I'm trying to design a game but am having some difficulties. My basic idea is an unstable 3rd world country. There is two sides one side that is trying to join together all the cities and establish a government and the guerilla side thats goal is to destroy roads and cities and prevent the countries unity. I started out simple with hexes, three terrain types, as city, flat, and mountain. Mountain which you can't travel through. So far I'm only using one type of military unit like in Risk. And resource caravans to build roads and supply cities. Ideally I want to re-amp the game once it's finished to incorporate factories, research, and many different types of units with different speeds and abilities more like axis and allies. I just can't get the basics made up. After I have a core design to work with I'll be able to easily mold and shift the game. So if anyone has any ideas or tips for building this game up please let me know.
3rd World Revolt Board Game
Heya TheCM
Well first of all, I would tell you to be careful about your game theme. Because this kind of conflict is in current news and people are dying quite regularly from similar kind of rifts, some people might take it in very bad taste. Althought the mechanical-game system sounds like it could be fun, I would urge you to carefully consider at least making it a real world country environment.
Perhaps a good idea would be to change the theme to aliens / robots / fantasy / futuristic: so for example an "Avatar" like world, with high tech invaders and indigenious local alien tribes. Or like in Terminator "Industrial Robots" and the remaining few human rogues. Or LOTR style fantasy where orcs have taken over the world and indoctrenate everyone but an elite force are trying to stop them. Or robots/furturistic like Battle Star Galactica (bad robots, good humans) alternatively: blade runner (freedom fighting robots / bad corporate humans) or historical "ally parachute trooper/spies in nazi occupied france)
Ok to game: First of all we need to work out if it goes going to be Red vs. Blue (same units, same order, same posibilities only different colours) such as in Catan etc. or its going to be a team 1 vs team 2 game (each side has vastly different choices / possibilities / powers and are not the same at all) which would be cool but also leads to the "Oh I hate being those guys, let me be these guys this time" kind of arguments.
I like the mechanic that if the Uniter player joins up roads and cities, then he gets some sort of bonus to his play eg: he has already united some cities. And of course as the Destroyer takes down his roads and joinings then the destroyer gets more powerful as it is easily to wage warefare on split sectors.
It might be cool for it to be a quest oriented race. Eg each campaign having a sigle quest card "Destroyer wins if he Captures the mountain fortress in cell D7 and does not let more than 4 cities connect within 8 turns" and again: "Uniter wins if he has an in-tact city with a rating of 4 or more after turn 10" and "Uniter must have a defence army of at least 10 units, in this game: destroyer may not use weapon-factories" similar I suppose to objectives in some of the Games Workshop games: but in a nice hex format. This would probably give the game quite a lot of movement in that sense: you could have a "smaller" game , a "longer" game, a more "fast paced and aggresive" game and could suit each campaign to the players motivations - making the replayability quite high. It would be a very big and broad game, if done well, it would be awesome. Again, you could do a C&C/Red Alert style "Tanya the super unit" game mode in where the Destroyer would have a very limited number of units, but they would have mega powers (Perhaps a - jump anywhere around the board / always rolls 6's / able to complete 2 actions in one go - kind of deal)
Hope this is the kind of feedback you were looking for :o)
Cog
