Hello all. I was thinking about creating a game and a mechanic I thought seemed interesting is a combination of worker placement and a tech tree.
Think of it like this, you have a # of pawns to place on a tech tree, and on a turn you may advance this pawn further on the tech tree opening up new abilities, more options, etc. An example of what the tech tree may look like would be the tree available in Final Fantasy 10, or World of Warcraft (when there used to be a bevy of options).
This mechanic I believe would most easily find it's home in some form of strategic war game. Possibly futuristic, or maybe more modern to make it have more familiar technology.
A downside that I could see would be analysis paralysis.
Is anyone aware of any board game that does something like this? I know Twilight Imperium 3 has a tech tree, but there's no worker placement there. Thank you for any help.
Worker Placement/Tech Tree Mechanic
If you have a chance, check out the game, currently running on KS, entitled "Raiders of the North Sea." While it contains, among its various mechanics, Worker Placement, it allows you to "upgrade" workers, which allow you to perform different (for the sake of argument, TechTree) type abilities. It's a bit of a stretch, but check out the videos and let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Joe
I had a thought the other day while running about something similar.
Each player may have up to 5-ish actions that could be used to generate resources, gain VP, or do other good things. A player could spend their turn using an action, drawing a new action (plus discarding if over the max hand size), OR improving an action they had by one level. The actions would be laid face up on the table. Actions have a total of 3-5 levels, each of which makes them incrementally better when used. The highest level would grant the largest benefit when that action is used, usually with some sort of desirable 'capstone' ability.
Ideally the game would slowly morph in terms of what the best kinds of actions were, introducing a tension about whether to invest in a certain action early on to make it more potent, or to keep cycling through actions in order to have a broader, weaker set of effects/abilities. One strategy might give you an early lead, but the other might make you more flexible to changing win conditions.
