Hello
A friend and I ahve started thinking about a empire building game set in europe spanning from 1400 to 1800 and I would love som feedback to our early ideas about the game.
Basics of the game:
The game takes between 2-5 players.
It is cooperative, to an exten, each player have one secret goal giving them extra points at the end of the game.
Core ideas is cooperative gameplay, to a limit, think shadows over camelot feeling. Resource managment and AI driven competing empires that you collectively have to deal with.
the game is centered on swedens history since that is the countries history we have most knowledge about, other countries personalities and events are going to be included aswell.
Start of the game:
The map is divided into different regions outlining the countries, each region produce one of three resources; argiculture, industry or welfare. A region can produce one or all three of the resources.
The players takes on the role of a nobel house in sweden owning 1 starting region in the larger country that belongs to the king.
The starting region produce resources for the noble house itself, the regions beloning to the king produce collective resources that the players at the end of the round have to discuss how to spend but more on that later.
After the starting regions are handed out to the players they are also given an secret agenda that they have to fulfill, these are not set yet but some of the ideas are: Power to the king - 10 points if the king owns the most regions at the end of the game. Noble power - 10 points if the nobles own more regions than the king at the end of the game and so on.
As aprt of the inital setup you also place 3 charater cards displaying famous charaters from the timeperiod. These characters give bonuses to the different resources: +1 to industry. +1 to welfare. +1 to agriculture and some special characters that give a +1 bonus to the countries collective army.
alongside these charater cards you also place event cards, you place 1 more than there are players, so in a 3 player game you place 4 cards and so on. Some of these events tie in to the avaliable secret agendas and some of them are outrigh bad. For example, sudden influx in power, the empire expand with three regions or The black death strikes - the empires collective welfare looses x amount.
As a final part of the setup you also place the development three, a chart showing how much the next development in the different areas cost, The areas are Agriculture, Industry, Welfare which all strngthens the production of these resources within a region. Then it is Empire expansion where you spend resources to buy a new region to the empire and finaly Army where you spend the collective resources to buy extra soldiers.
How does a turn work:
At the start of the turn you replace the charater cards and event cards if any have been bought the previous turn. The first player then look at the charater cards and either buy on to his own house or one to the empire. After all players have decided wheter or not they want to enlist any of the available charaters the players decide which event cards they want to buy, bought events card will -not- take place, so if you don't want the pest to strike you have to buy the card. there is one more event card than players so something will always happen.
After this you can spend resources to develope your regions.
To end the turn you move the turn number forward one place, it moves in 20 years intervalls and when you reach the year 1800 the game ends and the player that have best fulfilled its secret agenda wins the game.
How does warfare work?:
If an event card with for example "War against France" is -not- bought away the empire goes into war with france, You then compare the total army count for each empire, for example Sweden 15 France 10, sweden would then after the war keep 5 soldiers and takes control over one of france border regions adjacent to, or at least in the direction of your own empire.
How do i get a new region to my nobel house?:
The regions first have to be bhought to the empire proper, after that the players kan give money to the king, which then become collective property to buy one of the empires regions as their own. A region in the empires control can only be developed to a certain level giving an incentive to the players to purchase regions from the king giving more collective resources that can be spent by other players to fulfill their secret agendas.
Kinks to work on:
The biggest thing to sort out is how the resources are generated and how much the development costs for the regions should cost.
These reambeling notes reflect where I am in the idea stadium and I would greatly appreciate any input.
Regards
Jens Thenström
