Game #5/12 - Green, Chems & Steel - a cyberpunk reverse engine builder

Money, Drugs & Guns

An 18 card reverse engine builder game for 2-4 players about eliminating synthetic beings.

As an agent for hire you’re tasked with expiring a number of Synthetic beings known to be operating in the City.

During the game you will visit locations and perform tasks in the most optimum order to bring in more Synthetics than the other agents.

Files for playing:
Rules:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/5u9ezmwc877ftto/money_drugs+guns_rules_01...

Cards:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/5g4t1pz6084v80b/money_drugs+guns_cards_01...

Additional resources needed:
2 Meeple/player + 1
8 Red, 8 Green & 8 Yellow Discs/Cubes

Game play:
The game is played until one player has expired the majority of synthetics.

Each turn the active player will draw 1 location card, plus 1 for every active +1 location symbol on their player card. They will also gain 1 resource of their choice, plus 1 for every +1 resource symbol on their player card.

The player than attempts to complete all the location cards in the order they wish. Completed locations provide rewards, but any locations not completed at the end of their turn provide bonuses for the other players.

There are four types of location:
- resource locations (giving you more stuff to do stuff with),
- new lead locations (giving you new locations to complete),
- synthetic locations (where the synthetics are expired),
- decoy locations (to ruin the plans of the other players).

As the game progresses, you switch off skills on your player card making you less efficient as the game progresses.

Reflection:
This is my fifth game of my challenge to make 12 18 card PnP games in 12 months.

I’m really pleased with how this one came together. It deviated from the initial idea more than the previous games as I found some of the mechanics in the original were too clunky or simply were not fun.

The core concept remained the same though; chaining quests together to perform multiple actions. The theme was heavily influenced by blade runner, but what cyberpunk setting isn’t?

Getting the level of player interaction right was more difficult than I thought it would be. Since you’re all playing as lone agents, thematically you wouldn’t have a lot of interaction, but I didn’t want this to be a set of multiple solo games running in parallel. So I added in a ‘decoy’ mechanism where you could derail the plans of another players, but at the risk of derailing your own plans. I also made it so the penalties for not completing quests benefited the other players, rather than punish the active player and this seemed to give the game a more positive experience. Having the positive player interaction meant that the other players were more interested in what you were doing as they benefited when you messed up.

The 18 card limit was a little bit too restrictive for this game really and it really would have benefited from probably having double the amount of locations. That sort of thing is something I’ll look at when I get to the end of this process and re-evaluate how this one feels.

I was also proud of the art style for this. I admit it’s not amazing, but I really struggle with the art and I felt this art was a lot better than some of the previous games. I experimented a bit with a new art tool and in some places it didn’t work very well, but on the whole I’m proud of how the cards turned out.

Anyway, I'd love to hear how others feel it plays.

If you're curious, here's the link to the other game so far:
Game#1:
https://www.bgdf.com/forum/game-design/game-design-workshop/gene-dreams-...

Game#2:
https://www.bgdf.com/forum/game-design/game-design-workshop/game-212-dya...

Game#3:
https://www.bgdf.com/forum/game-design/game-design-workshop/game-312-ani...

Game#4:
https://www.bgdf.com/blog/game-412-those-magnificent-men-adventure-game-...