Velocimancer Games

I finished the lengthy (for a modern-day attention-span and a time-thief in an office workplace) Encyclopedia of Chicago entry on the Plan of Chicago.  It's a great story.  I've been synthesizing ideas for The Plan (the game), not all of which can play nicely together.  Right meow I'm looking at the Player Tableau and thinking about how to lay it out so that it tracks Success, Co-Operation, and Corruption (my current three statistics) across the three Phases, and over the course of the game itself.  There may be some redundancy, but I gotta get a first draft up; hopefully that'll motivate me to build the card file for the three Phase decks, which is really all I need to do to at least have a prototype. Slan!

Another little rapid-fire scribbling of idea pings for The Plan. I've been thinking that a possible gameplay mechanic for the Proposals and their voting would be to a two-part phase: Phase 1: Put your proposal tokens on one or more slots on a d8.  You've got eight slots, each corresponding to a different result for the roll of a d8 - You're basically betting on specific results or sets thereof.  Perhaps you spread your proposal tokens on a whole bunch of faces - you'll have less payoff, but you're more likely to be one of the winners.  Each face can have multiple players' tokens on them (perhaps even an element that rewards co-op [Perhaps it rewards people you have co-operated with the least! Discourage long-term alliances.  It's all about public image]) so that the faces all represent different proposals. Phase 2: The die is rolled.  Players take turns playing cards to alter the result - +1 through +3, Surprise Budget for a second result to be added (e

In my quest to process Todd Sanders' design thread over at BGG, I've come across repeated references of his to Sid Sackson's A Gamut Of Games .  Intrigued, and with a bit of Amazon money to spend, I picked up a copy.  I've been going through it page by page, processing the game design elements, the strategies, the different philosophies of play, and the bits of colour and history peppered throughout.  The book is fairly quick going, though I've been underlining, scribbling in the margins, making comments, jotting down ideas, and in general doing all the elements of note-taking that I have always smilingly, steadfastly refused to do when required by a class. I'd recommend the book in turn to anyone getting into game design.  The current edition has author's notes at the front explaining the publication history, and the chronology of the book and its contributors.  And, as Sanders mentioned somewhere, Sackson is in many ways if not a founder, at least a keenl

So I've been thinking about my earlier seed of a thought for The Plan , and reading this fascinating document , and remembering some of my favourite moments of (of all things) Parks and Rec .  Some factors I would like to include in the game: Favors from Organized Crime that equate to basic, quiet bonuses, but count as a Mark Against in your record; A separate track for each player balancing public approval and personal funds to keep you in perpetual election or re-election; A cool design challenge might be to use chess pieces on my board; the projects you work on that reach completion have a lasting influence on the City; A tableau you build of "your track record" that is useful for tracking your victories/achievements (and therefore makes a good point tracker), but also acts as a resume for certain jobs - ergo, you are rewarded phase-to-phase not only for your victory points, but how you earned them; the possibility of multiple players being in the same division for a p

Mahalo.  So I've been thinking about one of the longer-standing (and longer-winded) issues between "Euro" and "Ameritrash" games - that of (perceived) Skill vs. Luck.  The argument runs that the less luck has to do with the game, the more it reflects skill.  Chess vs. Snakes and Ladders . A thought I had to mitigate the perceived influence of Luck: Replace dice with discreet stacks of cards, to which cards do not return upon being drawn. Now, I'll bet this concept has been suggested before.  But as I'm new to all this, I'm puzzling a lot of things out myself.  I feel that it's worth musing upon. So let's compare a die to a stack: We'll have d6 (die) and d6 (stack). A d6 (die), when rolled, always has a 1-in-6 chance of rolling each of its results. Now, a d6 (stack), when drawn from, removes that result from future draws.  You can count your cards (easier with a d6 than with higher denominations) and plan accordingly, especially if yo