No, I'm not talking about Face to Face vs Internet gaming here. I was just struck by an interesting thought and I thought I would share it and see what you guys think...
the thought process went like this:
I was thinking about the Campaign idea (see journal entry, based on the ideas spurred by jwarrend's Action card mechanic thread) and thought that winning influence in 50 states might take too long for a good game. In order to cut it down I thought perhaps the game could cover simply winning a Region. there could be a set of boards, one with each region of the county on it (I'm talking about USA here, as that's what I'm at least remotely familiar with).
Then I thought why not expand the idea a bit and use multiple Regions (or board pieces) for a longer game or with more players. If a single board piece or Region were enough for 3 or 4 players, then what happens if there are 2 players and 2 board segments? Would it be Multiplayer Solitaire? With 2 boards and 4 players, as far as any one player is concerned, would there pretty much just be 1 opponent to contend with (the other two being too far removed from their game to matter, except in final scoring)?
This got me thining of "Local opponents" (the ones on your board) and "Global opponents" (ones that don't have any direct effect on your game). Has this concept been utilized before? I can't think of any games offhand that purposely set up Local and Global opponents. It might be difficult to do without a large number of players- unless you get some kind of circular relationship going on where you canaffect the player to your left but not the one to your right.
Perhaps the closest thing I've seen to this is Multiplayer Magic: the Gathering where in some variations your cards affect your immediate neighbors (or 2 people out) but not the players further away than that.
Have any of you used the concept of Local vs Global opponents in your designs?
- Seth
I imagine there'd be some stuff that only affects your region, and then there'd be some stuff that affects the whole country. So the distinction between local and global would be that stuff that affects you will more often come from the Local opponents and less often (or less severely) from the Global ones.
I had assumed a standard turn order, not that the seperate boards would be seperate little games- I'm thining more along the lines that the boards are all part of one big game (indeed, it could be a single board with different regions outlined, and effects are region specific...)
Maybe if the boards are seperate than there are seperate decks of event cards or whatever that are board-specific, so player A in the SW region never will draw a card that affects only New Orleans, but player C over in the South region will.
- Seth