Entry 1: Robin n the Hood

This seems well-planned and fun. I like the minigame component, with the bidding, and the interesting rules about movement of the cart and the men. I worry that it might end up with only a few optimal strategies, since the base rules dictate how it will play out, and you don’t get to move your guy much each time. Also, other than deciding how many coins to bid on a dual-steal, not many of your decisions will be that complex – I think it will nearly always be obvious where you should move, or how many coins to steal to prevent another guy from getting any or to divert the cart away from opponents. Also, to make it more complex and strategic, I think it might be better if each player got more merry men – otherwise I think the cart is going to do a lot of moving without hitting any men. That would cut down on the length some, too – I think the cart won’t lose too many coins each time through, so a 60-coin limit might be way too long.

As for the contest restrictions, I’m not sure there are two minigames here – the bidding and die rolling is definitely one, and maybe the crossroads could be another, although it’s not really a separate game thing. I liked this one, though – I thought it used the theme well and was appealing with the simple, logical rule set.

Entry 2: Sherwood – the Final Showdown

This is interesting; I like the abstract nature with the theme still worked in. It was a little confusing when you referenced board spaces without defining them (e.g. town spaces – the gray ones? – and forest spaces – the green ones?), but eventually I figured it out.

I strongly suspect that the game won’t be balanced as written. The rules are complex enough that I can’t tell how for sure now, but the difference in board layout I think favors the Law side strongly, since the road spaces are in strings and the forest spaces are in clumps. Also, no gold enters the game unless the Law side taxes, so the Law side can pretty much decide whether the Merry Men even get to pursue that strategy, and can prevent gold from entering the game once the MM get close to a gold victory. There’s really very little incentive for the Law ever to take gold; instead they should just recruit, since they can beat the MM by outfighting them.

The combat has a similar sort of rock-paper-scissors thing that I used in my gambling minigame – but I like how you can do strategic things with the deck if you can remember what your opponent has left. It would be impossible for a single guy to beat a band, though, and once the bands form and have more members, it will be difficult to beat one. Having them get less mobile as they get bigger is a good balance for that.

The two minigames are present – the recruiting minigame and the combat minigame – and I think both would be fun. There might be a pretty strong luck component – e.g., getting fire cards in your combat set, or happening to roll high when recruiting or taxing. A bunch of the mechanics are pretty elegant, though – particularly the band cards, which combine gold and men as a resource and dictate movement. I like that.

1 vote from me.

Entry #3 – The Sherriff’s Men

This seemed like a simple, potentially fun game. It’s a little hard to imagine without an image of the board. The minigames are present, but all seem to involve dice contests with Robin. There don’t seem to be many opportunities for player choice or strategy – it seems like it would mostly play out like an interactive story, where the plot and actions are controlled by the event cards, the dice, and the rules, not by the players. The only things the players do other than roll dice is choose which guards to put where, which isn’t so challenging, and even the guard numbers are determined by die roll.

I do love “Determine first player by knife fight.”

Entry #4 - Nottingham

Great sense of humor inverting the story to play as Prince John and the Sherriff. The board and art you’ve prepared are neat, too – better than the typical prototype stuff we see in these competitions. I like the game setup, too, with a hidden ally for Robin, although it’s possible that this is becoming common enough in recent games to be over-used or trite.

I always have trouble with the designs in this competition when they invoke a bunch of features or cards (in this case the Nottingham Cards and Sherwood Cards) that aren’t included in the design – it makes it hard to evaluate what the game would actually be like. You’ve done a pretty good job of describing it and giving examples, but with all the different spaces on the board and no indication as to what events might happen there, it’s a little difficult to imagine. I like the Sherwood minigame, where people are forced to either hurt their overall effort by adding to the forest, making it harder to collect coins, or actually play an event card that hurts themselves. Normally people are choosing the best strategy in games; here, it’s choosing the least bad, which is fun. I’m not sure what counts as the second minigame, although there is certainly a variety of game activities present.

There might be a Pandemic-like element here, where different characters have different roles; I can’t tell from what’s submitted, but that would be a cool feature if true. I think you hint at it at the end when you talk about drawing more Nottingham cards if you have a higher number. That could be fun.

1 vote from me.

Entry #5 – Sherwood Irregulars

This is a neat idea; I like the asymmetric angle and the use of playing cards as the combat resolvers and also the treasure cards and robbery game. It was a little hard to tell from the board image what constituted a “space,” although I assume it’s the square blocks out of which everything seems to be constructed. Again, I’m not sure it would be balanced, although I’m sure that could be worked out in playtesting. The two minigames here are the best of the five I’ve looked at here, and the truest adherence to the contest rules, where you actually stop the game and play another different game to resolve a situation.

2 votes from me.

Entry #6 - Sherwood

This was my entry.

Thanks for the kind words. I am not sure exactly how the movement minigame would work, but it seemed like a fun thing to try. I'd love to get a set of this made up and playtest it to see how well the mini-games would actually integrate into the overall game.

As I said above, I thought Nottingham was really cool too.

You asked that I give more detail, so I will. Here's the image again -

Here's what I wrote in the rules:

So, the idea is that there are four movement tiles numbered 1-4 for each player playing. The 4 tile is larger than the 3 tile, which is larger than the 2 tile, as shown in the image. They go through several stages:

Claiming: During the movement minigame, a player can claim one movement tile. They can only claim one touching the center circle or touching one they already have claimed.

Collecting: After the minigame, you can collect all the tiles you have claimed. The longer you wait to collect, the more tiles you get, and the higher numbers you'll probably reach, but on the other hand, you won't be able to move any guys on the turns you wait through.

Using: You can use one movement tile per turn; all your guys can move the number of spaces on the tile you play.

Restoring: When you have played a tile, the player next to you gets to restore it to the movement board; it can touching the base circle, or it can connect to two other movement tiles.

I like the structure of this; I haven't tested it out to see how it would work, and obviously the geometry and size of the tiles and the base circle might have an impact on how it goes. I imagine people might be tempted to hoard good tiles, but then they wouldn't be able to move around much. The "touching two" rule means that it's harder to play a good (high value) tile and then prevent somebody from picking it up the next turn.

A four-space move for all your guys is so much better than a 1-2 space move that it will be worth delaying moving to get one. On the other hand, it might be good to be able to play every turn, too, so people might be tempted to go for the lower ones. At first, you'll have turns where you don't move; later on, since you'll be getting an average of a tile per turn, you'll always have one to play, but you'll have to decide whether it's worth playing a bigger one and then letting somebody else potentially grab it easily (since you don't get to restore it to the circle yourself).

I should probably cut some of these out and try it to see how it goes. I think it's maybe a better fit for the minigame requirement for the contest than it might be in a real game, since it's a little fiddly and complicated compared to what it actually accomplishes in the game, but I think it's original and interesting, at least.

If your idea sounded better, let me know what it was - it obviously uses more tiles.

With regard to your first question, that's actually covered in the rules as written:

For the second question, I think I'd solve that by limiting the claiming counters, maybe to four, and I'd have to force people to collect their tiles when they were out of claim tokens. I think that solves it without getting too complex.

Good points - I think maybe the urge to monopolize movement might be there, but I don't think it gives you a benefit in the broader game here, so I suspect people wouldn't do it. It would be easy enough to prevent; just add a rule that if there are no unclaimed movement tiles touching the base circle, then people can replace a claim token belonging to another player (or even more extreme, replace that claim and all downstream ones).

It might be cumbersome, it might not - I think we might be at the point where somebody just has to make the parts and see how it works, rather than theorizing it to death.