Hi Everyone,
I'm a major board game enthusiast and an amateur/aspiring designer. I think mostly in themes, so I'm hoping to learn more about choosing and implementing mechanics and just generally contribute. I'd like to have my games published someday, but I figure the best way to start is to make games to enjoy with my wife and friends, and I won't worry too much about the next step until I stumble upon something really good.
Currently I've been kicking around ideas for an American football game. I love football and the strategy involved, but I don't really want to do a full simulation. Something easy for relatively experience board gamers to pick up to play in 40 minutes to an hour, and hopefully something that will be playable with either 2-4 or 2-6 players. As you can probably tell, this is very much in the "inspiration/percolation" phase, but I think there are a lot of aspects that could work well:
- A "general manager" game that starts with the preseason and players compete to trade draft picks or bid on freeagents, hoping to build a good enough roster to make it to the Super Bowl while dealing with injuries, problem players, ect.
- A "coaching game" where players compete in a "football game" by calling plays for their teams. Possibly a deck building game where players build and draw from"play-calling decks for offense and defense
- A "player game" where players try to put together a career and retire in the hall of fame (with each round being a season). Players would have limited time units to distribute to various activities on their pursuit of both production and fame (ex: film study and workouts vs parties and media appearances), with a randomized chance of payoff (though more time units would increase chance of better payoff). Some mechanism would increase the fame vs preparation conflict as the players careers progressed. Not sure if this idea has enough direct conflict/competition between players, but if that's the case, maybe I'll create a "Twitter feud" mechanic.
Like everyone else, I've got more ideas than time, so I've got a lot of other ideas for more "traditional" board games with knights and kings and resource collecting, but the football idea is sort of my current preoccupation. Looking forward to getting to know everyone and participating in the community!
-Nate
EDIT: I've fleshed out my ideas for my football game a little more and made a "New Game Ideas" post. For those interested, you can read it here: http://www.bgdf.com/node/5691
