The game you didn't submit to the GDS (Feb 2011)

Played around with a game where black and white dice were ninjas, and leaped across roofs (represented by tiles, while the spaces between them were alleys) trying to maintain dominance of the cities rooftops. When dice were defeated on a roof top they were kicked into the alley adjacent, and re rolled. They had to move through the alleys and find a partner (an allied die of the same number) to climb back up to the roofs. It was kind of neat, but it didn't work well enough to submit. I might return to it later though.

I also tried out a sword fighting game, but couldn't make it interesting enough. It just got repetitive, with the players' swords men pushing each other back and forth across a deck. I was going to title it "I Am Not Left-handed!"

I only found out about this site a few days before the deadline to the GDS so I only had time to try to get one game ready and rolling, if I had more time to think about it that idea would probably ended up as the one not good enough to enter. Still I like the idea of the bunny game, though I think someway to steal other players dice or to lose dice would make it more interesting. I also agree that the point of the competition was to keep it simple and I tried to avoid voting for any complicated games for that reason.

My first (and best, I think) idea was for an exploration game, possibly called "Dice Temple" (not very catchy, I'm afraid...). Players are exploring a lost temple, and each player has 3 dice (red, green, blue) representing his "stats" with three types of equipment (whip, torch, pistol?); these are rolled at the start of the game. The temple is a 5x5 grid of cards, and each edge of a card is an "exit", with a color and a "threshold" number, representing the traps of the temple. To pass through the exit/trap and onto the next card, you have to exceed the threshold number in that color with the sum of your stat in that category combined with a free roll. (The cards all start face down, so you're exploring the temple as you go).

The rooms themselves contain various effects -- reroll one of your stats, -1 to one of your stats, add an additional die in one color, face a challenge (roll in a dice-off in one category against the game board).

There's also a press-your-luck element, where you basically keep going until you choose to stop or fail a roll; failing a roll sends you back to the entrance in the lower right corner BUT staying put could risk someone else discovering more of the temple before you get a chance to. You get points for facing and passing the temple's challenges, for each turn that you survive in the temple without getting sent back to the entrance, and for finding the hidden exit to escape the temple.

I mocked up a prototype and played it through and it's fun, but I chose not to enter it because (a) the components exceeded the requirements of the challenge, and (b) it's derivative of a game design I've already worked on extensively. I don't know how the game I did enter will do, but the one real advantage of this GDS is that the games are so easy to prototype and play through that I hope to work on one or both of them!