A Racing Adventure Game

What is your target consumer with the game?

What do the animals do?

It sounds to me like what you have designed is a kids game. I have (and played) a simular game when I was a kid. You build your own eacetrack with puzzelpices. And it was a simple roll and move. The difrent tiles had difrent abilys on them, 5 difrent I think. The am was first to finnish with the mosh honney jars. I atleast think you collect honney jars.

I think you should skipp the whole "your animal have to eat" part. Just make the animals collect somthing or make it a simple race. That way you can get the agegroupe down. Maby 5-6 years old. Pluss every one loves to collect things.

Maby have difrent animals collect difrent things?

If it is a kids game the he should keep the dice, that is my opinion. Easy and simple for the kids. Maby shorten the track instead, use onley 50 of the 100 tiles? That wau you increas the replayability aswell.

Since you plan to appeal to kids and since you want to make this a boardgame with physical components, you're dealing with an audience that is pretty young. By the time that kids reach the age of 8 or 10 they will likely be playing digital games on the DS, smartphone or console unless those media are not available.

Before the proliferation of mobile devices, you could count on boardgames for family get aways and vacations. But, now the kids will really need an intervening force to get them to try something that isn't digital. School is one of them. Parents are another. So... you will either want to target a younger age (between 5 and 8) or you will need to add choices which will at least interest adults so that your game can be played as a family game.

But, adding choices which scale well to the age of the player is always the hardest challenge about a family game. They need to be simple to understand but allow for a greater degree of complexity to emerge. If it is solely designed for a young child audience, you can rely pretty heavily on chance... but you'll also want them to be presented with a few choices they can understand. Like what direction (from multiple choices) to move in. What objects (from multiple choices) to collect. All which tie into the goal of the game in a very simple and straightforward way.

There may also be elements of 'sharing' that kids have to do in order to get what they want. Or, at the very far extreme of abstraction, needing to 'give back' objects so that they can get more later. Since kids games are really just lessons guised as games, things like delayed gratification, sharing and good sportsmanship are really the goals of young kids games and the set of choices that are presented to them have align with these goals/lessons.

This could itself be the topic of a GDS showdown: Write a set of rules for an ancient set of game objects for whom the rules have been lost.

I was one of those visitors without comments. At the time, I did not have the time to leave a message... but I did want to commend you on the illustrations. They look really fun and align with the theme well.

After reading the introduction to the game, I understand a little more clearly how you plan to implement the race, and why the track is necessary. The story is clearly an important part of the design and probably will make the game compelling to the age group that you hope to attract.

However, the game is very long for that age group. I think that something that takes between 25 and 35mins would be much more appropriate. In addition, the game does not appear to me (based upon our discussion here and the description on your blog) to have any choice in it. It seems rather more like an adventure than a game. This may be fun despite the fact, but I would recommend if this is indeed the case that you make it a cooperative game about sharing.

So, as I see it, after getting lost in the jungle, a group of farm animals (a donkey, a pig, a sheep, a horse, a mouse, a dog, etc...) have to work together to escape. Along their way out of the jungle, each animal will pick up different goodies that are found in the jungle by performing silly tasks for 'good' animals they encounter. These items will then need to be shared with other parts of their group in order to defeat the 'bad' animals they encounter. The overall mechanic would involve a progression from place to place (perhaps through rolling two different dice and choosing one) along a number of different paths and side paths and make it very hard for any player to 'escape' without the others being able to do so as well. The kids need to learn to work together so that everyone can escape, otherwise no one will escape... at least, that's what I see the lesson being. But, the fun will come from performing lots of silly things to collect goodies. And, that will also be the real difficult part of the design process - coming up with the silly tasks that are required to earn the goodies.

In this view of the game, the board would be more multilinear than the one you have drawn... but it would contain bottlenecks where each player needs to 'bribe' the animal who guards the gate/bridge/path to get through. Players would be able to trade goods freely with each other. And, in fact, some elements may require one player to get to the other side of the gate and then give back stuff in order to help other players get through the same gate. Each animal might have a different thing that it is good at on the board, and of course, certain players might be better at certain silly tasks than others... so some degree of coordination may help the players succeed.

In keeping with your existing mechanics. What if you introduce two dice into the game... color coated... and players choose which result they want? Rather than have numbers, the game path would have colors (which match the dice) and they would be laid out in different sequences at different points of the journey. The basic mechanic of the game would involve rolling two dice and advancing to the next space along the path that matches the color you choose to keep.

So... the swampish area might have an overabundance of black colors along the path, while the water area might have a lot of blue. You could introduce short cuts and side paths to the game by requiring players to land on the color at which point the path forks and you might also introduce wild colors for areas where you want players to stop. There may be some colors which don't appear on the dice (secret areas) which require you to either play a card to get there or roll a special die.

The object of the game could either be to get to the end (escape) or, as seems to me to be a more fun game, to have the most valuable treasures when the first person escapes. In the former case, items that you pick up along the way may allow you to redeem them to circumvent certain areas or use them in lieu of rolling. This version of the game would be very tight, and encourage players to 'invest' early and figure out exactly when they should 'divest' to make it to the end before anyone else.

In the latter case, the spaces that you land on could give you items of different value and the board would scale like life, so the most valuable stuff is towards the end. But, in general ending the game would not necessarily mean you win because if you don't collect enough stuff along the way that is valuable in favor of getting to the end, someone else who played smarter might beat you.

