CGD1 Theme: Spelunking

Why not? I must admit that this is something that confuses me as much as the "I have the best idea in the world and someone might steal it" line of thinking. Why not make an overtly Indiana Jones game? Does anyone seriously think we're going to publish this thing? (I'm not trying to be a pessimist, rather I'm saying that if we're thinking about publication, we're missing the point of the project) I think we should be trying to make a game that is maximally fun, and if we find that the game is the most fun when it is built around a movie or other work that we know and love, why not create such an experience?
(As proof, would the Lord of the Rings game by Knizia be as much fun with a different theme? Maybe; but it works so well precisely BECAUSE it's a Lord of the Rings game!)

So, I say, let's rip off proprietary material with impunity. If we want to make a Jones game, let's make one. If the game is good enough to publish/sell, we can try to license it, or else retheme appropriately. But why preemptively stifle our creativity by saying things like "rather than Jones, Belloc, and Salah (sp?), we should call the players Smith, Dubois, and Abdul, just to avoid getting sued". We're not going to get sued. Let's get serious here.

If we can make a game that has a great "feel" like the theme we're going for without overt and explicit references, so much the better, but I don't see why we should handcuff ourselves in the early stages...

-Jeff

I grant that there's a pretty good chance that someone knows the copyright laws better than me, but I would be absolutely shocked if they prohibit you from creating a private work for your own use that involves copyrighted material. Like, if I wanted to write an Indiana Jones story, of course I can do that; it's only when I try to sell it, and benefit from the copyrighted "brand name" without permission that it becomes problematic.
At least, that's what common sense dictates, and I assume that the law does as well...

Well, since this thread has really bumped up the amount of space, I'll just answer some wuestions people have had regarding Tourist Trap.

"scoring": Yes, tile would have a point on it (in cases of boring passageways that make it easy to link up many cave tiles by having multiple edges, no points). And tiles with pretty pictures and names like "Onyx Column" would have but one or tow passage links, but score points. There might even be special tiles that can multply popints of neighboring tiles ("Mystery Lake" multiplies the tile to the East of it by 2X).

Regarding the comparison to my Yellowstone Idea: I didn't even think about that game, ,but the more I think of it, Yellowstone has more in common with Carcassonne (capturing areas of a shared board everyone is building), and Tourist Trap is more similar to Princes Of Florence (players are bidding for tiles to place VERY CAREFULLY on their own individual board).

Confusion of the Tourist Tile scoring system: What I am envisioning with the tourist tile is that, when a player takes a tourist tile instead of a cave tile, a scoring round happens where everyone looks at their Tourist Trap and scores. Since the player who took the tourist tile doesn't get the added benefit of a future score from a played tile, he also gets some score bonus (such as, maybe, double his score, or in addition to his points, he also gets the points of another player). This is somewhat similar to the way a selected roles gets a bonus in Peurto Rico. I sort of like the idea that maybe there are only 10 tourist tiles in the deck, and once they are all drawn, the game is over. Some in some cases, it might not be worth the risk for a player to pick the tourist tile, and if noone picks it during a bidding round, it just gets discarded. And it makes for a somewhat variable game length, even though the players can sense that the eventual end is getting near as the tourist tile 7,8, and 9 show up in the auction.

Personally I don't think I like this too much. I think it detracts from the look of the game to have game text on a tile. When the game is over people should be able to look at their board and see an interesting or beautiful cave system, not a bunch of words and numbers.

I could see some tiles having numbers so you know how much they score, but it might be cleanest to just score for particular things... maybe Xpts per completed cavern, Ypts per surrounded rock, Zpts per "special feature" (where the rules would list the special features- basically little pictures of things like Underground lakes/springs, stalagtites, rock bridges, gowing fungus, etc.)- perhaps the special features would need to have differing point values, I dunno.

As I mentioned, I've never played a game that scores like that before, so I am not familiar with it. My impression is that it's kind of lame. Personally I like the idea of the game end being signalled by one player placing his third Concession. That way you can try to end the game sooner by or make it go longer by bidding or not bidding on the Concessions.

Also, rather than scoring rounds, I think it'd be fine to simply score at the end. The Concessions could score a certain amount, and if you want mid-game scoring it could be done like Carcassone- if you complete a cavern or surround some rock you get some points. Then you might score more for those later on. It'd be good to get points during the game though if the bidding system uses VPs to get tiles.

- Seth

Sounds good to me. Allows for larger board space as well. Now, should there be a pre-set board with one opening to the caves on each side (one for each player)? Probably.

- Seth

I'm also picturing using money as "victory points". Players generate a certain amount of revenue for completing the cavern, and then they have to spend it to bid on the new pieces. The mechanic will be like Empire Builder where you have to decide if you want to keep the cash towards your $250 million goal or spend it on more track in the hope that it will help generate more revenue.

FastLearner, these look absolutely mind-bogglingly great, I am truly impressed. But, they show exactly why I think a tile laying game is a disastrous idea for a group project. Each of your tiles has 8 possible entry/exit locations. That alone, plus the myriad ways those entrances/exits can intersect on the tile, suggest to me that talking about the tiles is going to be tough, coming up with a good tile mix, etc, is going to be darn near impossible.

