Some of us have probably seen GroundHog's Day. More still have probably seen numerous episodes of Star Trek. You know, the ones were something catastrophic happens, but in that event time gets reset back a set increment in time. The people involved remember tiny tid bits of what happens, and have to prevent the disaster from happening all over again.
Well, I was thinking, how could you make a game out of a time looping situation?
The first theme that popped to my mind is a secret laboratory messing with time travel has an accident. The ensuing explosion destroys a town, then time goes back, and the players have to figure out how to stop the explosion.
Then I thought of a more interesting idea that I think I'm going with. There's no rhyme or reason to the time reversal. Who knows, maybe I'll figure out a fluff way of putting it in, but here's my idea.
The first turn of the game has players drawing event cards. Each player goes around drawing event cards until their demise card is drawn. Once all players have "died" then time is reset, and the players then have to save EACH OTHER. You get more points for saving the other players lives, but you dont' get any unless you survive yourself.
The player who is alive at the end of the game, who saved the lives of the most other players wins.
Obviously politics play a strong role in this game. However, I'm worried about the mechanics to this game.
Obviously this game can't have too many bits that get moved around. Resetting those bits to their original locations every round might become tedious and boring. So cards seem a good alternative. I thought perhaps this game could be strictly a card game.
I'm thinking of somehow combining a board and card game where there are a few movable elements on the board, locations are important, but most of the action happens through the cards.
Perhaps the events of the day are somehow scripted by drawing a line of cards at random. To kind of lay the seed for the game.
I've been giving it a lot of thought, and I plan to see how far I can take this, but I just thought I'd come here to see in what directions others would take it, and bounce some ideas around. Have there been any other games like this?
I think I like that a lot. The conditions drawn is almost perfect, since the players will have to remember what those conditions were.
Perhaps instead though of one card being drawn, there are a series of cards drawn. Some being conditions, some being events.
As conditions cards have to be met before the cards further in the track can be executed, and as soon as a condition is not true, then time starts over. Event cards change things happening in the game, perhaps in certain areas, or perhaps in some other way. There would be 3 cards drawn at a time, and once all these cards have been "completed" then perhaps another 3 are drawn and so on and so forth until either a certain number of cards are dealth, or some other end game trigger happens.
The event cards could better be handled if the game was lowered in scale from a town, to say one neighborhood, or even one room.
Although I still like the idea behind the object of the game to be saving the other players. Players will be motivated to save the other players, but they also want to convince the other players to save them as well (otherwise they won't score). Although, that mechanic could break down unless there was some motivating factor. I mean, who would want to save the player who saved the most people? And by extension, who would want to save the most people?