New Game idea... HELP!

I too think that the game sounds too simple. The game idea is good and it is a nice start.
My ideas to this idea :
I would add some bidding mechanic. Who dares the most ?
Taking a card and then throwing dice doesn´t leave much space for game tactics. What if you take cards with i.E. "Busses" or "Ramp length" which modify your ability to jump more spectacular, then when the stunt is made you throw dice which decide how many of these cards you are allowed to use. There is some risk management when bidding.
The audience is important for stuntmen. So add them in some way. Collect the audience after a good stunt and who has most at the end wins ? Is the number of audience available before or after bidding ? Has someone seen a card before other player have seen it ?
What happens if you fail your stunt ? Do you loose all your hand cards ? Audience ? Can you retry the stunt if it only failed merely ?

some thoughts - I wish you a lot of fun with this project. The best moment in game design is when a feeling or scenario gets cought by a fitting game mechanic. It suddenly is as if there never was an other possibility than this one and that makes me as a designer feel happy.

verspielte grüße
martin

What if there was a bidding system? Like players could bet the number of fans they have? Hitting tricks would gain fans and missing would lose them?

Or what if you drew the event randomly which sets the difficulty (and base reward), then each player had a chance to hinder themselves? You keep bidding around making it harder until someone calls it and a player has to go. Each hindrance modifies the base reward in some fashion.

Over the top of 10 buses... through the Wall of Church Bibles... off the Monster Trampoline... and through the Ring of Thermite!
"... I can do that blindfolded."
"I can do that blindfolded and no sleep the night before."
"Okay, I'll do blindfolded, no sleep, ... on a unicycle."
"Ha. Go then."

I agree with dropping the dice mechanic, at least as I am understanding it here. It is very difficult to balance dice so that one terrible roll doesn't basically take you out of the game (unless your opponents also have terrible rolls) and it's frustrating to have the lack of control that dice bring. If you stick with it, try to use a pool of dice that you can assign in various places.

I would suggest having the stunt cards that you mentioned and also have skill cards that let you complete the stunts. You might even want to have all of the cards be dual use so they could either be a stunt or have skills on them. Some sample skills would be speed, steering, power (for jumps), and showmanship. To maintain the push your luck aspect some skill cards could have minimal (or zero) skills, but prompt you to turn over cards from the top of the deck when you use them that apply to your skills for the stunt.

One of the positives of this approach is that if people get the poor luck of not having matching cards, they could save their cards until the next hand and hopefully come back with bigger/more stunts. I think this effect would naturally cause the level of stunts to escalate, which keeps the tension going until the end of the game.

As this is your first game, I would warn you against upping the complexity...at least before you prototype. I find that the most useful method is to prototype only the core of the game and then add things on after you've verified that the base game works. This also allows you to "fail early", i.e. if the base game doesn't work like you thought it would, you've put in much less time.

This is a very interesting idea, and I'd love to try it out actually.

Personally, I would keep the dice, because as the nature of stunts goes, they are risky and having dice determine outcome makes a lot more sense while fitting the theme really well. If it's too strategic, then people are just going to turn it into a numbers game and then it would be no fun. It seems like the fun in this game comes from the push-your-luck aspect. Sorry to all the others that hate dice, but I really do think this game would be ruined without them.

I was thinking of having multiple d6 dice with custom faces, but those faces are numbered. So there would be red/yellow/green, but red rolls 1-6, yellow rolls 3-8 and green rolls 5-10. How this would work into the game is that there's an "trick deck" and each round a trick is drawn which determines the trick all of the players are performing. A trick starts off with a difficulty that needs to be met, and a number/colour of dice to be rolled. The players can then use their cards to give themselves more dice or less dice, make the trick harder or easier. Blindfold/Flips/Stunts for making the difficulty higher, and bike upgrades/trick modifiers to make the difficulty lower and gain dice. What would make it interesting is say combining a blindfold with a turbo booster. You get +1 red dice, but you need an extra +5 to win, for example. ;)

Now once the player has played all the cards, they roll their dice and try and beat the difficulty. If they win, they get their dice result, plus the difficulty, plus a bonus from any cards they played. This means the higher the difficulty, the more points, but also if they lost dice they get points for that too. Then the player with the most points wins that rounds and gets +1 score.

Also if the player fails to roll high enough to beat the score, then they wipe out, and the trick card determines what happens when they wipe out. They might miss a turn from being in hospital, or lose all of their cards because their bike got wrecked.

I REALLY like the core idea of the game, it sounds like it could be a lot of fun. :D

I think the concept sounds more and more tight. I was thinking about the custom dice. The most thrilling dice rolling I've done is playing Elder Sign. The take away a die and reroll to fulfill the needed dice is intense.

So if each stunt card has one or two custom dice symbols on it, then you have to match those to succeed. Some stunts might require distance, others finesse or whatnot. There could be a

You could have the option of sacrificing a meeple to get a reroll without removing a die. Or maybe a use a meeply to add a die. That gives you leverage at a cost for future stunts. Conceptually... like Evel Kneivel... will jump the grand canyon.. Yay... using a rocket.. Boo... he made it... Yay... but look there is a parachute... Boo...

If in a round you deplete your hand and everyone has a chance to do a stunt, then you could have some stunts face up on the board and each person adds a face-up stunt to their hand before they perform. That gives extra stakes to winning the first bid.