Developing a board game

[jpfed]

My computer is in the shop (again) until at least Thursday afternoon, so I haven't been able to work on The Factory. My thoughts have turned to the skeleton of an idea that awaits the primal ritual that will bestow it flesh. To make it easier for people to comment on individual parts of the ideas for this board game, the parts will be listed as

Comments

[anonymous]

I want to participate in your flesh-bestowing primal ritual. I look forward to discussing more tonight.

Are you going to pass out liabilities as well as resources?

Might be cool to have short term liabilities that can turn into resources/increase access to resources later on.

[abigailstein]

Oh--I was the anonymous poster

[jpfed]

Liabilities are an especially interesting idea, considering what I'm about to post below.

[jpfed]

Consider also a new way of distributing resources in a board game.

Dole out some number of resources into a central pot. Then, have players attempt (under some time limit) to agree on an equitable division of these resources. If a consensus is reached, then the consensus is enforced. If a consensus is not reached, then no one gets anything

[jpfed]

Note that the process of forming a consensus for distributing the entities in the central pot becomes more interesting if most of those entities are resources, but some are liabilities.

[jpfed]

If all kinds of resources were obtained through the same in-game mechanisms, that lends a certain bland uniformity. While the resource triangle shown above fits all of the resources into a single framework, that doesn't mean that they should all be treated uniformly by the game's rules.

It's probably spicier to have different ways of obtaining (and using) resources for different kinds of resources. It may be that certain kinds of resources are used reliably to "purchase" or trade for other kinds, while yet other resources are doled out randomly or selected by each player every turn.