Hi All! I had an idea for a game mechanic that there is no chance I'll touch for over a year but thought it might make for some good discussion. I was thinking of possible innovative ideas in boardgaming or variations of familiar mechanisms and I thought of competitive tech trees. Now I have only played maybe 100 or so games so I would be shocked if this idea hasn't already been explored already but I haven't seen it anywhere. have seen tech trees quite a bit, but what about competitive tech trees? What I mean is techs that build off other techs but can only be had by one player. What I envisioned for this was maybe 8 base abilities that players can pick to start on Each ability that techs out to two more abilities now these abilities happen to be side by side to the techs of other players. And the techs that come after this are likewise side by side. Players can move up OR over on the tech tree as they pay the resources necessary to do this. This adds not only a wide variety of possible techs, but also meaningful interaction even on the tech tree level as you can cut people off in certain areas, and deny certain abilities as only one player can own each tech.
I'm not sure if that block of text made sense so I'll try to show what it might look like below:
Base Starting Abilities:
Movement +1
Buy +1
2nd level:
Movement +1 trees out to Movement +2 AND gain 1 wood resource
Buy +1 trees out to Buy +2 and gain 1 meeple
gain 1 meeple and 1 wood resource are side by side
movement +2
gain 1 wood
gain 1 meeple
buy +2
3rd level:
movement +2 trees out to movement +3 AND gain any resource of choice
gain 1 wood trees out to movement +3 AND gain any resource of choice AND gain 2 meeples
gain 1 meeple trees out to gain any resource of choice AND gain 2 meeples AND Buy +3
buy +2 trees out to gain 2 meeples AND Buy +3 AND Gain 2 VPs
Movement +3
Gain Any Resource
Gain 2 meeples
Buy +3
Gain 2 VPs
The idea would be that as you move up in any one area you would simply upgrade your ability, but if you move over to a new ability you still get the highest wrung that you reach in the previous one(eg. so if you went up to +2 movement and then over to gain resource of your choice, you would still have the +2 movement as well as gain resource of choice ability. If you moved over to +3 movement you would only have the extra 3 movements alongside gaining a resource of your choice, NOT 5 movements).
Has something like this been done before? If so, which games? Besides that what do you all think of this idea?
Looking forward to seeing your thoughts!
Interesting thoughts all! Like I said I have no plans to work on this for a long while but I was curious not to see anything like it to date. It is different from a simple tech deck as you can see what your opponents possible techs will be in the future which you can plan for somewhat.
To keep from the fast cut off as mentioned above, your techs don't share neigbors until the 2nd rung(ie. your first two tech upgrade possiblity noone has direct access to as a first build).
To keep everything equal I think this would probably work best as a tech circle so everyone has the same amount of options and access to all kinds of different abilities.
Yeah, balancing will be super tough and harder yet will be presenting the tech tree circle and other game mechanisms in such a way that a player can actually plan and make choices on the information(tech trees are hard enough to take in, let alone be competitive). I wonder if I could make a win condition be getting a certain number of techs, or to a certain level of tech to help focus the game on it a bit more? Definately lots of different ways you can go with an idea like this one, just not sure if is truly workable in a fun way.