[game Idea] Oil Rig

As game ideas go, they can be fun / useless, just jotting it down here before I forget: 

Worker Placement.

Oil Rig:

One is the pipe fitter, One is the worker on the pipe, one is the worker on the drill and one is the worker on the joint sealer?

You place a Pipe, and a worker, and it sucks up an oil. You then sell that oil at the end of the round for cash? hire more meeples? which represents cash/work flow.

If you still have meeples, you can drill more, BUT you draw a damage card for each round of drilling after the 1st. 

If you want to drill deeper, you need more pipes, you can place a meeple on the drill, draw a pipe from the stash, and place it under the 1st pipe (in a column) If it has no pipe fitter, you need to move a meeple down the pipe to 'fit' it. You get paid 1 oil per pipe+meeple. 

At 5th & 10th (maybe 3rd 6th and 9th?) there is a drill operator symbol, you need to place a meeple into the drill operator room to go further.

If you have meeples spare, place them into the joint sealer space, and either discard 1 damage, or maybe draw a sealer card, to counter damage.

Once you have run out of meeples, the round ends for you, excess damage takes away pipes (you can always place a meeple in the drill operator and draw 1 pipe)

Each round, you press your luck, to place more pipe without sealers, and potentially lose more pipe in the next round, or shore up with more meeples to counter the damage..

Should it be oil drawn from a deck? in sets of 1 or 2? 

Then since you might be stuck, how many meeples can you 'house' on your rig? maybe it costs 1 oil for the 1st, 2 for the 2nd, etc, but also maybe at 5, it costs 1 upkeep

The pool of oil cards is in the centre, once its 'dry' the game is over.

Meeples cost to buy, but maybe rooms on the rig cost too? Do you forgo the cost to house meeples, instead hire temp meeples for the round, to pull out more oil, because last round a LOT of 1's got drawn, so you suspect lots of 2s and 3s are left.

Maybe rig cards/boards are on display in a market, with a 1,1,1,2,3 cost. 

Rig cards might be upgraded drill, which houses 2 early drill guys, +1 pipe each.

upgraded sealer housing, 1st meeple gets a +1 seal.

upgraded meeple housing, these meeples don't go back to the bag when you end your round. 

Game Design: Roll to Move

I was watching some game design videos and how they complained about 'roll to move' and I just felt like, hang on, where they dissing it because they don't understand it? or just because everyone says that its bad?

Why and When Roll to Move is the correct way to go.

If we look at the mechanics of a roll to move, for example, we'll use a single d6. if both players tokens are standing at the beginning of a 6 spot track. then yes, roll to move is a poor mechanic. The likelyhood of one player rolling a 5 and the other a 1, means that neither player had any influence over the event and so its not fun. 

Sure, Odds are, the 2nd roll might be the opposite, and they both win. And yes, you can extrapolate out, if most people are playing a somewhat fair game, then over the course of 10 rolls, with a roll average of 3.5, the two players, on average will get to the finish line around the same time.

Here we have red, rolling poorly, and blue rolling well. Blue has a lead of 5 squares

Three turns Later, and Blue is even further ahead by 9 squares, so blue feels like he's winning.

Yes, If the Law of Averages comes in.. 

While Contrived, Blue and Red have 12 turns each, and arrive at the end, in the same round.

In such a game, going first, has higher odds of winning, because he's cross the line first.

Yet, there is no point to this.. regardless if you roll once or a hundred times.. you're not making any choices. So there is no game here, its just an exercise in dice and math, which is why its for kids.. to teach them dice and math, and that's all.

NEXT.. If we look at the squares themselves as opportunities.

In many games, a roll of a dice, gives you a table of opportunities, Lets say 1 to 6. You roll, consult the table, then I roll and consult the table. The table, and its choices are the game.

Roll	Results
1	Take a Coin
2	Take a Shoe
3	Take a Bag
4	Take a stone
5	Give an Item to another player
5	Swap an Item with another player

Now this game is just about collecting objects, You take turns for a set number of turns, say 12, and you want to get a complete set of all 4 items, which earns you a point.

