I watched an episode of Extra Credits today that talked about a game called Dust 514, a squad FPS set in the EVE Online universe. What makes it interesting is that events that happen in one game effect the other. So in effect you have two very different kinds of gamer, interacting in and shaping the same virtual world. It got me thinking about how a similar approach could be used in tabletop games, allowing players of different interests and skill levels to interact in a way that most suited their playing style.
For example, a medieval warfare game might have a phase after everyone takes their turn where the farms give resources, decided by a dice rolling mechanism. But if some of the players decide at the start of the game that they don't feel terribly combative, they could instead take control of specific farms in the game, playing on an Agricola-like mat. King players could then help farmers when they were able, and battles happening on or around farms would become a hazard.
Another thought I had was a dungeon crawl miniatures game, where one of the Characters a player could choose from is an Apothecary. She plays using a deck building mechanism, brewing potions to heal or stat boost the other players. New cards would be items dropped by monsters.
Or a 4X space game where a player could be either an alien warlord or just a humble merchant ship, trying to make ends meet.
These are the more obvious (and obviously flawed) ideas I had. I just wanted to get the concept out into the open because I would love to play games designed like this.
Well, we're pretty used to the turn-taking mechanism. As long as the things that the Archmages did effected the Merchants (I can just see the Archmages sending out hordes of monsters at eachother, ignoring the little people that might be crushed on the way) I don't think there would be much worry of boredom. And you could always include Cosmic Encounter style "Well it's my turn, but everyone else has something to do" things. It would be neat to see a "Torches and Pitchforks" mob of merchants and warlords going up against a particularly troublesome Archmage, even though they aren't terribly likely to succeed.
One thought I had was doing something like The GIPF Project, where each game in the series is playable by itself, but you can join them together to form a giant monstrosity of a game
The games running in parallel thing would be interesting. I can see a Risk-type game with timed turns running at the same time as a real time card game, with things that happen in the card game effecting whichever player is taking his turn.