In both cases, you might be required to perform silly tasks to acquire these items. So, you're belief about how well you can do some of these things may influence your choice of die that you keep.

I am partial to the latter, life-esque, version, for small children because I feel like they will have more fun perpetually accumulating and that the idea of investment/divestment is perhaps a little bit beyond the idea age (6-10). It also wouldn't require them to understand the redemption process... so you could keep it really simple: roll two dice, choose one, advance, perform, collect. The game ends whenever a player reaches the end. At which point, you count up the value of all your objects and whoever has the most wins.

You could also include some items which increase in value when a part of a set. And/or... limit the 'payout' of each space so that there is also an issue of competition for certain items/colors between the players.

Notice: In this new version, there are no bad animals. Only animals at each stage of the game which each require you to perform a task to receive a gift from them. Each animal in this case could represent their 'ideal' allegorical persona and the task that you have to perform would relate to it. So, you need to amuse the monkey. Make the hyena laugh. Beat the owl in a game of math. Prove your courage to the Lion. Do something that requires patience for the elephant. Etc...

But, regardless of what you choose to do... get rid of the current lion mechanic. No one should be punished for being behind. Being in last place is usually it's own punishment. Especially, if you decide to include items on each space that disappear when collected, being in last place is punishment enough insofar as it limits your choices.

I agree. The 'invest - divest' version of the game is very well suited for adults and could likely be adapted to be a true Euro-style game. Even adults would like this theme. So, I can envision a very robust game in this direction.

However, I recommended the accumulative version because it strikes me as much more accessible to the age group that he wants to target. Kids won't want to give up what they have gotten. Rather than teach the dynamics of investment (monopoly), I think that delayed gratification is a much easier concept for them to grasp. So, I love your idea about 'toolifying' everything.

Not only is it very iconographic, it also introduces the idea of getting one thing now so that you can get something better later. If the game is a set of doors, then each tool is a key. Perhaps certain keys work on multiple doors and multiple keys can be used to open the same door... but there could be a lot of doors that can be opened along the way for bonus items. You might have to weigh the keys you acquire against the risk that others might take the items that you want before you get a chance. But, as long as progression is one-way, you might not need such a form of strict competition to capture the essence of delayed gratification and risk investment.

Here's how I see the game unfolding:

Still the roll two dice, choose one and possibly the perform a silly task for an animal to receive a gift. But all gifts have both an intrinsic value and a use (tool) value. Inversely proportional of course. The use value of a tool is realized later in the game when it is used. As a Euro game, the gift might be redeemed for something else and disappear. But, sticking with an American style adventure game, let's just say that you always keep the tools in your toolbox.

As a result, there need to be far more tools than you can possibly acquire in one play of the game and the effect of each tool needs to be balanced well for the fact that some may be used over and over again. The gifts/tools that you can acquire are non-exclusive. So, everyone can pick the same tools without limit. But, since the game flows forward (except maybe a special tool that lets you go backward) you will not always be able to get exactly what you want.

Later in the game there may be a lot of gifts that have a lot of intrinsic value but little use value and require you to be able to use certain tools to get them. Some of the early tools thus unlock certain doors later on. Some allow you to by-pass certain areas. Some let you roll three dice. Some let you duplicate gifts. Some let you choose an easier task to perform. Perhaps you can think of some additional things that need tools.

In order to prevent players from going very slow through the board, the game is still determined by the intrinsic value of all the gifts you have acquired. As long as the intrinsic value of gifts is higher toward the end of the adventure, players will always have an incentive to move forward (provided that they can also unlock them) quicker than anyone else. Because, if the game ends whenever one player exits the jungle, then it is possible for that player to end the game before others get a chance to get the high value items.

On the other hand, if it turns out (like Quidditch) that you don't have the most, then the mechanic could allow you to try to slow down and grab as much as you can before you have to end the game. The 'optimal' strategy might thus be very tight, but Euro games don't seem to suffer from this (Race/Dominion) and most people haven't complained about the complete absurdity quidditch in Harry Potter. So, I think, given the theme and the audience, this 'losing by winning' condition might be excusable.

Ideally the optimal strategy would actually vary depending upon what each player decides to do. If everyone else is going slow and getting a lot of tools early on, perhaps it benefits you to race ahead and end it even if the overall point value is low. On the other hand, if everyone is racing ahead, then they may slow down at the end as they realize that they need to pick up points, and someone who went slowly initially has time to catch up.

The main question that needs to be answered by the designer is whether the game should be a race (as the title indicates) or whether it should be an adventure (also in the title). A race would require all the tools to focus on their benefit to get you past your obstacles as fast as you can. In this case, tools have no intrinsic value only a use value. An adventure might allow you to explore the long paths to acquire items that can be used for later or may just be good in and off themselves. A race has an obvious game clock. The clock for an adventure is less obvious.

Usually, adventures end with climatic battles. Races end at a finish line. Abstractly, a battle and a finish line may be the same thing. But the quintessential difference between the two is the inevitability of a conclusion in a race vs. the uncertainty of winning a battle. So, does the game progress inexorably forward or are their points where you have to 'go back to the save point' if you fail?

The alternative to a climatic battle is a modified race/adventure like Race for the Galaxy or Dominion where you can end the game but still lose. Both games are very unforgiving to novices and require careful attention to flow and value because you can still lose by winning. But, they usually end quickly with the pace accelerating over time as opposed to the near endlessness of American games like Talisman.

So, how should this game end? What is the goal? That will ultimately reveal the whole reason for gifts/tools/items.