But it can be a little boring to just roll a d6, and look at a chart.. if instead the chart was on the table, like a board.. we can see it..

Hence why many roll and move games have the 'chart' as the next 6 steps you can land on:

Now we see that while red landed on a 2, and took a shoe, blue landed on a 6, and would need to swap an item (to ensure this works, we need rules about what happens if you can't give/swap)

In Blues Next roll, 1->6 will still equate directly to the chart, but for Red, the order has been mixed up, where a roll of a 1 will give them a score of 3. because there is no modification to the dice rolled, the odds are still the same. (see more below)

Now, we have 12 rolls, resulting on 12 checks on the chart, and the roll->move structure is actually just a timer for how long the game lasts for.

In essence, provided there is enough rounds.. 12 or more, statistically, most players are going to have a fairly even chance of getting each roll once, and as long as you design in the rule to allow some exchange with a player who didn't roll often enough, or rolled too much of, it balances out.

This actually is pretty much exactly how Catan works. just the 'movement' track is in your head, for how many plausible turns until you hit the end of the game.

Roll modifiers.

IF you could modify the roll made.. then we unlock a whole gamut of possibly interesting choices. Since the roll of a 1 in that second turn, equates to a 3 for red, if red had a +1 token that could be used. Red can choose either a bag or a stone as their 'gain' allowing them more strategic choices.

Conclusion

So, when we look at older games, and think, Oh, Roll and move, how wrong. We fail to realise some of the very complex decisions that are likely to have been made to ensure that the 'track' has equidistant effects and choices for players, to ensure a balanced end game.

Board Game Creation

Over the last few months, I was contemplating what to present at Concentric, the local board/RPG convention, where we have our own board game designers group. I was keen to present something more finished, so I chose the simplest of all my game ideas and pulled it out of storage, dusted off the 3.5in floppies and loaded up my game documents (and quickly copy/pasted them all into google docs for future access)

The Game I chose had no name, It was a blurb: Heroes entering a dungeon, players don't control heroes, they influence heroes, to ensure no-one is able to determine which heroes you want to win, you play influence on all heroes, sometimes good sometimes bad, sometimes indifferent.

Over the course of the game, you can slowly determine, who is 'influencing' which group the most, and if your goal goes against that, can push to block that hero group more often.

No, Not this Ludo

This Ludo

 Its Ludo meets Bridge, wrapped in a fantasy setting.

 

There are only really 3 types of card you can play, Movement, Blocking and Enhancing. Each has a few varieties of cards, but just stating those concepts really cements my own idea of how to present that. 

The "heroes" are Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, so I could use Purple, Orange and White to represent Movement, Blocking and Enhancing.

The Board has a path from the players start, to the centre, 10 squares.

The Concept is simple, you play a movement card to move forward, a creature card to slow down someones movement, or an enchancement card to increase the chance that the movement card will allow movement.. what I meant by those last points.. a creature will block you, if your hero group is un-enhanced, but if enhanced, the creature is killed (removed from the path) and the hero continues to move forward.

When the Heroes reach the treasure at the end, they claim the treasures. Once all treasures are claimed, the players reveal their "favoured" heroes and points are claimed.

The Game can play as quickly as 20 minutes, but if you use the more advanced rules, can go for an hour. I've tested with 2-4 players a few times, but at ConCentric, I managed to victimise get eight players, to really test its limits.. (i.e, could you pull this out at a dinner party and play a round or two.. the answer is.. not yet)

Making a Board game is Harder than you think

I had 2.5 months, and I honestly thought I could pull off such a simplistic board game idea in that time, I really thought I'd be almost ready to think about kickstarting it once I presented at Concentric.. Whoo Boyo, No..

My Initial play tests, suggested I needed more card types, my next play test had too many. The Hero theme suggested cards that just broke the game, pushing it into hours of play, but taking them out left the game as too simplistic and we could finish in 10 minutes.

Presenting at Concentric, showed me that eight players might only work if the players all know what they're doing, because my nephews were very gung-ho, just throwing down their 4 choices, I forgot that adults like to contemplate their moves, and that meant a 10 minute turn around the board.

So, Its back to the drawing board.. I'm almost there, but its just needs something else...