Best of luck; I don't want to be a naysayer, but I really think tihs is going to be really difficult to design as a group. Hope you guys prove me wrong!

-Jeff

3x3 might be a bit excessive in size anyway. 2x2" will let us fit 20 on a page (if that doesn't leave enough margin space, it can be slightly under 2"). In that case 24 different tiles would be closer to $0.54. With 80 cents for the box and 10 for instructions, that's $1.44, so the game would sell for $14.40. The retail price for Carcassonne is $20, so that's not unrealistic.

What is 32# chipboard? Would that be tiles or cards?

You're the expert on this, so I might be completly off base, but my understanding is that 50% of the retail price goes to the resaler, 25% to a middleman, and the rest covers production, marketing, and profit. On the initial run, we would expect that 25% to be mostly production costs because of a lack of scale, so a multiplier of 6-8 might reasonable. In that case, we could hit a retail price point of $10.

We could also take the Cheapass route and just use envelopes run though a printer; that would reduce the "box" cost to about 10 cents)

Puerto Rico had an initial run of 3,000 copies and they managed to have a reasonable price point. It also has a lot more components than we're talking about.

Assuming that we are settling on the tile-laying game...

I like the tiles FL has proposed, but the game is starting to resemble Carcassonne again (although thinking about it, the "eight exits" is more similar to Metro). I don't think there's anything bad about that beyond a lack of originality however (as if there is anything original in the world anyway!) I already commented elsewhere that the "Tourist Trap" game sounded awfully like "ZooSim" to me - even down to the separate cave systems.

As for the debate about production costs - I'm in FLs camp too: I don't think it should matter for this design. What I think is needed is some agreement over the basic issues of the game, now that a bunch of ideas have been floated.

Component set. Would someone like to have a guess at how many tiles the game is likely to use? One game mentioned above, Metro, uses a board to constrain the tiles (meaning that the game works with just 60 tiles - which is a magic number for 2-6 players.) Carcassonne, by contrast, has a freeform board whose size is only constrained by the table you are playing on, but this results in, what, 100 tiles or so in the basic game and loads more in the expansions. One cave game I designed uses a prelaid board of face-down tiles but since it doesn't use any sort of corridor system I don't have to worry about connections. However, it does have the benefit of a much smaller tile pool (36 tiles in this case).
Personally I would prefer a game less dependent on connections - otherwise it will feel like a pipe-laying game; rather it is the caves aspect that we want to focus on.

Laying mechanic. Have we decided if this is a shared board game, or an individual game? I'm not sure that the tiles would necessarily need to be that different for both (which, of course, opens up a dual-purpose game which can't be a bad thing :)) However, obtaining the tiles needs to be done in different ways for the two types of game: drawing randomly might work for a shared board game (since all players can potentially benefit from it) but not for an individual game (since it becomes too luck oriented.)

Movement. At one point it was suggested that the players move dobbers through the cave system (using equipment etc.) At another the Carcassonne-style "claim a tile with a dobber" was proposed. My feeling is that a Spelunking game should have some sort of movement in it, but this may be a minor mechanics issue.

Scoring. Is it a scoring as you go along game, a scoring at certain points game, a scoring only at the end game, or a mixture? I think I'd prefer a scoring at certain points game (like the Tourist tiles suggestion) rather than the Carcassonne style of scoring as you go along, since I think this makes it easier to peg a leader back.

Other mechanics. Are there going to be other methods of interaction in the game (such as Event Cards)? I'm still keen on pushing for this, since it allows for a whole variety of different games to be built on the same foundations. The downside is that it adds an even huger luck factor to the game than drawing tiles!

My feeling is that once these have been sorted out, specific mechanics can then be dealt with. However, I think I'd like to see some responses to these general queries.[/b]

If you're placing tiles face down, would there be tunnels that have to connect? What's to guarantee they will?

- Seth

I agree that when scoring takes longer than the game it is silly, but I think counting up the score at the end is perfectly reasonable. However it may be better to keep a running total, like on a board (Carcassone or Evo style) if we're going to be using VPs as a resource. Some scoring at the end doesn't bother me, especially if some of the scoring conditions aren't set in stone until all the tiles are laid.

Another idea for an auction is to allow people to bid on as many tiles as they like. Read my posts about 8/7C in the GDW or in my Journal for how I did the bidding in that... that way someone could get more than one tile at a time, but it would (in theory) cost them a lot of resources. I don't know if I like that mechanic or not, but it;s certainly different.

I totally agree, read my "relic race" point of view for this project for how I figured it would work (same thing- place tiles then move). However for the Tourist Trap version I don't think movement fits in as well or is necessary.

Perhaps we should have the start tiles in the center? that would set up the grid at least. Perhaps better would be to have a large board, or border (like 5-6 player Settlers has) to delineate the grid.

That was the idea- there'd be a symbol on the tile indicating which deck to draw from.

- Seth