So my daughter and a few of her friends like to play Warrior Dice, a free game from Warpspawn games. You can find the game at http://www.angelfire.com/games2/warpspawn/WD.html.
As you can see the game is little more than a simple dice fest. My daughter and her friends like it because they can create their own characters and duke it out relatively quickly. As she's getting older though, she's become more interested in games with a bit more meat behind them. We've played Catan, Wasabi and Citadels and a few others and she's had a good time. Her friends are less interested in these sorts of games, but they still want to play Warrior Dice. This prompted my daughter to ask me about adding some features to the game so she can play something a little more substantial while still holding her friend's attention.
Specifically, she's looking for a way to make the game multiplayer, to have larger groups of characters battle and for an alternate victory condition than just "kill the other guy".
Looking at the game I can see a few problems here. First, the combat as it stands now can be a little time consuming as each character trades blows back and forth. If we make the battles multi-character, and the game multiplayer, then there's a real risk of severe downtime for the players not involved in a battle. That would be an instant fail for the target audience here.
I've got a few ideas, but I need some assistance in trying to flesh them out. I'm going to be vague because I'm looking for some fresh ideas, but I also want to focus those ideas towards a certain end.
I basically envision having a deck of "mission cards" that the characters can fight over. These mission cards would generally give Victory points to the side that "wins" them, but might also give some special bonuses during gameplay (bonus dice in combat, recruit more characters, etc). The first player to a certain number of Victory points is the winner.
A certain number of missions will be available each turn, and the players will secretly allocate characters towards the various missions.
I'm thinking that the players will get a certain number of dice to roll (how and how many to be determined), roll them, and allocate teh to the various characters. Then the actions are resolved one at a time (in what order to be determined) and damage is dealt. This may or may not need to be repeated a time ot two to fully resolve, though I don't want resolution to take too long. Then again, if all the players are engaged then perhaps taking a bit of time to resolve a conflict isn't necessarily bad.
Anybody have any ideas to add to the mix? I'm really hoping that ic an pull this off and solidify my daughter's interest in gaming and possibly pull a few more into the fold with her. Any help would be appreciated.
__________________
It's basically just a simple combat game using dice and a character card. There is kind of an rpg element involved as you design your character and come up with the names for his/her moves but the resemblence stops there. It certainly could have some roleplaying elements added easily enough, though I doubt it's deep enough to sustain anything but short term play.
There's also a variant called Mecha Dice ( http://www.geocities.com/shaungamer88/mdice.html ) that has some slightly more advanced rules and some pretty cool custom paper dice to represent the giant robots. This one doesn't catch my kid's imagination as much as Warrior Dice, but it's still pretty neat.