Crazy Idea: "Build your own space opera" board game

To the first question: absolutely.

I immediately started thinking about computer games which often try to be all things to all players, and compensate by making everything from diplomacy, to construction, to tactical combat on autopilot.

There is no autopilot in tabletop, but you can relegate unwanted (by the particular players at a session) aspects to base currency. Say, for example, you don't want to deal with scientific or artistic accomplishments. Fine, every card with a science accomplishment has text you ignore(with regards to your final question) , and a low number of, say, "groats", a universal currency.

So for every card or token dependent on science or art or anything specific, you simply have minimum groat conversion. If you still want progression in an "everything else" category, don't think specific trees for the various aspects, think about one groat ladder.

This should help you maintain balance during design, and spare the players the discomfort of looking at a pile of unused components.

Not every combination, but I would say test every module in every position. Assuming the setup I suggested, it would mean testing each “plane of competition” as:

Red (complex rules)
Blue (complex rules)
Blue (moderate rules)
Yellow (complex rules)
Yellow (moderate rules)
Gray (complex rules)
Gray (moderate rules)
No color (simple rules)

Since each game has one Red, one Blue, one Yellow, one Gray, and two No Color, it’s possible to kill a bunch of birds with each stone. Still makes for a lot of tests, and each time a particular option comes up it should be in a different combination than the other times it was tested.

I'm glad someone else mentioned 504 before I did. I find it fascinating, and I'm grateful I purchased it. At the same time, no typical gaming group is interested in "figuring it out," and instead I press it to my fellow game designers as an exercise in learning, not a game.

I often think of that game as one specifically-intended for designers and tinkers, as opposed to the game-playing public. Setup of a given permutation of the mechanics seems so arcade and obtuse at times, I can't imagine a typical gaming group working their way through more than a couple versions unless they were doing so primarily to study the interaction of mechanics, rather than enjoying game night.

I do remember the GURPS role-playing system from my pre-teen and teen years. They had a general rules book that dealt with the foundations of their game system, then kept it alive (as in, commercially-viable) by releasing sourcebooks and campaign handbooks for different milieus, with games as diverse as superheroes, TMNT, and even Conan the Barbarian (which had a flavor distinct and discrete from GURPS Fantasy).

It was entirely possible to pick-and-choose the sourcebooks you wanted to add to the original GURPS, but you could also play the game completely independent of any or all of the sourcebooks/expansions.

504 has game mechanics that may or may not exist at all in a particular run. The proposed game would always have the same (six?) means of competing, just with different priorities.

A typical RPG will have detailed rules for a bunch of things, and some subset would just get ignored by certain groups. I’m thinking of encumbrance in old versions of AD&D, or Resistance Rolls for non-attack spells in Rolemaster. This game would let players formally downplay the parts of space opera they find tedious.