Howdy all,
In keeping with the advice I'm continually giving to others, I'm going to post here with a board game idea that I've been working on for some time. (Sorry I haven't posted a whole lot recently - it's always hard to focus in the winter). As always, please let me know what you think as well as ideas that it inspires you to share.
Nefarious:
Every player is a mad scientist, vying for world domination through constructing villainous machines, plotting in various regions around the world, and securing your evil empire by collecting Villainy Points (VP).
How do you bring your nefarious plans about? The same as every other evil genius: minions. Faceless mooks are an industry staple, and as any mad scientist will tell you, "We're hiring!". Minions happily flock to your cause with a little persuasion, happily doing whatever they're told.
However, you don't have time to order your mindless servants about - that's why you have henchmen. Despite being a paranoid villain, you have 3 friendly henchmen whom you can direct to do your bidding, and who carry out your orders until they hear otherwise from you. It's their job to boss the minions around, allowing you to carry out your evil schemes.
On your turn, you do the following:
1-Move a minion from any location to anywhere else on the board.
2-Place minions: for each henchman, you may move one minion from your secret base to wherever your henchmen are located (you're not forced to).
3-If a region or machine has the requisite number of minions, place a plot marker on the region, or flip the machine.
X-Leave your henchmen where they are.
Note: you start with a handful of minions, and have a max of 20. you recruit minions to your secret base by leaving your henchmen there to recruit, where they recruit one every round. Everywhere else a henchman goes, he'll bring one minion at the end of each turn.
Minions are often assigned within your secret base to machine cards that you've obtained (see later) or to defend the base from attackers. -- (I'm not sure just yet how to deal with players attacking other players' secret bases, but I don't want it to be an area control game where you can attack/capture others' bases - I want something lighter. Maybe defenders and attackers have a combat every round, and if attackers are able to kill the defenders they can remove one minion from a machine? machines often need minions on them to keep them running at this stage, so that feels OK...)
The central board has several regions (right now, one for each continent). It also has a place for decks - one for machines (which are built in the secret base by placing minions on them via henchmen), and one for some form of action cards.
I'll go over how the world regions and cards work:
- Regions: henchmen allow you to place minions onto a region, and when you get enough to "capture" the region, you place a plot marker on the region. At that point, you can move your minions out and keep the plot marker there. Some regions are required for certain machines in your base, or for action cards.
- Decks: Place henchmen here to place minions. As long as you have a henchman on the deck in question, you can draw a number of cards equal to the number of minions there, keeping one, and putting the rest on the bottom.
- Combat: If multiple people place a henchman on the same place (region or deck), there's a quick combat at the end of the round (roll a number of d6 for each henchman on the region, hitting on a 5-6), and henchmen that are lost return to your secret base (but minions stay put).
Where I'm at: I've developed a set of machines that allow for you to spend minions to perform certain effects, and I'm working right now on an action card set. I expect to be able to hold my first playtest sometime this week. I'll post here when that's complete.
Some thoughts I want to bounce off others:
- Most games give you a bonus for being a particular faction, so maybe each player can represent a different mad scientist with a cool bonus. However, I kind of want to play with this idea and give everyone a different "paranoia", a detriment that they need to work with as part of the game (and that their villains can use against them). Thoughts?
- Game end conditions: should it be a race to X points, or the game ends after a number of rounds? Or is there something I haven't thought of as a way to mark the end of the game?
- I could make the game a cooperative game, where the players are trying to overcome some spy agency or misguided superhero as a team. The mechanics would actually work rather well, though combats/region control would need to be re-examined.
I wasn't aware that someone else beat me to the punch on the theme and name. However, from what I can tell, it's fairly different in its execution, and seeing one game with this theme helps give me confidence that there's a niche for it.
What do others think?