This game has occupied my commutes, my showers, my pre- and post-sleep musings, and even a few of my dreams. A great many things have been assembled. It is now time to try and get that melange out of my head and assembled into an externally logical system.

The assumed presentation is a modular map built from square tiles. The square tiles would represent one of six terrain types: ocean, marsh, plains, hills, mountains, impassable. The players would start the game by assembling the tiles into a pleasing pattern. Possibly there would also be preset patterns of scenarios for more canned experiences.

Once the map was established the players would in turn each found one city state in some location on the board. A city state would be defined by its central location, initially something like a meeting hut, later something akin to a City Hall, Palace or other capitol building. Subsequent buildings within range of the central building would be considered to be part of the city state.

City states consist of contiguous sets of buildings. City States are defined by their centres and a range factor from their centres. That range gets larger as the city cntre is upgraded. City states may overlap, in which case one either overtakes (war/conquest) the other, one simply absorbs the other, or they co-exist with clearly defined (possibly porous) boundaries.

City states will be invested in by players. These investments will initially take the form of straight cash. Later investments may take the form of building contracts, logistical supplies and material supplies. The lead investors in a city state will guide the city’s decisions. Minor investors will not have a part in this decision process.

This is not a negotiation game.

The basic expected pattern:

1. City states are ordered in terms of descending bankroll

2. In order Each CIty State takes a turn. A turn consists of:

• Each player with presence in that city taking a turn and moving their product markers among buildings within the City State, or moving them out to buildings in other City States, and other like activities, selling material to the City State, investing in the City State, etc
• The primary investors in the City State making decisions for the City State. This will mostly take the form of building construction, investments in material, wars, etc.

1. Repeat #2 for the next City State

2. When all City States have been processed, repeat from #1.

Buildings would be largely analagous to the buildings in Neuland or Roads & Boats. Player participation however would be strictly along the Neuland pattern. Players would only own product markers and product markers would decay across turns. Like Roads & Boats, players would not own buildings or transports, just product markers. Thus the challenge becomes one of sequencing product marker translations across chains of buildings both within and across City States efficiently. Additionally the challenge is to sequence the City States so that their order of operation allows for most efficient action sequencing. Finally the challenge is to cause City States to construct buildings that most advantage your action sequencing without undue benefit to others.

Assumptions:

1. A player may cause a City State to build any requested building merely by providing all required resources.
2. Buildings gall within technology levels in different vectors. Some builds are not constructable until the City State has mastered specific prior technologies
3. City States can “borrow” the technology of their neighbours (connected by transports) without investing in the technologies themselves.
4. Construction of a building at a sufficiently high technology level causes all buildings and any product markers they may contain and any transports which depend on them of a sufficiently low technology level to vanish instantly from the game. They are obsolete. This effect may extend to City States directly connected by transports. Thus for instance a City State may research Internal Combustion Engines and then build a Internal Combustion Engine factory only to see all stables, horses, donkeys and carts instantly vanish from the City State’s domain. This pattern is deliberately directly comparable to the 18XX train rusting pattern.
5. A players turn starts by laying down each one of their product markers that are in the currently active City State. They may move up to N product markers on to subsequent buildings for free. In doind so the product markers stand up (shades of Neuland). They may move product markers additional steps forward through the building chain or add additional action markers or start-location buildsings in the City for an exponentially growing cost. Product markers may be moved across transports to other buildings or to remote City States for a fee paid to the owning City State.

The thematic premise to date has been competing city states (cf early Greece) with players variously investing in the city states and potentially guiding their life cycles, or exploiting the facilities the city states proffer to generate profits. As such the core pattern is a mix of macro-investment tightly combined with micro-investment. A player may guide a City State to built the QRS building so that they can then use that building to produce products which they sell/use to make large profits with another or the same City State, or another player, or perhaps at another building nearby or elsewhere. Thus it is expected that the relationships and connectivities of the city states will provide a large and evolving context which the players will build and evolve, all the while also exploiting the details of the imbalances in that system to their own advantage.

I realise that many players yearn for in-game identities. They want to be the…XYZ. They want to have an identified anthropomorphic role. It has been difficult to determine such a role for this game. Several concepts cam to mind: clan heads, apocryphal jewish investors, Illuminati, conspiring hidden hands etc. I’ve been rather fond of a forced misinterpreation of the Commonwealth term “Shadow Cabinet”, which while it means something else entirely, by name suggests the sort of hidden role the players would take in guiding the lives and fate of the City States.

