Boy, did I ever not jive with everybody else this time - my votes went to only one of the top three, and my entry doesn't seem to have placed, even though I thought it was pretty cool. The winner didn't stay within the 400-word limit, which nixed it for me, but I liked it - I guess other folks don't care, or don't do word counts.

Anyway, here are my comments on the entries:

Entry 1 - Rawhide

my entry

Entry 2 - Mother May I

The game sounds like fun for kids, and sweet, with all the nice gifts. I may not understand the strategy or what happens if you land in the wrong cup - this sentence isn't clear to me "They must shoot at that cup and remove the item if they make it in another cup." It seems like fun, but not strategically deep, and the permission thing doesn't seem to make much difference. A lot of the game would depend on how accurate people could be with the catapults; I'm guessing from my experience with other such things that they're not very accurate, which could make the game last a really long time.

Entry 3 - Teddy Bear Rescue Squad

Very whimsical, with the teddy bears, carousel, and jack in the box. Nice use of the mandatory elements, and I like the rest of the theme you built around it; very fun and cute. I was trying to figure out the strategy, and there didn't seem to be a lot; you gradually narrow in on Jack's position, and eventually you're deciding whether a 1/3 chance of another guy winning is worth a 1/12 (or higher) chance of you losing. Could be fun for a few plays, but doesn't seem very deep. (2 votes)

Entry 4 - Fire that Catapult!

This could be fun, but so much is left to the undescribed deck of cards that I can't really evaluate how it would go. The catapult thing is almost unnecessary, although I'm sure it would be a selling point - this could just be a dice game where you roll from a distance. Voting isn't really permission, so I don't think it quite meets the mechanic requirement.

Entry 5 - Artifacts of the Dark Jungle (great title!)

I really like the theme of treasure hunting. There are a lot of clever little mechanics in here - the sharing of bounty, the digging up to three times, etc. Very devious stuff, and all of this would give it replay value. The claw crane thing is fun (and would make the game exciting) but it seems a little forced - are these things really spring loaded? Couldn't you just draw cards off a deck and avoid the expense of the crane? Or is there a dexterity component to it? The artifact auction is a neat balancing mechanic but it seems pretty counter-intuitive and complicated. I wonder if there's a way to keep the balancing stuff you added but make it make more sense. I think the monetary system is needlessly inflated - just use single coins, give people three of them, and earn four per treasure. But all of these are nitpicks - the game looks solid, is complex, and would be fun to play many times.

The entry is 418 words - over the 400-word limit. This is rough, because I like the game, and it's not far over the limit and could easily have been cut down to size. However, I don't vote for games over the limit, so I can't give it any votes. I'd have given it three.

Entry 6 - Tea With the Queen

Great theme and atmospherics. The mood/setting of this is great. I can just imagine sitting around the table with exaggerated accents and gestures. The game seems pretty simple, without too many strategic decisions to make, and the hand-shuffling that happens sometimes could be pretty destabilizing. I don't really see the permission angle, unless it's in the trades - maybe that's it. For a fun light game, this could be a good time. (2 votes)

Entry 7 - May I Come In?

A fun twist on the werewolf-style party game. The crossbows are fun but probably not necessary for the game. I don't see why you would ever play a key color for a house that doesn't exist - so why would you ever be stuck outside? This doesn't make sense, but maybe I'm missing something. I think there might be some holes in the rules as far as strategy goes, but I like the use of theme.

Entry 8 - Body Wars

Very clever (and weird) idea with the warring organs. This could definitely be in the weird-but-fun category. I'm not sure how all the resources would interact - you'd either have to bend how the body works some, or you'd need to do some other balancing - it's hard to see how the brain, lungs, and heart don't have a lot more power than the lymph nodes. Creative idea, and the trading is sort of like permission. I'm assuming the spring is in the wind-up timer? I have a hard time seeing how the body survives more than a turn or so after failure of a major organ, too, but maybe you could find a way. Fun idea; I'd like some more details to see how it plays out. (1 vote)

Entry 9 - Tactical Frienemies

Could be very cool, but extremely difficult to evaluate without more details, and without the other components being explained - like, what are some of the secret objectives? No idea what these are. What are some capabilities of the units? Too much left to my imagination here. I'm not sure what the difference is between all the different actions - why would it ever be worth approving somebody's entry? What's the difference between Backstab and verbal denial? You never describe how the Deny card works. Maybe I'm not understanding this, but it seems like this is complicated without adding much. I do like the idea of spring-loading the board - although that could be hard to get past modern toy safety mavens - and I love little wargames like this - I just wish I could see more how it would play.

