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Holiday Wars: Playing on a calendar

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larienna
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Joined: 07/28/2008

I watched today the anti-christmas clip from Cinemassacre that exposed the fact that christmas was expanding everywhere, you even have decorations before halloween has arrived, and I had some game ideas.

I already wanted to make a game about halloween fighting back to take their revenge on christmas. My first idea was to have some sort of shopping mall where some halloween characters attacked the christmas decorations and take everything down while shopping for new weapons.

But when I watched the video above, I had a flash when they shown a 4 month calendar page and you could see christmas expand. I thought it could be cool to have a game where you fight on a calendar.

The idea would be that each player would play a popular holiday, probably: valentine, easter, christmas and Halloween. The idea is to expand your territory on the calendar and capture more territories including minor holidays.

My idea would be to be able to play on a real calendar. You could play the game like some sort of chess game where each holiday has special units of their own with special powers. I thought first of using a linear calendar, but the problem, it makes some holidays unaccessible. For example, Easter can hardly attack christmas, it needs to pass through haloween or valentine.

So I thought that Maybe I could use a 4x3 calendar where you can warp on the edges if the month follow each other. The initial placement is perfect because each holiday is 2 month away from each other in all directions if the months are ordered from left to right.

What do you think?

What kind of game would you like to play on a calendar, a chess like, war like, snakes and ladder like game?

Blazingwolves
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Joined: 12/24/2011
Great idea!

That is an AWESOME idea! Each holiday would have specific characters/units available to them, along with a "boss" type character. The actual holiday on the calendar could be their main base, along with the surrounding dates their base. The object could be to control all the holidays! I love this idea! Christmas also might have allies, such as Hannukah, etc. Snowmen can freeze units for X amount of turns, etc. Great idea!

Blazingwolves
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Joined: 12/24/2011
Just made a map

Just made a map:
January: The New Year Faction (NYF)/New year
February: The Heart Breakers/Valentines
March:Irish Pub Club/St. Patrick's day
April:Egg Bombers/Easter
May:Mothers Crack Down (MCD)/Mother's day
June:Fathers Fight Back (FFB)/Father's day
July:Rebels/4th of July
August: Whatever you want, as it has no group/holiday
September:Work Force United (WFU)/Labor Day
October: Undead/Halloween
November:Turkey Nation/Thanksgiving
December:Elf Squadron/Christmas

Map is a 4x3; [January ][February][March ][April ]
[May ][June ][July ][August]
[September][October ][November][December

I'll work on units. Great idea!

larienna
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Joined: 07/28/2008
The idea of playing on a

The idea of playing on a calendar is actually very print and play friendly. You could actually tear up a real calendar and use it as a board.

Blazingwolves
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Joined: 12/24/2011
Yah

Now that I have the board, I can easily mass produce it. Very print friendly indeed. Now we just need to figure out the units/rules.

deFunkt29
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Joined: 01/04/2011
The idea of tearing up a real

The idea of tearing up a real calendar I really cool and original, and if the rules were simple enough it would give it a really simple, pick up and play vibe. The only problem I can think of is that that is a huge amount of spaces to keep track of in a game. Perhaps each month should just be it's own territory, or be split into chunks? Though maybe you have already thought of a solution to this!

kos
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Joined: 01/17/2011
Real calendars would be cool

I second the idea that playing on a real calendar would be cool.

For a start, any "manufactured" game board is going to be country-specific. Several of the example calendar events proposed earlier are non-events outside USA, and the list omits many of the largest holidays/celebrations in the world (in terms of the number of people who observe those events). Eid ul-Fitr, Diwali, Chinese New Year...

In contrast, if you came up with a fast, fun set of rules that can be played by anyone on their local calendar, it would have much greater appeal. If the game is to have unique units or holidays with special abilities, the focus of the game design would be to come up with a set of unique powers which can be selected/distributed in any way (such as in Cosmic Encounter) rather than allocate set powers to particular holidays.

As an aside, for those in countries where Christmas involves spending time with family and eating too much food, it would be fun to cut up old calendars (which you don't need any more because it is the end of the year) and give you something fun to do rather than listen to Uncle Jack's bad jokes again. You could also give bonuses to players on dates surrounding their birthday to make each game unique to the set of players.

Regards,
kos

larienna
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Joined: 07/28/2008
Of course, aiming for

Of course, aiming for something more generic that can even include people birth day could be interesting. But it weakens a bit the theme of the game since you must be generic enough to include any type of holiday. In that case, it would be more a game were people would design their own pieces but where you can supply a series of predefined forces for the popular holidays.

I also thought of using only 1 space per month instead of all the months of the year. But I can still find in cool to play on separate day spaces. Unfortunately, it does take more place.

Else, the only other way to play on a calendar would be like pay day. You roll and move on the months and wrap around at the end of the year. I was thinking that it might be possible to make some sort of roll and move war game. Your troops needs to be spawned on home/conquered holidays and when you fall on enemy squares you attack them. Still maybe 365 days for a game like that would be just too much.

Else, the board could be separated as 52 weeks. This seems much more reasonable for a good amount of space.

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