Hi Everyone,
Thanks for taking the time to help a fellow game designer. My friend and I have been working on a barbarian war game for quite some time and we're trying to add a market mechanic where players will sell loot they've captured in their conquests. What happens is after completing a mission they draw loot card(s) based on the difficulty level of the mission, the number and value of the loot cards going up with the difficulty. In keeping with the theme, a player might draw 2 loot cards for completing a medium level mission. For example, they happen to draw a card with royal jewelry and another card with a chest of jade amulets. The part we need help with is designing a market mechanic where the players would then sell those loot cards. The money they earn would be used in a separate phase to buy bonuses for their armies.
The way we see the market phase is possibly the way the govenor or a build phase works in Puerto Rico, where all the players would participate in order. Also, the board is divided up into two separate spheres, East and West. Selling loot acquired in the eastern sphere of the board would then yield eastern coins, and selling western loot would yield western coin.
Players would then take the coins they made in the market phase and purchase enhancements they can use for their armies in a different phase.
That being said, we're having trouble coming up with an interesting market mechanic where players can use strategy and maybe gain some advantages by the choices they make.
That's a tall order to fill, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Thanks again!!!!
my apologies Gizensha and Iceman, let me explain the general framework of the game better. It's a Risk-style war game, 4-5 players. Set in 13th century Europe and Asia. Complete missions, which are randomly selected, by conquoring parts of the map. Basically, there are West Missions (Europe) and East Missions (Asia). That's why I was dividing up the treasure into two separate types. Completing missions earns treasure and victory points. There is a single combat unit, essentially the barbarian horde/ pawn if you will. Combat resolution is by dice, which is also somewhat like Risk.
I was thinking to make the game more interesting a player could sell the treasure to earn money to buy upgrades for armies. These upgrades would give bonuses to movement, attack, defense, etc. Also, I was thinking this is an opportunity for players to have a long term strategy and have more choices (something my playtestester have asked for across the board). They can build up their armies to suit their strategy.
In terms of completing missions and acquiring the treasure, the game is purely opportunistic. In half the cases, you don't know where the next mission will pop up on the map. Playtesting has shown that players usually just go after whatever mission is easiest/ nearest their armies. Perhaps this would change if different missions offered different types of treasure/ different levels of value.
To answer your question Iceman, yes, players can steal the treasure from one another because it is placed on the board as a movable piece that can be captured if another army takes over that space. No trading of treasure so far. The game is more or less a battlefield.
So with the map set up as it is, players are not able to travel to another part of the map to sell treasure for a higher profit since the whole map is consumed by rampaging barbarians (the players), although that sounds like an interesting concept. The "in demand" "cards do sound like they could fit into the framework that is already there.
I am intrigued by the idea of having categories of treasure (spices, jade, etc), having a collecting element where a player might want to trade or try to complete collections, and then also having a market with prices on a sliding scale. It would really add another level of interaction. I just wonder how the categories could be introduced into the existing framework. The problem is that players complete predetermined missions that are, for the most part, randomly drawn. A player will not complete more than 4 or 5 missions in the whole game. A player usually completes a mission every other turn, but usually not every turn.
In order to incorporate the categories of treasure and collecting, should each mission have a predetermined treasure as its reward or should a player be able to choose or have a limited number of choices on what type of treasure he wins after he completes a mission?
I hope this gives you a better understanding of what limitations and possibilities I'm working with. Sorry I wasn't able to explain it better the first time.