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Feng Shui Moving Company

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Wed, 03/13/2013 - 23:17
ninjaneer
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An idea for a board game I came up with earlier today while sitting in a meeting I should have been paying attention in:

Feng Shui Moving Company, for 2-4 players

Players are the workers of the Feng Shui Moving Company, which not only helps you move into your new home, but helps maximize spiritual harmony. The game consists of a large grid-based House Board (ideally several you can select from) divided into rooms and Furniture Tiles.

Players take turns either taking new Furniture tiles into their hand or placing them on the grid inside rooms. There would also be Harmony cards that describe specific furniture configurations that, when met, earn the player some points and possibly an extra bonus (maybe rearranging furniture already placed in a room, or removing a piece entirely). Some Harmony cards will have simple requirements such as "place a table next to a window" or "place a yellow object facing east" that are easy to complete but are worth few points. More complex configurations would reward more points and stronger bonuses.

The game would end when either all furniture tiles are placed, no more furniture tiles can be placed, or there are no more Harmony cards (assuming there are few enough that you could run out during a game, though I think there would probably be a very large deck). Players add up the points they've earned, subtract some for any furniture tiles they have remaining, and whoever has the most wins.

There could also be a single-player mode where the player just tries to rack up the highest possible score they can, maybe in a limited number of moves (i.e. furniture placements)

Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

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Thu, 03/14/2013 - 11:18
#1
ninjaneer
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Some more ideas

Some more ideas I've had last night/this morning:

  • Placing furniture next to other furniture of the same color lets the player take another turn
  • House boards have specific rules on what configurations are pemissible
  • House boards have special "always available" Harmony goals
    • This would require Harmony point tokens, as opposed to my earlier thoughts where a player takes a Harmony card itself to track points.
  • Players can discard a furniture tile if they think they will never be able to place it
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Thu, 03/14/2013 - 12:44
#2
JustActCasual
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Unpack the luggage, la la la,

It would be interesting if rather than hands you had trucks which you would load in one direction and then unload in the other (think like tetris and then sliding everything back out/up). This essentially divides the game into 2 phases: the loading phase, where you are trying to load the best furniture in the right (reverse) order to fulfill your strategy at the other end; and the unloading phase, where you would be trying to unload furniture into the new house board to fulfill the scoring requirements. You could make the sliding-only movement apply to the house board(s) as well to add another component - you might have to grab some subpar items to be able to get the things you really want.

Actually, I might develop this into a pentomino-y game of my own...

EDIT: If you do sliding-only into the house you might want to include an empty zone or scoring penalty so someone doesn't just drop a piano in front of the front door to stop everyone else from scoring.

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Thu, 03/14/2013 - 21:27
#3
munio
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i expect most of the audience

i expect most of the audience to have no clue when it comes to feng shui, keep this in mind when designing and naming some aspects of the game

perhaps there is a way in which can mess up, each other's harmony by blocking other players.

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Thu, 03/14/2013 - 22:11
#4
ninjaneer
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Good ideas

@JAC, I like the truck idea, though I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. Placing furniture effectively in the unload phase would rely on knowing the layout of the House and the Harmony cards ahead of time, and forcing them to plan out their entire strategy in the load phase would be tough. If there are many furniture pieces, there would be too much strategy to think about, but having fewer pieces would reduce the number of scoring opportunities. I could still use a load phase, but it would only define what furniture you have available in the unload phase, but still let players unload in any order.

@munio, I didn't actually plan to have much actual feng shui in the game, it was more for theme. I planned that players could block each other by placing furniture in disadvantageous places. The Harmony cards describe the configurations needed to score points, so if player A sees that player B is going for one of them, A could place something that prevents it. Now that I think about it, this would make the loading phase JAC mentioned work pretty well. Players would see what furniture everyone else has taken into their trucks, and be able to plan accordingly.

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