I've got a mechanics idea and I'm looking for comments and a matching theme.
In some games, you obtain an advantage for being the best w.r.t. to some criterion of the game. For example, in Settlers of Catan you get 2 VPs for having the longest road. Whenever another player gets better w.r.t. to this criterion, they take the advantage over.
While obtaining such an advantage is just an additional bonus in many games, I'd like to make it to the core of a game. In order for this to work, there must be multiple such advantages and obtaining any of them must require supremacy w.r.t. to several criteria at once. Taking it over requires getting better than the current owner in all of the criteria at the same time.
Currently, I'm thinking of using maybe 5 different advantages, each of the requiring supremacy w.r.t. to maybe 3 criteria, which sums to 15 criteria altogether. This is quite a lot, so I'm not gonna use things like "longest road", but some more abstract things. Let's denote the advantages by A1, A2, etc., let's denote the criteria for A1 by A1-C1, A1-C2,. etc. Let A1-C2-3 denote a "thing" giving you level 3 in criterion 2 for advantage 1. There'll be many such things scattered across the map waiting to be explored and/or conquered. Being best w.r.t. to the criterion A1-C2 means simply controlling the A1-C2 thing with the highest level.
- Is there a game using something like this?
- Does anybody have an idea what theme could match it? (Actually, I can imagine a matching theme, but I'm not very happy with it. I'll post it here later, so I don't influence your ideas.)
a political game: you need votes from different groups of people (or creatures) to win different seats in a Senate / Galactic Board / King Arthur's round table
a cooking game: you need the best ingredients to cook your meal (or prepare your cocktails) and win stars for your restaurant / bar.
I'm a fan of more classical theme (fighting, fantasy, medieval, ...), so the cooking game doesn't fit my taste, but I like the political theme.
Neither I think, I have it.
Not exactly my cup of tee, but sounds interesting.
Yes, it all interacts with the theme. My original idea was to keep the things on the map, so they may be re-captured and there may be fights, but I don't insist on it. Collecting the things instead could make the game simpler (which is a good thing as I tend to overcomplicate matters).
The criteria indeed may overlap, I just didn't thought that far.
This leads to probably too many advantages and too few criteria. With only 5 criteria it could be too easy to grab all of them and thus gain all 10 advantages. But this is just a very preliminary thought.
Using such an restriction diminishes the number of advantages, which is good think. Limiting the overlap is a good thing, too.
123 145 246 367 578This lacks a symmetry (7 and 8 both gets used only once), but that's fine. Obviously, there's no symmetrical solution (since the total is 15, i.e. odd). There's a symmetrical solution with 6 advantages:
123 456 789 147 258 369.If the symmetry is a good thing is unclear. Having 6 advantages instead of 5 doesn't matter. My biggest problem with using criteria for multiple advantages is that I've got no idea what theme it may fit.
The theme I'm thinking about now is sort of political: Each advantage is the favor of a god (What exactly it gives you gets obvious in the course of time). There are three criteria per god: Biggest statue, biggest temple, and biggest whatever.
This leads to criteria specific for each advantage (having biggest Zeus' statue doesn't please Poseidon at all). Do you like it? What could the "whatever" be? Any other thoughts?