I stumbled across a neat thread at BGG that seems worth sharing. In it, people share some quick descriptions of the various games they're currently working on. It's an effort worth duplicating here, I think. To get us started, here's my list:
Works in Progress
1) Caribe - Send your governors, soldiers, merchants, and pirates to settle the islands of the Caribbean. It's basically a timing game with ship travel to handle delayed payoffs. There's a small amount of resource management and a run-based stacking mechanism on the islands (units of the correct rank can become leaders on the island, gaining special powers). Some dice-based conflict resolution thrown in as well, but not as a major focus. This is the one I submitted to those European design competitions.
2) Knaves of London - Take on the role of Professor Moriarty, the Invisible Man, Spring-Heeled Jack, and other members of Victorian London's criminal underclass as you scour the city for evidence of an assassination plot against the queen. Variable gameboard with four colors of evidence tokens representing the four quadrants of the city. Point-to-point card-based movement. Scandal cards apply negative points but can be used to bid for turn order and control of the queen's movement. Scoring is similar to Tigris & Euphrates in that your score is defined by your least-numerous color.
3) Box Office (or somesuch - every movie-related game title is already taken, it seems) - Similar to Knizia's Traumfabrik in ways, though I didn't know it at the time. An auction-driven game where you bid for individual scenes and link them together into movies. Aside from a catchy title, each scene has individual components such as Lead Actor / Comedy / Musical Score / etc with a small negative or positive value. These get added up for each movie to determine end-game scoring. Players begin with a limited amount of money and the money isn't recycled as it is in Traumfabrik. Instead, winning bids go into the Award pot for a given film category and losing bids go into the Nominations pot. The award ceremony occurs at the end of the game, money is distributed, and the player with the most money wins. Just for kicks, you can go through your movies at the end of the game and explain each scene title in the context of a central narrative.
4) Nightfall - Shadows Over Camelot meets Battleground: Fantasy Warfare meets Settlers of Catan. Basically a card-based cooperative fantasy tactics game where players navigate the streets of a small village, working together to save young Prince Wilhelm from the forces of Darkness (who wander the city in a dice-determined fashion). One of the players is a traitor, of course, and is secretly working to undermine the heros and hand the Prince over to the Dark. Units are represented by cards that move about the gameboard (with hit points tracked by dry-erase marker). Special actions are handled via other cards. The Settlers mechanic is that the dice roll at the beginning of each turn determines which units (friendly and hostile) are allowed to move. Every player gets to move almost every turn but you're never sure which unit(s) you get to move. Still working on the initial prototype.
Undeveloped Ideas
5) Carnival of Venice - Each card has two colors, maybe a symbol as well. When a card is played, it affects other cards of its color (flipping them, scoring them... I tossed around a variety of ideas but don't know what will stick). Influenced a bit by Coloretto and the simple thought that pictures of dudes in colorful masks is somehow inherently cooler than chameleons. Could be I'm wrong. ;o)
6) Noah's Ark - A children's memory game as you try to find pairs of animals to go on your ark. Meanwhile add opponent-controlled rising floodwaters, some jostling for geographic position, and a bit of Euro-style scoring mechanisms to the mix to make it interesting. Maybe a couple of unicorns.
Canceled / On Hold
7) Galapagos - Control a food chain consisting of three species (plant, herbivore, carnivore) and carve out your ecosystem on a small island shared with your opponents. Move, mutate, feed, and breed. The winner's the player with the most highly evolved carnivore at the end of the game. This one made it all the way to the prototype stage but I killed it before it ever got played. Something about the math felt fundamentally flawed and I wasn't convinced that it would be fun.
8) Grave Brothers Realty - Take on the role of a real estate agent playing both sides of the market, selling haunted houses to the living and the dead. Once the house is purchased the opposing players in each particular house will be making competing renovations - where the dead may want creaky stairs and rattling chains, the living want skylights, a fresh coat of paint to cover the blood left behind by the previous tenants, and a spare bedroom for the live-in exorcist. Each side wants to flip the house for a profit but runs the risk of being run out of the house as the stakes get higher. Players also have a limited number of 'family member' units to put into play, adding pressure to sell the house and move on. I finished a first draft of the rules but never got to prototype stage - the game seemed overly complex and a nightmare to balance. Maybe if I could narrow the focus to a two-player game, it might work better.
