A couple of years ago, I came with an idea for a ccg that was very steampunk in design but nothing really came of it. Since being on a break from work, I've been dredging through old emails and deleting rubbish from my comp and came across the old docs i made on this and it got me to thinking whether it would work as a board game. The basic premise is this:
Humanity lives in vast steam powered machine cities that crawl across the ruined landscape. These Machine Cities are called 'Engines'. They scour the world looking for old tech to repair their decaying cities, and to try and create a better world for themselves. Well, that's the theory. Mostly people survive in a brutal world where these great Engines find artefacts and wage war upon each other, and Pirate Engines steal from the weak.
A very cool world setup imho. The idea was that each player had an 'Engine' card, 4 resources (coal, wood, steam, and iron) and used those resources to bring other faction-specific things into play like clockwork soldiers and other steampunk-like things. The game area was split into three areas where artefact cards were played face down at the start of the game and was won when a player controlled all three artefacts or destroyed the opponents Engine.
Artefacts would have given abilities that could be used, and could be detrimental to both sides. The other cool thing was that the decks were going to be factional, with pros and cons to each, plus there were ideas for Pirate Decks as well. Well suited to a CCG or even a LCG format, now used by FFG.
My thinking is whether to keep this format or work it into a board game that keeps all the flavour and design of the initial ideas. I think it has merit, and could possibly be a better 'fit' than a straight card game. I would like to keep a lot of the card elements in, but figure out a unique combat system for when these great steam-punk monstrosities battle each other, not to mention a mechanic for locating these hidden artefacts.
I would love to see this with minis, and can even visualize expansion packs of new factions/engines that could be released.
ideas, thoughts, input all welcome.
the premise conjures up such great images, it would be a shame to not explore it further. I hadn't really given much thought to 'Grounders' (like the term) to be honest, but raises an interesting concept.
In the initial plans, Engines would have used straight manpower while resources were gathered and Engine were able to construct the great steampunk machines that did the 'real' work. One other cool concept was the idea of 'junking' a machine to scavenge for parts to build other machines, or even scavenging destroyed machines for more parts. I think that it would an idea to have limited resources so that you needed to scavenge in order to survive. It could add a higher element of strategy to the game.