The Concept: Players plan out tunnels to dig up materials, the problem? lack of food.
This idea came to me a while ago, I'd love to make it, but time.. as usual.
Here's my notes from way back, somewhere between 1994 and 1999.
-- start:
In the beginning, players need to find 'shroom halls' to provide food for your dwarves, next you connect to other players to trade.
Next goblins discover your halls and come in, taking away food sources, other creatures get introduced.
At a critical moment in the game, 'shroom halls' get infected, undead darkness takes over some areas and the Dwarves have to defend themselves, this is when they begin to gain new metal advances to forge weapons to push them back.
* Uses the Kingdom Underground system
* seperate resources into metal / farming.
* Farming resources required for population and technology improvements.
* metal resources required for buildings, armour, weapons, tools, forges.
* tech tree needed for stuff.
--- that's it, that's the notes.
Now, being interested in deck builders, I'm wondering if it would be possible to create it in such a way.
Start the game with some shroom hall cards, a wood pickaxe, a wood shovel. the wood shovel you can draw a card from the soft soil cards, the pickaxe from the soft rock cards. Are these a deck of shuffled items, or are they sets of cards to be chosen.
To include goblins, you'd need to shuffle them into the decks, somehow spacing them under other cards, to make it interesting, when you draw a goblin, you play it on someone who has the least number of goblins & or monsters.
I'd want tunnels, that when drawn are placed on the table, slowly building up a network, maybe trade would change the whole game, so unsure about it.
You gather food tunnels to support your cards? maybe its your hand limit? or your draw or both, maybe the forges are draw cards, and your food is your hand limit, some food types might give you extra draw/hand limit, when you get a goblin, its place over your food location which limits your hand limit.
Goblin defeat cards are in the stone age cards, but they'd trigger larger monsters, Maybe defeating a monster give you an insta boost, but if you get stuck, other players can defeat your monster.
Seems to be a trend here, wood->stone->bronze->iron->steel->mithril?
Each deck of age cards gets shuffled, the top card (cards?) revealed, wood is a smaller deck
Tool cards need to be a choice, maybe they're limited, you don't want too many else your deck will get clogged up.
It might be a bit boring to just have each deck, each deck having some 'problem' that blocks a tunnel with some effect, and once you finish the last deck the game is won? no, I think it needs to be some kind of changer, I think it'd be interesting, plot wise, to say, the dwarves needed to descend quickly, so they don't get 2nd wood items, players are quickly introduced to upgrading, maybe its worth getting several stone picks quickly replacing your wood one, or maybe even, the wood one 'snaps' when you upgrade it?
maybe you can place 1 tunnel per turn for free, extra tunnels require discarding pickaxe cards, from here I'd need to test the game idea. more ideas will emerge about when to have things upgrade, how to thin the deck, aka deck building, The obvious one is taking build cards from your hand and placing them in your grid, which is why I think restricting it to 1 per turn, or maybe you always draw 1 and play 1 to make your deck size stay the same,
That's the basics.