Tea & Claw (working tile) is a card game concept I'm working on in which woodland creatures visit their neighbors for refreshments and polite conversation while hopefully avoiding being messily devoured. I posted some thoughts about this a couple months ago, but recently it's been gelling into a more coherent idea. Let me know what you think.
Players have three card zones in front of them: the Porch, the Parlor, and the Pantry. There are two types of cards: Guests (anthropomorphic woodland creatures) and Dishes. The Guest deck and the Dish desk go in the middle of the table and a number of cards from each are flipped over.
On a player's turn, he either takes 1 guest card and places it on his porch, or takes 1 dish card and places it in his pantry (if he has the types of guests that the dish requires on his porch.) Cards are replaced as they are taken.
Guest cards could be bears, mice, rabbits, wolves, pheasants, etc. Each of them has certain likes and dislikes in terms of food, including other animal types. When players take a guest, text on a guest's card may insult or invite other guests in play. If the card says to "insult 1 rabbit" for example, 1 rabbit on the same porch will move down 1 porch to the left, ending up in an another player's area. If the guest invites 1 rabbit, 1 rabbit moves from the porch on the right to the active player's porch. They will probably have other effects as well. The result is that as players chose guests, animals will shift around clockwise as they try to join their friends or flee their enemies.
Once a character is chosen whose text reads "Teatime!" all guests on all porches are moved to their players' parlors, where they are "locked" and can no longer leave. Then another round begins, except now guests move counter-clockwise. Throughout this, players are trying to form an optimal party of guests on their porches and send disruptive or hard-to-feed guests to their opponents.
After a number of rounds, the parlors have become quite full, and scoring begins. Players check to see what dishes they have collected and how many guests they can feed (each guest will only eat certain kinds of dishes) each guest fed this way gives etiquette points to the player. If a guest has no dishes it can eat and has a prey type listed, it eats that guest. You lose points for this. Finally, players gain points for sets of guest types they have collected.
I finished working this out in my head this morning, and I'm about ready to start prototyping. It feels like it will be a fairly quick filler game with mechanics that bring out the theme.
What do you think? Does it sound like a game you'd be interested in? Does anything sound broken?
Yeah, I'm still working on that. I might have all the scoring bonuses on the guests themselves. So one might say "1 etiquette for each other rabbit" or "-2 etiquette if at least 1 fox is present."