Hello everyone, I joined because it seemed like a good way to develop a game that I've had rattling around in concept form for a while. I have ideas about it, just no real way to join them together. The whole thing came about when i acquired 144 small plastic dinosaurs. I have exactly six of each kind, which I feel begs for a game. I might as well list what I've thought of.
1-I have an idea of might vs. movement using the way your dinosaurs are clustered on the board. So, having six dinosaurs, you could, for example, have a group of three on the board, a group of two, and one on his own. By joining or disbanding units, you affect the type of die they use. In combat, the lowest roll would win, so all six dinosaurs clustered together would use a d4 d6. and you diminish the six of the group, you increase the die, until you have your one dinosaur using a d20. Having a unit lose could mean being sent back to a spawn point.
2-Obviously, this leads to why the players wouldn't cluster their dinosaurs all into one pack. I've thought of a few ideas, maybe capture the flag for example would be the easiest, and maybe the best for testing the mechanics of the game, but I'd rather something a little more complex, and that's where I'm stuck. Maybe some kind of resource management aspect to it. Or, one nebulous idea I had would be of having three types of item you need to bring back to your 'fort' from one of the opponents (in keeping with theme, could the game be 2-6 players?), with the twisted being taht you can't have more than one of a type of item in your fort at once, which means putting your items in danger.
3- An attack/defense mechanic for asymmetrical play could be an option, i think, but again, I'm not sure of the win conditions involved.
4-Something I'm very unsure of is maybe starting with one dinosaur and gathering resources to buy more.
These are all just brainstorms, really, and I really want input. I don't have any experience really of game design. What do you think?
These are some really good thoughts on it. First off, I think it's work best as a board divided into discrete squares, specifically, hexagons. I don't think the warhammer idea would work as well because the dinosaurs are a little uneven, and it'd be hard to cluster them together uniformly.
What do you think could constitute layers of defense, and how could players build and dismantle them? A hit point system for the 'fort' maybe, or, maybe, as a mechanic at the beginning of the game, like risk, you'd have a certain allotment of stone blocks that you could place in a certain configuration, or, maybe have stone blocks scattered at random around the playing field, and have the player have the option of using a portion of their squad to move them to make defenses. I think in the game, each unit would be able to move and also conduct an action, like pick-up, conquer a point, unite or disband units, or attack.
The mights vs. movement mechanic is pretty much lifted from the boardgame BattleBall. In combat between units, the lowest roll would win, so it makes sense that a group of six dinosaurs, who use a d4, have an advantage over a unti of one dinosaur, using a d20, since that means the unit of one has a much reduced chance of getting a lower roll than the bigger unit. However, when moving, the bigger unit has a disadvantage, since they still have to use the d4, and the smaller unit has the advantage with their d20. if I incorporate a resource gathering a building mechanic, I feel like this could be to my advantage if I put a minimum required unit size to pick up certain objects.
Something else I thought of is the maneuverability of certain unit shapes in terrain. If a path is only a hex across, a cluster of dinosaurs could use a turn to reform their shape into a long skinny one and pass through....except that there's a game breaking problem. If a unit of 6 just reforms over and over into a long shape, they could inchworm their way across the board as if they were rolling a 6 each time. I'm really unsure what to do there...I could involve some kind of penalty, but I don't know what.
Adding onto the building mechanic, while my first idea for the field would be one really big hexagon, with a fort/nest at each corner, i also played with the idea of alloting a certain amount of smaller interlocking hexagons that the players would take turns placing, making each game different. Unfortunately, I feel like there would be too many variables involved in that step, so maybe I should save it for a later version.
What do you think?