This Sunday we played out an insane concept. Trying to teach, run and complete a game for 12 players in a game half finished. Why would anyone put up with that? for me, for my birthday. I do this every year.
Bannisters Big Bad Birthday Bash Bonanza
So for this year, I want to build up some lore & story of the town of J'semby. I need to know some critical things: What buildings needed to be torn down, to make room for the farms and orchards needed to grow enough food for the population to survive.
How much material from the old town will be needed, what stone needs to be repurposed for what other buildings? Where will new wood come from?
In the past, having large conversations usually devolves into chaos, I either need to break it apart into bite sized turns, or break down the concept into bite sized decisions.
A quick way to do this is with cards. Each card has its own rules ON the card, so you can quickly surmise what you can and can't do, no need to ask or look up the rules.
This can sometimes also mean, players can think about their turns in advance, looking over their cards and comparing to others.
So I started with the core premise. what do I want. I want players to choose buildings in their district that are no longer useful, to them, and tear them down, to make room for food production.
The city is under Siege. Refugees are flooding into the city as the zombies approach. supply lines are being squeezed, then shut down. Its a calamity, when people get stressed they panic. multiple refugees in the same location means unease, distrust, mob mentality.
When things get bad, then worse, the city officials need to act. They have too many people for the buildings that exist, they need to house them or lose them. Promoting someone else to take in the masses might be a good idea, maybe load them on ships?
That's stage one of the game, dealing with the overwhelming numbers. Refugees pouring into the city.
What I did was create a deck builder game. you 'place' all your city buildings, use them to create resources. All starting cards, (cept maybe 2-3) will allow you to draw more cards. Since your hand is 5 cards, with a good draw, you can play out all your cards, and get no inefficiency.
When you get your first refugee, you 'might' get 4 non-redraw cards, but that last one will still allow you to play out your whole hand.
The 2nd and 3rd refugee though, is guaranteed to create a blockage, you now have potentially 6 cards that will block your ability to play more. With a worst case 10 cards left in your deck, you get 3 unrest cards (guaranteed to create further unrest) so you will need to bargain with your neighbours to unblock you.
Each turn after, you need to spend some resources to 'extend' existing buildings. house the refugees, and even feed them somewhat, they will 'pay' at first.
So as a deck builder, the whole idea is to 'clear out dead / not good cards, and buy in better cards. The mechanic of getting ;stuck' with refugees worked out ok, but it was a harder slog than I expected.
I had 80% regular players, but even they struggled to get the machines rolling in their minds.
I had to make a decision. Abandon this version mid play, and go back to the earlier drawing board, OR struggle through it.. at what cost and what reason.
Obviously, flipping the script meant 2-3 players dropped out. which would have happened if I continued the struggle.
The 'simpler' game was not working, it had too many holes. So we closed out at 5 with 'some' parts working, others not so much, but at least I had the 'data' for this run to work from.
Afterwards I thought about it (alot) and thought that maybe a tableau game would suit better. Place out the buildings at the start, AS the map. figure out your meeple=>food from the start, and work from that.
Instead of complex 2-3 possible actions per building, and multiples of wood/stone/coin to build.
Just boil it down to what's plausible within 1 turn, break larger buildings into 2, 3 or 4 cards to represent costs, i.e. "wood" and show the cost & benefit at the top.
Instead of drawing refugees, you 'place' them, some buildings can cope with some spares (church) and even convert them into meeples (labour) so people feel like its a bad idea to tear down a church later on. (sure the land and the stone could be put to better use.. but the housing for refugees is awesome.
The whole point would be to have some trade-off for each building.
I want lumberyards to 'store' wood, stone masons to carve stone, neither of which exists inside the city walls at first. you need to build them.
I want townhalls, guilds, theatres, other kinds of buildings that have a use, but in some ways are useless for a whole city to have multiples if the walls are closed and food is scarce.
So back to the drawing board, and we'll see what happens next.
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