Entry 10 - Out to Sea

Interesting contest-of-wills game; I think the ideal strategy could be figured out via Excel in a few minutes. Could be fun as a light opener to a game night; I think it might be cool to add some more elements to make it more complex and strategic. Good use of both mechanics (although the spring-loaded table could just as easily - and far more cheaply - be somebody's hand rolling the dice).

First of all, thank you sedjtroll for setting this up. I had a lot of fun thinking up ways to incorporate the 2 requirements into game design, it was definitely challenging. I will comment a little bit about my own game before going over the other games.

I am actually pleasantly surprised that "May I come in" got that many votes. I had a tough time with the word limit and really wanted to put in a couple more things in the rules for clarity but simply didn't have any space for it. One was how the game would scale with more than 5 players, and the other was an example of how one round would go and why players would make certain choices since the mechanisms are quite subtle.

The driving mechanism behind people's choices are:
- There are 6 colored houses but only 5 players.
- If a house is not occupied during the night, that house disappears and cannot be used for rest of the game.

So right off the bat at least 1 house will disappear after the first round, but players may hold keys to the house that disappeared. They will have to ask to join someone else's house in order to survive. Vampires will have strong incentive to let them in to convert them, and regular people will have incentive to invite them in just to ensure the diversity of houses in future rounds.

and now onto the other games.

Entry 1 - Rawhide
It seems like a fun game, I just didn't think the challenges were well integrated. I didn't quite understand what spring had to do with the game. I think you meant the water/stream/spring not the spring-loaded-spring right? As for the permission part, I feel like the players would almost always say no to make the opponent walk around their enclosed area. It would be better if they just charge money/cow for entering another player's area. I think this game has a lot of potential, it just wasn't well suited for this contest.

Entry 3 - Teddy Bear Rescue Squad
I loved the name, loved the description, and then I got overwhelmed by the number of components and got lost. I didn't understand how the board, dice, carousel, and Jack In the Box all fit together.

Entry 5 - Artifacts of the Dark Jungle
I really liked this one. The Permission card/Deny Cards was a mechanism I wish I thought of. All the mechanisms fit the theme well. More than anything I like how it is written in a clear and concise manner and I understood immediately what the designer was going for. It is definitely the most "ready" game in this competition. if I really have to pick on something it is that the claw crane seems forced, but a lot of entries (including mine) had tough time incorporating a spring-loaded components into the game play.

Entry 6 - Tea With the Queen
I like the cute theme and I am a sucker for recipe games so I voted for this one even though I don't really consider "trading" the same as "asking permission". And the thought of people sitting around a table attempting to speak Elizabethan English was hilarious.

Entry 8 - Body Wars
This is a great base idea for an educational biology game. To whoever designed this game: please re-design it without having to worry about asking for permission and using a spring or a wind-up kitchen clock, it feels like those mechanisms were holding your game back (or you were forcing the game into those mechanisms). Either way, love the idea, would love to see more, it's like pandemic but inside your own body!

Entry 9 - Tactical Frienemies
I liked this game because I had a similar idea(placing spring-loaded pieces under hex board) but couldn't get it to work, so Kudos for that. Other than that, this game had a bunch of mechanisms I liked, secret objectives, permission/deny/backstab cards, etc. I think it just didn't do so well in the competition because people are getting jaded about hex war games.

I don't think spring as in "small stream of water" was part of the intended challenge, it's not really a component.

I would have accepted that, but I had a brain fart, and didn't even consider the possibility of a spring of that sort.

Now let me address some of the comments and maybe ask a few questions so I can get better at this. The first thing is

I am not sure I agree with this comment. I think voting is a type of permission giving. The way I say it is that is I am presenting you with 2 or 3 choices and you look them over and you decide which one you give me permission to do it is your vote. It only is classified as a vote because there are other players also giving permission to use the card and those choices are totaled. That being said I think I could handle this better in the game by a blind “vote” where the player all cast their vote as to which card and if my then one is picked the player shooting gets to use all those modifiers.

What kind of penalty would you suggest?

Thanks for all the help and I look forward to attempting the next challenge and discussing more about game design.

First, thanks to sedjtroll for putting this together. I had a lot of fun working on the challenge. Limitation breeds creativity and the mechanic and component limitations you set really helped to get my creative juices flowing.

My Game - Artifacts of the Dark Jungle

Like I normally do, I worked on the mechanics first, and the theme evolved from there.