I am increasingly unfond of the current name of Shadow Clan. It is too melodramatic and suggestive of things this game is not intended to be.

At core this is an attempt to design a game-type I strongly dislike, but in a manner that I’d enjoy playing. I strongly dislike economic system/snowball games (eg St Petersburg, Phoenicia, Power Grid, Das Zeptor von Zavendor, Outpost, Civilisation (and all the other 4X variations) etc). However I do like logistical graph manipulation games. The result is that in many ways this is an attempt to make an economic snowball game which is also an interesting logistical graph manipulation game.

The core game problem is assumed to be competition for share of the pie. The player with the largest percentage of the pie at the end of the game wins. Most likely this will be expressed in terms of money, and thus the pie will effectively be the bank of all money in the game universe with the game ending when the game system runs out of money. The player with the largest net worth at that point (largest fraction of the pie), wins.

The parallel to the 18XX is deliberate. However I’m not interested in producing an 18XX clone and thus will be resisting thinking about or phrasing this game in terms of 18XX comparisons. I expect that this and future blog items will show that this is difficult.

The 18XX are effectively all about owning the most valuable shares at the end of the game. Cash is important, but pretty much only as a way of gaining the most valuable shares. I do not want to follow that pattern. The loose expectation here is that players will build and iteratively exercise logistical systems in order to make profits. However the key element is that they won’t build a profit engine in the 18XX or Outpost, sense, but rathr engage in a game-long sequence of logistic moves and relationships which variously result in net profits (and re-investments etc). Thus it is expected that the game will rely much more on timing, presence, and connectivity than systemic relationships.

To give a sense of where I’m heading the primary game inspirations from the logical perspective are things like:

• Neuland
• Roads & Boats
• Logistico
• Atta Ants
• Bridges of Shangri-La?
• Kogge

And on the investment vehicle side are games like:

• the 18XX
• Imperial
• Greentown
• Antike
• Container
• Traders of Genoa

Hopefully this will give a sense of where I’m heading, or perhaps trying to head.

Image a multiplayer game. Turns are simultaneous. Players move their pieces about a (relatively small) board in accordance with the current game phase. each player may have half a dozen or so pieces to move on the board in each game phase. Two player pieces may not occupy the same location. This poses two questions:

1) How to resolve when two players want to move their pieces to the same location at the same time?

2) How to resolve multiple simultaneous conflicts in which not only do multiple players have multiple discrete conflicts, but each player has a different desired order in which they want those multiple conflicts resolved? eg If Bubba wins that conflict then I really want to win this conflict, but if Boffo wins this other fight then I absolutely have to win this conflict but otherwise I really don’t care etc.

There are several classic resolutions such as Zoosim’s flag/precedence hierarchy and Roads & Boats similar system along with resolution order dictation etc for the first question. I don’t know of methods that specifically address the multiple simultaneous conflict order resolution problem (tho Roads & Boats makes a nod in that direction).

Ideas?

I’ve the sense that the game would do better with a silly theme. Perhaps something like robbers competing in robbing banks and each other’s hoards or some such. Suggestions are welcomed.

New/better/polished rules.

Cleaned up some ambiguities, fixed the initial deal, I Win! cards are now worth points, tweaked the variants.

The deal description is wrong.

The first player should get the 1/5/9 in one suit, the 2/6/7 in another, and the 3/4/8 in the third. The second player should get the same thing but with the suits allocation rotated once. The third player should get what’s left, which is the same distribution with the suits rotated the last time.

I’ll get a formal versioned PDF of the rules put together and posted soon.

‘Ohana Proa did not make the cut for Hippodice. It scored 3.33 versus the required 3.1.

I’m pretty satisfied with the the game as-is. The rules are in good shape, it plays well, I enjoy it. Perhaps it is time to start talking to the Peter Eggerts of the world.

Onward ho!

Initially targetted as a perfect and certain information three player card game with both a high Take-That! factor and high control. This game is the product of roughly 15 minutes actual thought and a little mumbling to myself while taking a shower.

The game consists of two decks of cards. The player deck and the prize deck. The player deck consists of 31 cards: three suits of 11 cards (red, green, blue) with values ranging from 1-9 inclusive, plus three I Win! cards and three blank player identification cards. The prize deck consists of nine cards, three in each of the three player suits with values of 4, 6 and 9. The back of each prize card is coloured to match its player suit.

