I'm looking for feedback on the theme, possible mechanic ideas and how they fit together. Also if there is anything I should look at to draw inspiration from do toss it my way. Please be brutally honest:)
Overview-
.Monaco Grand Prix, 1929
.Sabotage cars before race
.Place traps during race
.Be the first to finish
Premise / Theme-
It's 1929, Antony Noghès, a wealthy manufacturer, has the idea of a new race, a race where man meets machine in a duel of courage and skill. Welcome to the Monaco Grand Prix! He offers 100,000 Francs to the winner of this event and many flock to take up the offer. However, though many teams are prepared to win fair and square, others are slightly more creative when it comes to following the rules of the road.
The idea-
The basic idea is that there are two stages of play, sabotage and the race. The aim is to win the race while sabotaging the other teams so they lose, but the problem is they'll be trying to do the same. Each player will have a specific car depending on their character, William Grover-Williams will have the Bugatti 35B for example. These cars will have components (represented by cards) and special abilities, all of which can be sabotaged.
Sabotage-
There will be various ways to sabotage. In the sabotage stage of play, teams can replace components of the other team's car with faulty ones, causing difficulties when driving. This mechanic could play somewhat similar to Masquerade, with a scrap heap full of broken engine pieces able to swap with.
Another possibility is that players move their pieces with a simple roll of a dice and must move around the race track collecting faulty pieces to place in the oppositions car, but they must get back before the start of the race or they'll be left behind!
You must also collect, buy or steal items such as traps, these will be needed for the race in order to screw with the other teams while they're racing.
Race-
When the race begins players will move around the track, but be careful of traps placed by other teams such as oil spills, wrong turns or thumb tacks across the road as these will slow you down and maybe require you to hop out the drivers seat and slip into some mechanics overalls.
All those ideas sound excellent, I'd not thought of bribing teams but it seems like a must-do now! I also think that lasting over multiple rounds is certainly a good idea, I never like it in games where there is just one round and if you don't start off well you're bound to lose, so the idea of being able to claw it back is nice. I especially like the "cause at least 5 accidents in a race" challenge, that should get people all worked up haha.
I don't want it to be too heavy, easy to learn but with lots of variation in what you can choose to do (sabotage-wise). I like the idea of a Wacky-Races type thing where there are just crashes and calamities going on all the time and just utter chaos.
The art style will also be extremely important, I was thinking of having it like the old classic Monaco Grand Prix Poster, like this sort of thing: http://bit.ly/1L815xf