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Alone at the Crossroads: Trees

I've made some progress on Project Smatter (Neon Fight? Neon Flights? Neon Static?) but I think it needs more work than I can really give it to make it contest-ready by the deadline.  But we'll see! I really like the game (the big scary change I'm considering making is giving one action per player per turn, instead of two.  Dunno if I'm smart enough to play that game, much less design it) but I frankly don't play Go, Chess, Tafl, even Checkers; none of the heavy abstrategy games.  So I'm sort of paralyzed by that.  And there's only a month left in the 2P contest.  I may just mess with For King and Country, polish that up and submit that.

So what have I been working on instead? Probably nothing, right? I mean probably.  Except that I've got this bug in my head for a solitaire 52-card game.  It's inspired by my reading and commenting on a lot of design stuff on the BGG Design forums, and you can definitely see fingerprints from others' (unfinished or unpublished or abandoned work) but I do think it's not outright theft by any means; my major mechanic is based on splaying, which I've been reading about in Innovation.
I'm calling my mechanic Alone at the Crossroads.  It's a way of building the character of a solitaire game, wherein the character has two axes of development: Horizontally, Cunning vs. Boldness; Vertically, Song vs. Silence.  Players start out being able to splay cards in only one of the four directions.  After achieving a certain amount of experience, they can start splaying cards in another direction (either one of the two directions in their currently unsplayed axis.  So say a character chooses to splay their cards to the right (Boldness).  They have now ruled out Cunning, but after scoring the requisite number of cards, they can start splaying their cards up (Song) OR down (Silence).  And say they pick Silence (Down); after scoring the next requisite number of cards, they can combine that splay, so that every card is now splayed down-right, and now gives both its Bold and Silent bonuses.
The two-axis mechanic, in a solo game, is why I call this Alone at the Crossroads.  Trees will be the first deck to employ the mechanic, but I could see a game of Peaks, Waves, Stars, Dreams...
Anyway, I don't want to jinx my work ethic, but that's what I've been building.  I'm partway (the easy part) done building a prototype, and I hope to be able to get a working text-only proto ready soon.  I don't think I'll bother posting airy-fairy concept stuff to BGG; I'll only enter the contest if I have a real first draft done.
So.  We'll see.

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