Alternatively, something that is “cooperative” but still has limited resources that the players have to compete over could be fun. So you have the “work together” option, or the “My plan is good, and yours will lead us to destruction, thus I am stealing 3 of your cogs” option.

Because working together is fun, but cautiously working together spiced with paranoia and accusations and backstabbing is more fun!

Okay, I miss Bunyip, I admit it.

Each player gets a goal card. A few of the goals are mutually exclusive, but most can be combined. “Get three green widgets up and running” and “Set up a chain reaction between a blue gizmo and a green widget”.

Each player draws a goal, and keeps it secret. Now, each player has exclusive access to some resources, so in order to accomplish any goal, some players will probably have to work together. I see simultaneous moves, so each player lays down a card representing their “turn”, and reveals them at once. So you don’t get to see if the other gnomes stuck with their bargains before you decide whether or not to break yours. And you’re trying to guess what the other player’s goals are, while keeping yours secret, but still working towards yours.

Except that’s not very collaborative, is it? Well, you still CAN work together, and will have to at some point, in the end, so joint wins will probably be common. And throw in a common enemy which the players will probably join forces against even if they aren’t explicitly helping eachother with their goals. (The dreaded Socket Monkeys!)

I see playing cards labelled “power sources” and then machine parts off the power sources, and then other machine parts off the machine parts, in sort of Illuminati-power-structures-esque builds. Possibly with strict conditions about what can link to what. “Requires widdershins power to function” or “only supplies power to (IE, directly controls) Green units” or such. But no player should have ownership over any cards once they are in play.

The downside to following your personal goal would be the risk that someone else would call you on it, if it became clear to them that you weren’t putting enough effort into completing the Imperial goal. (”Hmm, Ben could have played a fourth cog to make the Imperial Hub - did he overlook that, or is he working on something else?”) Perhaps they’d get the bonus that you’d have gotten for completing your personal goal, for this. And if they’re wrong, you get the reward as if you’d completed it.

Does feel as if it’d be quite difficult to prove that a player was following their own goal instead of the Imperial one, though. Logically it should just be a matter of calling a player out, after their turn, and then seeing whether their most recent game action contributed towards building their secret-goal in any way, without contributing to the Imperial goal.

The problem is that this would turn up false-positives; that someone might have been stuck and made a random move, only to be called out for working on a secret-goal, and - now that they reveal their card and look at it - they were furthering that goal slightly, even if they didn’t mean to.

But perhaps that’s fair enough. And perhaps this would become a game of taunting procrastination - that the reward for completing a secret goal would be the same as for pretending to complete a different secret goal, while ignoring the Gnomish Emperor.

(Perhaps a face-up discard pile as well, to stop the machine getting too big. With the ability to return the top card to play, as if from the draw pile.)

I think, rather than “I’ve guessed what your secret goal is, so now you lose” the better thing to do is “I’ve guessed what your secret goal is, so now can play cards to thwart it”. Which also allows for amusing bluffing, and trying to get people to play cards to thwart a goal that doesn’t really exist.

I’d steer away from the “group” goal were I designing the game alone, and try to encourage player interaction merely by making it so that very few goals could be reasonably accomplished by a single player working alone. Thus, you have the dilemma of asking another player for help, but possibly revealing something about your goal if you do so, or asking for ‘help’ towards a fake goal, but probably having to trade away some favor just for an elaborate bluff. Unless your ‘bluff’ tricks people into thinking that they need to do X to thwart your goal, when in fact X *is* your goal. Hmmm.

The initial state of the board is the *plan* for the machine: a configuration of deactivated “device” cards arranged in the shape of a completed machine. A “device” is something like an oil pump, a motor, or a laser. Until someone activates a card, that piece of the machine doesn’t actually exist; it’s just part of the plan. Here’s the public goal: you have to complete the machine within a certain timeframe. I don’t like using a deadline to enforce a public goal; any other ideas here?

Most of the cards the players play with are “piece” cards. This is something like a screw, a piece of sheet metal, or a liter of oil. Each high-level component card has printed on it the low-level cards you need to meld to activate it. Once you meld piece cards into a device, you put a token of your color on that device to activate it. Once all the devices are activated the machine is completed.

But each player has some secret “technique” cards that let them substitute some low-level components for others, or just build a high-level component with fewer cards than are required. Here’s the bluffing, maybe?

Each technique card also describes an obsession or quirk of the gnome you’re playing (eg. “You hate screws! Everything should be built with bolts! You can use 1 bolt to replace 2 screws in a device; you cannot use screws except one turn before the deadline.”). They restrict your actions and you get more points if the completed machine fits your preconceptions. Here are the private goals.

Under certain circumstances you can rip someone else’s device from the machine, replace it with your own screwless design, and strip the other device for parts.

Yeah, I really killed the bluffing there. I’d love to play this game, though; it reminds me of a cooperative version of Kevan’s Technopoly.

I’m a bit unconvinced about the calling-people-on-their-secret-goals mechanism, too. Partly it’s the points thing - getting points just for being falsely accused feels annoying, that Player A could essentially award the game to Player B through an excess of accusations, while players C through F sit around being irked - but also that if the goals and components are sufficiently interesting, it’d be awkward to come up with an easily applied rule about what counts as working towards a goal. “Have at least four of any one component in the machine” - does playing one of any component count? It could be expanded to four eventually, after all. What about playing a Pendulum that could theoretically set a Counterweight moving to tilt a Lever to hit a Flange, when your actual secret goal is to have a Flange getting in the way of anything? I suppose that could become part of the calling process, that after the called player’s revealed their card the caller has thirty seconds to come up with a plausible way in which their most recent move could have led to their secret goal, perhaps limited to using two cards plus those already on the table.

(I, er, don’t have any actual suggestions. But there’s probably an interesting bit of wall in front of you somewhere to distract you from this fact! Quick, look at it!)