two factions so far:

The first is a deathray toting character that plays with a mancala like track, and hits opponents based on where they drop the last stone in the mancala track as they drop stones. The character can line up opponents to damage multiple of them, and has a pawn on the board with the monsters.

The second is a giant robot building character that plays a pallete building game with knapsack problem constraints on it. They have to cram the best parts into a limited robot chassis size, and push their giant robot around the board. They have a lot of upgrades that they can make to the robot, and - given a good build - can deal massive damage to an opponent (even if they start out as a relatively weak faction).

 The game was playable, and we had a fun time, but we lost pretty badly when an opponent landed on my wife's robot's head. I was also pretty effective in the beginning, but as the difficulty in monsters scaled up I had a hard time hitting for enough damage to keep competitive (it taking three shots to take down the last monster that I killed). You generally want one shot to be enough to take down one monster or else you will start falling behind.

Here are my notes from the brainstorming session after the game:

• All humans should play simultaneously.
• Having an actual board would be nice
• The robot should start with 4 parts 
• The robot should never fall (boot thrusters, or something?)
• When purchasing, the robot should look at 5, keep 2?
• More multi-player tech cards, so you have to decide who gets what
• Pawn moves 2 per turn instead of 1.
• When you drop the last stone into the repair slot or the damage slot, take another turn
• Possible new techs for the death ray:
• multiple rays
• damage using the types from the last two stones dropped
• use damage from slot they pick up or last drop into
• both first and last
• one of last two
• make two shots in one turn
• may skip drops, but only one in a row
• kill = immediate bonus shot
• kill = gain a new stone
• may push to the side on a hit
• pawn may teleport 1x per turn
• pawn may fly
• may reverse direction of the track at start of turn

   All in all, we are happy with this play, but see a lot of possibilities for future improvements to the game.