I was going to post this as a comment, but it got too long. That’s what the submission link is for!
“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. …
Working together is fun, but cautiously working together spiced with paranoia and accusations and backstabbing is more fun! …
Oooh! You could combine this with my earlier desire for a game with bluffing/diplomacy.
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.”
“Excellent. The joint-win-versus-solo-win aspect could perhaps be reduced to individual points, rather than the whole game - have an extra goal card dealt onto the table (’orders from the Gnomish Emperor’), and earn one point if you complete that goal, but two or three if you complete your secret personal goal. And then replace the completed goal with a fresh one.”
“Here’s an idea. It waters down both the public goal and the bluffing, but I think it’s a good alternate approach and maybe we could fix them back up.
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.”
“I’m not so sure about the idea of the game board, as I think it needlessly limits the scope that the game can aspire to. The way I saw it working is that the goal had a card, drawn at the beginning of the game, that specified the requirements needed to complete the machine (for instance, that the Quantum Galvaniser needs six Girders, attached with Screws to a Motor, plus a power source and a cooling system). Play then continues as Kevan discribes, with two types of cards coming into play - Component cards, like the screws and the girders (or other components with the ’screw’ or ‘girder’ characteristic), and Construct cards, which are like mini-goals which require components of their own, and which require components to be added to them to be completed. Thus one player could draw a Gel coolant system, and have some of the players work towards it, but one players private goal could be to draw, complete and have incorporated a Water coolant system. As Kevan suggested, at the end of the game each player who has achieved private goals gains points, the more the better.”
I’m starting to think this might work best as a networked computer game.
There is a “board,” as Leonard suggested, called the Machina. It changes every time you play–it’s made up of several connected macrocomponents, which are in turn made up of multiple component cards. There’s a recursive algorithm to generate the blueprint for this game’s Machina. It’s essentially a radial tree that only goes one or two levels deep.
There are multiple ways to build a macrocomponent: like Josh suggested, a Coolant System might be either Gel or Water, and like Leonard said, a Drive Engine might need one Screw or three Bolts (and either a Cam or two Pistons, etcetera).
During the turn, you can make deals to trade cards, table-talk confidentially or otherwise, and so on. At the end of the turn, everybody contributes a card to the Black Box, which shuffles them up and applies any transformations as necessary (eg if your specialty lets you play a Cherry Bomb as a Dynamite, you put in a Cherry Bomb and a Dynamite comes out). All the cards are displayed, but there’s no attribution, so nobody except you knows exactly what you played.
This anonymity is what allows for the Sabotage cards. Don’t like that Gel coolant system? Blow it up and rebuild it with Water next turn! Don’t want Ben to finish the Quantum Refrigerator? Cover him in Glue for a turn! And of course, like all good sabotage, nobody knows who did it.
Meanwhile, each player has two secret Goals, as determined by the way the Machina is blueprinted (you’ll never get the goal “Gel Coolant System, Not Water” if this Machina doesn’t include a coolant system at all). Some goals are worth a fixed number of points, and some are variable, depending on the number of Screws you manage to substitute for Bolts or whatever. Depending on the intersection of your Goals, you get a predetermined special ability from a table: Cross “no Bolts” with “Gel Coolant” and get the ability “convert any Screw to two new cards from the draw pile.”
Each macrocomponent is worth a certain number of points to every player who contributed a card to it, and of course one’s personal goals are worth points too, so you could theoretically win without completing your own goals. To win the game, you don’t have to have the most points–you only have to have more than a certain threshold of points (again, determined by the components of the Machina, so that it’s impossible for everyone to win). Multiple players could win, or nobody could win.
It occurs to me that this game wouldn’t have to be computerized if you had a neutral party, like a Machinist, who handled the card-exchanges and Black Box shuffling. That would require a lot of note-passing, but then again, that could add to the fun.