Setup:

1. Shuffle the prize cards and deal them out in a face down line
2. Pick a start player and give them the red player identification card and the red I Win! card. The green player identification and I Win! cards go to the player to their left. The blue player identification card and I Win! cards go to the player to the start player’s right. Each player publicly displays their player identification card and takes their I Win! card into their hand.
3. Separate the three player suits and sort the cards in each suit into ascending order.
4. Starting with the start player deal one red player card to each player until the deck runs out.
5. Starting with the player to the left of the start player deal out the blue player deal out the green deck in similar fashion.
6. Starting with the player to the right of the start deal out the blue player deck in similar fashion.
7. The dealt player suit cards form each player’s hand along with their I Win! card.

Rules:

1. Turn over the leftmost prize card and add it to the prize pile (beside the row of face down prize cards)
2. In turn order starting with the start player each player plays a card face up before them.
3. Resolve the trick.
4. Repeat from step #1 eight more times, starting with the winner of the prize suit in the last trick
5. Each player claims half their prizes
6. The player with the highest score wins.

Resolving the trick:

The trick is resolved by resolving each suit in order, starting with the suit of the prize card, then the remaining suit with the highest value card played (tiebreak goes to the player suit to the prize suit player’s left), then the last remaining suit. If no cards are played in a given suit, then that suit is not resolved for that trick. If no card is played in the prize suit then the other suits are resolved as necessary and the prize card is left in the prize pile. In this case the lead moves to the next player to the left of the previous lead.

Resolving the prize suit:

1. Whichever player played the highest valued card in the suit of the prize card takes the prize pile card(s) and places them along with the card they played in their score pile. If any player played their I Win! card then they automatically are considered to have played the highest card in the prize suit. If multiple players play their I Win! cards then the earlier played cards are considered “bigger” than the later played cards.
2. If another player also played a card in the same suit, then the player from #1 separates their score pile cards into two face up stacks. The player with the next highest card in the prize suit then takes their choice of the two stacks and places those cards in their scoring pile along with the card they played.
3. If the third player also played a card in the prize suit, then the player from #2 separates their score pile cards into two face up stacks. The player with the smallest card in the prize suit then takes their choice of the two stacks and places those cards in their scoring pile along with the card they played.

Resolving other suits:

1. The player identified by the suit divides their scoring pile cards into two piles. The player of the highest card in that suit takes their choice of the two stacks and places those cards in their scoring pile along with the card they played. If the player played a card in their own suit it is merely added to there score pile.
2. Likewise again for the next lower card in that suit.
3. And possibly yet again for the third lowest card in that suit.

Scoring:

Each player sums the value of the cards in their scoring pile. I Win! cards are worth nothing. The largest score wins.

Variant #1:

When dividing their scoring pile into two sets for another player to choose from, the splitting player must ensure that the two piles have as close as possible to the same number of cards as each other.

Variant #2:

A tenth trick is played, but without any prize cards. The suits are resolved starting with the suit of the player that lead the trick.

A night of odd dreams.

Let’s say I adopted a hyena model. The hyenas would simply be autonomous critters that wandered the landscape consuming corpses.The pack would grow as it ate, and when larger than X would split into two packs. A pack would consist of N hyenas per tile (not more than two), and would move deterministically toward the nearest corpse, injured or healthy player token (in that order) that another pack is not heading for, twice a day. If more than Q hyenas stepped on a mine it would explode (no choice for the MP) with mostly standard effects (less damage for the hyenas or hyenas heal over in 2 turns).

The real purpose of the hyenas would be to provide an additional drain on the MP’s deployed munitions. I fear that without such a drain the map would progressively fill with munitions until every tile was loaded by the end of the game. Additionally the the hyenas would provide a distracting target for the MP: the MP can’t afford to let the hyenas run about uncontrolled. Finally, the hyenas could provide an interesting set of tactical opportunities ala: 1) Get kids eaten by hyenas by front and back edge of map (not easy, but bear with me), 2) follow hyena pack back across landscape in safety, letting the hyenas detonate any mines along the way.

A possibility. However if I adopted the hyena model, how would it also translate to the disease attack themeing? If the players are diseases attacking a host body and the MP is the host’s immune system, what would the hyenas represent? Surgical excision of dead material? Hurm, there are all sorts of interesting things that lead from there…

Numbers are next, then rules, then simulation.