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Variations on a Puerto Rico style action taking system?

3 replies [Last post]
Sat, 05/31/2014 - 16:08
Thomas Claughton
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Hi all. I wonder if anyone has any thoughts about variations on the system Puerto Rico has for selecting the actions taken on a player's turn?

I'm devising a game on the theme of breeding dragons for their eggs. Players can choose to do the following on their turn:

Breed Dragons
Batch Eggs in dozens
Send Eggs to the Incubator
Hatch Eggs
Buy Dragon Hutches
Buy/Sell Eggs and Dragons in the Market
Trade Eggs/Dragons with other Players
Redistribute Dragons in their Hutches to breed new Combinations of Dragon Pairs

etc.

I've played the game a couple of times using the model given in Puerto Rico, where each player in turn decides what action will be taken, and so on until all the players have selected an action that round. But I wanted to move on from that model as it seemed too similar to Puerto Rico and I didn't want to ape it completely!

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thomas

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Sun, 06/15/2014 - 20:29
#1
Gamesaint
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Joined: 05/28/2014
Honestly, you shouldn't be in

Honestly, you shouldn't be in too much of a rush to distance yourself from Puerto Rico. Many of these games play in a very similar fashion with their own twist. If you play a few games of Puerto Rico, Lords of Waterdeep, Stone Age, and Agricola, you will see a very similar play style, but each is heavily influenced by it's central theme. The key is to be certain that your game has enough thematic elements that it's not simply a reskinned Puerto Rico. Once you've got that locked down, the worker-task model has worked for many games in the past, and can work for yours.

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Mon, 06/16/2014 - 19:51
#2
Heraclitus
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Joined: 09/10/2013
Lords of Waterdeep

This may be old news to you, but I just learned Lords of Waterdeep last week and found that it made a nice twist on Puerto Rico's role selection. Basically, the range/number of available roles changes over the course of the game, as does the number of choices each player gets per round. One of the choices (building) affects which new choices will be available in the future; when it's chosen, the player who built it gets a bonus.

Maybe something like that would fit your theme. It looks like you have plenty of possible actions to chose from, so it would make sense that players could earn additional choices as the game goes on. Maybe a mature dragon earns you an additional choice in each round?

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Wed, 06/18/2014 - 16:27
#3
Thomas Claughton
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Joined: 05/31/2014
Just wanted to thank both of

Just wanted to thank both of you for your reply.

Since I posted, I have done a bit of work on the game. I've started a new thread in the New Game Ideas forum in which I have outlined where I'm up to so far.

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