Pick-up and delivery/business style game based on Pizza

There's a reason why the United States is behind the times - not enough $2 bills/coins.

I spent my evening thinking of pizza delivery games at work, rather than my pirate games. Thanks ;)

I was thinking a grid board would work pretty well for the random addresses. It would be simple, and it could be beautified a little with colored zones. You might have a few blocks be the sports district where the stadiums are and such. When the event card "Big Game" gets flipped (in my mind there are some sort of events getting triggered somehow) players can't go through that district, but they sell pizzas for 2 dollars more everywhere else (since the stadium is so crowded, but there's lots of people staying home to watch the game.

Also, pizza orders could be randomized on dice as well. for instance, each starting pizza store gets to roll a d6 with cheese, cheese, cheese, peperoni, peperoni, cheese and peperoni. Roll three dice (two for the address, one for the order type) and bam, there's the order, you can decide whether your shop can fill it. Upgrade to the second level shop and you get to roll and additional die with cheese, peperoni, veggie, supreme, nothing, nothing. Third level shop gets to roll a third die of cheese, veggie, veggie, supreme, supreme, nothing. Those are just sort of examples of how the system might work, but it sounds easy and intuitive. Probably saves the price of a deck of cards as well!

Keeping track of orders, how long they've been waiting, what car has what pizza sounds like it could get a little clunky and fiddly. I guess if there was a vehicle limit (which would make a set number of little plastic cars/ bikes pretty neat) then individual player sheets with "orders in" and then "vehicle one," "vehicle 2," etc might be a pretty easy way to keep track of who's got what.

Keeping track of late deliveries might be a little harder . . . (though it might be neat to have the pizza only make half as much money if late, which would give people the choice to deliver it late or not. If it takes one more turn, sure, make a little money back. If events made you unable to even get out the door, just scrap it.) Maybe places on the players individual boards for the pizzas to go, counting down, and at the beginning of each turn the pizzas/ markers just get slid down one space. An event card like"No Traffic" might even let them slide in the opposite direction, if the game is a little bit abstract with time (which it probably has to be).

So yeah, that's some of what I was thinking about tonight!

:)

I guess the problem I was imaging was the physical ticking down of a few dozen counters for all the players orders somewhere on the table at any given time.

I understand what you're saying.

I am just worried about the point in the game where four players with five pizza shops each delivering two pizzas result in forty little tracks/ stacks of money that have to be sitting somewhere.

Just not sure how big the game might get. I run into this with stuff I've worked on >.<

:)

You could look into splitting up the city into "territories" each player picks 1 territory for his first shop. You only deliver in your territory, the more and faster you deliver increases profit. Actual delivery would be more abstract than what your currently have but would cater more to "pizza town tycoon" idea. You can add more shops in your territory increasing volume and speed of business. Also you could spend even more to branch into other territories. Players would spend money to modify how loyal each territory is to their parlor modified by how many shops they have, delivery vehicles and advertising. Other players would muscle and try to steal your business and customers.

I think you have to either focus on delivery and 1 shop running or expand to a more "tycoon" view if you try to do both you probably end up with a mess.

I had a Pizza Delivery themed game that I always wanted to finish, but never made any headway on past a certain point. Here's a description from my old userpage on the old BGDF site:

Hot and Fresh™
A routeplanning/press-your-luck/pickup-deliver game about delivering pizza and breaking traffic laws. Traffic lights change over time, making the available routes dynamic. Rewards for deliveries (tips) go down over time, so there's pressure to go as fast as possible, but as you break the traffic laws it becomes increasingly likely that you'll get busted by the cops.

And here are all the blog posts I've made about the game in my game design blog. Maybe something in there will be useful to you. The last thing I remember thinking about the game was that the interaction might be too low, and also that the Pizza Delivery thing - with 1 pickup point and multiple dropoff points - might not work as well as, say, a taxi theme, with multiple pickup points.

http://sedjtroll.blogspot.com/search/label/HF

Good luck!

Thematically, if each player has their own pizza place, then they are probably each getting their own deliveries (customers call them and order) - in which case are they simply playing solitaire? 4 players just making deliveries of their own on the same map at the same time? If so, there would have to be some other kind of interaction - maybe a way to slow a player down, or run them off the road (like Circus Maximus or some other racing game).

If they're all getting orders from the same face up draft pool or something (what I was considering), then it doesn't make sense for them to work at different pizza places - it's not like people who want pizza just put their order into a hopper and whichever pizza place takes care of it first gets paid for it... though that might be neat if it worked that way!

This is why I was thinking of switching to taxis instead of pizza delivery - with various pickups popping up all over the place, players would be in direct competition for them.

About 6 months ago I started to try and build my own game with a similar theme except it was one guy ran a Chinese restaurant, one had a pizza parlor etc. I've moved away from it lately and it still sits there taunting me as I think it would be great. Its also the only game I've messed with that my wife was interested in.

My biggest problem in a few play tests was that if you owned two vehicles it took a long time per player to complete their actions and there was a lot of waste in picking up certain customers.

Mine basically went like this:
First you got $100. You could buy one of 8 locations ranging from $20 to $90. You then could buy different cars ranging from $10-50. Closer to the center was better. Then you would flip over customer cards and start to deliver. You would roll and move based on time.

Profits decreased as above. Only 6-8 cards were usually in play per round so it was easy to manage. However it became a game of solitare as you'd only take the ones closest to you.

The taxi idea is actually very good. I started to switch mine to a UPS/Fed Ex delivery game but then it basically was a railroad and deliver game. I wish you the best of luck and I'd gladly playtest sometime.