Hi designers,
I currently am working on a game, that deals with the refugee situation in Europe. Players in turn get to be the head of the EU and distribute dice, that stand for certain types of incoming refugees i.e. couples, kids, young families and funds the EU gives to its members via I-split-you-choose mechanism.
Every player has a certain number of slots for dice in their country and over the course of the game they have to decide how to accomplish certain tasks (that part plays a little like Sagrada, so you have to arrange the dice in a particular way in order to score points). After each round the countries have to have the funds to finance the refugees living there.
In the second phase (the EU parliament phase) people draft cards with certain actions (here I really would love to incorporate a negotiation between players, but I can't figure out a way that doesn't make the game overly complicated) and in a third phase the players can play these cards in order to rearrange dice or get additional slots and so on...
The last phase is the scoring phase. The game ends after 8 rounds (4 years since the head of the EU changes every 6 months)
Phew, it's pretty tough to explain games in a foreign language.
What do you think about my basic idea? I played a few solo games and the core mechanism is fun and thinky, but the other phases lack a bit making meaningful decisions, but I guess that's all a matter of tweaking the cards in the deck. Plus, it's my first game, it's supposed to be god-awful, right?
Thanks for the detailed thoughts!
The more refugees you can accommodate, the more points you get. So sixes are the best but also you have to pay the most for those dice and on top of that you get some goal cards that represent housing tasks, that give you additional VP. For example "have one row consist of only fives". The player with the most VP wins.
So far the president only divides the dice (there are three dice that represent refugees and three dice that represent funds the EU will distribute among the countries that are willing to host refugees per player.) This phase feels quite good so far in my play tests. The splitting and the choosing are both interesting. Might be a bit AP prone though.
The cards represent government actions and are based on plans of the actual member countries. So some are programs pro refugee and some are against them. All cards played have immediate effects on your reputation within the EU (works as a tie-breaker and gives you positive or negative VP at the end of the game).
Some cards:
"negotiate resettlement program with the states of origin" pay development aid to a country and bring the dice back to there.
"Reunite families" put a 1 next to a 2 on another player's board
"shut down borders" you don't draft dice in this round
"Send refugees back referring to asylum treaty"
"Build refugee camp in Syria" pay money to keep some of your dice outside your country...
I thought about the refugee situation and it really felt like the governments are playing a huge game. Nobody knew what to do and so I thought of dice rolling.
I'm not overly in love with it, but so far I couldn't come up with something that fits the mechanism. Your dragon and dwarves example was eye opening for me haha...I'm stupid I guess.
I will say I would love to make a game showing what a complex issue this is, but it is really tough to get it accurate and politically correct if you know what I mean. There's just too many facets to a topic like this. It would be a lot easier with dwarves and dragons.
Tonight I will test it with a few friends of mine. We'll see what they think of the theme.