My Post Apocalyptic Theme

You could focus on 'survival' type buildings, meaning a water source, food source, and maybe secondary sources like clothing stores, hardware stores. Maybe the structures could have differing levels of value, depending how scarce/necessary a resource is. How devasted is the area that the game takes place in? Is this an area-control game or resource gathering type game? Or both :)

Agreed, though what is the scale of the game, in size and in time? I assume that 1 pawn (if you even use them) will represent a group, not an individual person.
• You can keep things immediate (each turn represents a few minutes or hours) and the game is a turf-war-style scramble for immediate control. Buildings like Police Station (use to hold prisoners?) , Car Dealership (get vehicles), Hardware Store (weapons and tools), Grocery Store (food for your faction) would come into play.
• Turns can represent a longer period (days or weeks or months) and the game is more of a limited-civilization-builder. Important building types might be School (educate your people) Factory (create goods) Farm (grow food), other large-scale stuff.

Personally I would lean towards the first option. The idea of groups of desperate survivors banding together and forming factions, quarreling to stay alive and protect themselves, and ensure their own survival, seems the most fun.

Setting up the blast area. Two fun options might be:

1) It was one big nuke. Structures (tiles) are laid down randomly in a fixed concentric pattern. Tiles at the centre of the pattern (and the structures on them) are at the epicentre of the blast, and are therefore most destroyed and irradiated. Moving outward from the centre, radiation is less severe and assets are in better shape. Perhaps as game rounds go on, radiation levels start to decrease, "unlocking" structures that were formerly too hazardous to annex.

2) The city was destroyed in an unpredictable random fashion (small cluster-bombs, whatever). Randomly lay the tiles down into the fixed pattern, then randomly place "devastation chits", which show a number indicated how destroyed the structure is, onto each tile. Structures are capable of bestowing varying degrees of benefit to the player who controls them based on what level of repair they're at. Perhaps structures could be repaired, raising their benefits... this could spark an interesting strategic choice for the player at startgame - hurry to claim buildings in good shape, or hurry to claim buildings that will bestow good benefits once they have been repaired...

Try this on for size: Each player starts with only a small band of pawns of their colour. They move about the board and encounter neutral pawns, which have varying degrees of hostility. These neutral pawns can be ran away from, killed, chased away, or charmed... this is how you build your faction. Perhaps all charmed neutral pawns have a degree of "loyalty." You can increase loyalty by improving your faction conditions... control schools, assets, those "status" buildings you mentioned. Pawns of questionable loyalty can be convinced to switch allegiances. If balanced properly, this function could organically "guide" players through an appropriately-escalating chain of events.

Think about this though... why are players competing? Wouldn't one option for these nuke survivors be to band together and create one big harmonious society? I guess the endgame condition (when you develop it) will fill in this thematic need.

Elements of any of these ideas could be mixed with those from the others. Keep hacking at this game while it's fresh in your mind, it's ripe with potential. As you can see, it's got me thinking!

~Josh

I wouldn't go with total cooperative. Game-systems that can be "played against" by a group of players trying to defeat it together usually feel to me like a chain of random (or scripted, or random within a scripted structure) events that unfold without much reaction to what the players are doing. Generating a decent reactive game system that really responds to the players' actions usually means that the bulk of the game mechanics are focused around the maintenance of that system. Typically this bogs down a game in complexity. (Solo games fail less at this because it's OK for that system to be the bulk of the game - with solo games, that reactive game system IS the game.)

This could function as an indirect-competition game where players are fighting the environment (and the chainsaw-wielding bikers with overgrown mutant farm animals on leashes) to be the first to get "stable". In this way the players compete with each other by securing map resources first, eg water, security, power.

However, it seems to me that this motivation would naturally lead to factions directly fighting with each other on the board. I mean, just because you snuck into the Hospital first doesn't mean I won't walk in and push you out if I'm strong enough to do so. In the post-nuke world it just seems appropriate - no law, no order, might is right. Perhaps, if this is a more epic-scale game, as stability grows, lawlessness becomes less forgiveable.

~Josh

Heh, yeah, thats the danger of exploring ideas in the forum, its easy to get sidetracked into versions of the idea that you weren't intending ;)

Ahh, so what was the original question?

Alrighty then, also might be good to think about the setting a bit more.

So you have a post-apocalyptic theme, but are the players in the ruins of a city? Or a small town? In the middle of nowhere?

If they are in the ruins of a city, then there will be all sorts of useful stuff hanging aroung, things they can jerry-rig etc etc. If they are in a small town, or the middle of nowhere, they will have different things at their disposal.

I would suggest having Basic stuff cover their basic needs - Food, Water, Housing, Clothing. Then your more advanced stuff would be enhancers for the Basic stuff (better food, better housing etc) as well as more interesting things you have to think about, such as security and entertainment.

I would even push towards having severals stages in the game that 'seamlessly' mesh into one another. Thus you would have the starting stage of the game where players are getting to grips with things and just scrabbling to survive. Then, when a certain number of buildings are up, or the right number of different buildings are up, people can relax a bit and start building enhancer things, upping their security etc, whatever. Maybe there is even a negative built in effect where once players have built up enough, Something Bad Happens which causes the players to scrabble to gain or keep control of certain buildings etc.

Also think about what resources players will have access to or need. Do they access their own supply of tiles or draw from a common pool? What do players 'claiming control' actually represent? What do the players represent? Different communities in the same place? Different families? Are players all the same or do they have access to different roles that means players must work together to get stuff done?

Ook, rambling. Ook.

I meant to add this to the previous post:

How about having special types of pawns? - such as a tinker/mechanic or a green-thumb type person. Folks with specialized skills could be worth more in certain types of buildings. Having a pawn that's good with their hands inside a hardware store, or a machine-shop, could be a boost to the types of improvements you can do, or could quicken (lessen the cost) of recovering future buildings, etc. The green thumb could aid with new tribesmen production, or at least help pay for any upkeep costs associated with feeding your pawns. Any you need someone that knows how to harness that power coming from the generators you just found...

Enough rambling, at least for now! :)