Incorporating a spring was tough, and I admit my use of a spring loaded claw machine was a bit forced, but I think it satisfied the criteria well enough. I'm pretty sure those machines have springs in them. And in any case, if the word limit were higher, I would have described a claw machine where you got to aim it from above but then had to pull a trigger to have it shoot down and dig. That definitely would have required a spring. In future versions of the game, I'll likely abandon the claw machine. While I think it would be fun for kids, and some interesting situations might occur (do you dig in the safe spot that has a little bit of treasure and no visible traps, or do you risk going for the treasure heavy area with the trap visible right beside the treasure?), it would be way too costly to produce, and the game play would be a lot slower than I'd prefer.

What really intrigued me about this challenge was the permission mechanic. I spent a lot of time thinking of a good way to either suitably reward someone for granting permission, or punish them for denying it. As those who worked on this challenge know, it's a tricky balance. You have to make it worth their while some of the time, but not always. After a lot of deliberation, I decided to go with a twist on the prisoner's dilemma, wherein you may or may not be rewarded for granting permission, depending on whether your opponents did as well. My hope was that this mechanic, in addition to being simple, yet strategically complicated, would keep the game relatively close. As a player got far ahead, the others would be less likely to let them dig.

The first version of the game I submitted (which was actually the second of three versions) had a more complicated reward system than the revised edition that was posted. I had gotten a chance to play test it the night before submissions were due and submit changes the day they were due. Originally, in a 4 player game, if only 1 of the 3 other players granted permission, the treasure split would be 8 gold for the player granting permission and 4 for the player digging. If 2 players granted permission, it would be an even 4-4-4 split, and if all 3 granted permission, only the player digging would get the gold. In the 5 and 6 player variants, there was even a 6-2-2-2 split. That worked, but there was too much motivation to grant permission. I worked out the math and realized that, assuming you have no idea which way your opponents will vote, you were, on average, 4.33 times better off granting permission than denying it. In addition, on those occasions when only 1 person granted you permission to dig, it felt pretty crappy to have to dig even though you knew someone else was getting twice as much gold as you. My solution was to switch to an even split, and only if exactly 1 player granted permission.

To answer one of dobnarr's observations -- that the monetary system seemed needlessly inflated -- this is the primary reason why. Under the very first version of the game, I needed treasure to be worth a number that was divisble by both 3 and 4. In the second version, I needed that number to be divisible by 2 and 3. And in the latest version, it only had to be divisible by 2. My error was in forgetting to go back and actually reduce the amount treasure was worth. On the other hand, there is one positive point to players having more money rather than less: they have more manuervability in what they can bid in the bidding portion of the game.

And that brings me to the bidding mechanic. The idea is to let players set the value of the artifacts they found, with the caveat that the other players can buy the artifact from them at that value. If more than 1 player want an artifact at the set price, it gets a little more complicated, but during the play test, it went pretty smooth. As a designer, I'm a big fan of self balancing mechanics, which this was. I didn't have to figure out how much each artifact was worth - players would decide that for themselves. As a player, it was actually really tricky to determine what price to set, and what price to pay or not pay. Often an artifact was worth more to one player than another, and they were all worth less the closer we were to the end of the game. And sometimes paying a lot for an artifact that seemed valuable would backfire as the other players would now be less likely to let you dig. The game was won and lost primarily because of mistakes made during this phase. One player enjoyed the mechanic and one did not. The one that did not was really bad at setting prices.

I also allowed players some flexibility in how many times they'd request to dig. The more digs you requested, the worse it would be for other players to grant you permission, and thus they'd be less likely to do so... unless they thought they'd be the only one granting permission.

As for the word count thing, I thought mine was within the limits. The first draft I wrote came in at 760 words and I trimmed like crazy. I got it under 400 if you use http://www.wordcounttool.com/. I didn't think to double check with any other programs. Oddly enough, if you use MS Works Word Processor, mine isn't the only one that comes in over 400. Rawhide! comes in at 405.

I am going to keep working on this game and hope to post a print and play version sometime soon. Again, I really enjoyed this challenge, and appreciate all the comments.

Thanks for the all the feedback everyone! This was my first challenge, and honestly the spring threw me so I sort of punted, which everyone figured out :)

Yeah - body wars is a sort of black humor game, but it's rooted in some very realistic biology, if someone could make the game. For example, if someone is starving, its sort of a race - the body converts available protein in the muscles into energy for the brain, so you typically have a situation where the heart muscle fails before the brain does. But yes - most games end the same way most people end, with a sickly dying old person, and all the organs failing one at a time. Call me a sucker for theme!

My guess for how the game works is probably one of two things (ad if anybody wants to weigh in, do so): either all the resources the game uses are always present in every game, so games where a specific organ is not present would simply ignore them; or each organ uses several resources, and if the organ that "makes/manages" that resource is not in the game, that particular resource is not used in the game.

Oh - and I loved Rawhide for the first player/ beef eating mechanic.