• Premise One: I’m interested in exploring the space between board games and RPGs, not so much in the way lots of games with Quest in the title have done so (although I liked those games) as in welding a collaborative-competitive creative dimension to the concrete elements like a graph and a card-driven economy.
• Premise Two: Several people have tried to write a role-playing game about playing a role-playing game, but I don’t think any of them were successes. Part of it is that when you actually role-play satire it’s not that much fun–you’re acting out the annoying things you’re satirizing and that gets old. Part of it is that a bunch of guys around a table is not a very exciting thing to imagine.
• I realized after a while that with a lot of traditional RPGs–D&D, Shadowrun and especially Palladium–I had the most fun before the game ever started, in the process of Making My Guy. Some people would say that the solution to this is to play different games, which is true, that’s one way to have more fun. An alternative solution is to isolate it and make it a game in itself.

So I want to write a game that’s structured like an RPG, with a group of players and a GM working through the process of character creation. Each player has a goal (”Build the character with the most Combat Power,” “Build the character with the widest array of options,” etc), which he or she tries to achieve by bending the system, bribing the GM and working with other players to buy game-breaking splatbooks. It’s possible for more than one player to win; it’s not possible for all players to win. The GM is not a player, but a set of dice-driven arbitrary decision tables.

I’m trying to decide, though, whether I want this to be a self-contained system–ie, you have some sample elements and make the rest up as you buy them in-game–or whether it should be played with all the real RPG junk you and I and our friends have amassed. Is it worth trying to build an abstract version that can draw on either your imagination or extant books? Or would it be more fun (and focused) to couple the rules tightly to a set of preloaded components?

I’ve wikified Not Invented Here, the NAICS Rube Goldberg game, and I think Leonard and I are going to playtest it via email. (Leonard, do you have a scanner or are we going to draw with our mice?) If you want in on the game, comment on this entry and I’ll add you to the quick-and-dirty mailing list.

Someone was brandishing a deck of Star Wars Top Trump cards at me over the weekend, with every intention of playing it with the given rules, but luckily I had the presence of mind to try the Yahtzee hybrid, which I’ve been percolating quietly since I posted it here.

And it worked much better than I expected. The game itself is still fairly trivial, gambling on the odds that a given random card will beat other random cards, but there turned out to be a lot of humour in the mission narrative - developing little metaphorical representations of scenes that fit the deck’s theme (or were in its film), and seeing how randomly-dealt characters cope with it. Turning over your last card to see who you’re going to have to assign to the high-Dark-Side three-token “torturer” role, and getting an Ewok. Being proud that your Skeleton makes quite a good two-token “head” body-part for your Frankenstein’s monster.

I’ve written the rules up. Am wondering whether the “everyone play simultaneously” mechanic needs tightening to stop people watching and waiting too much (that this didn’t happen when testing it, because nobody was playing fiercely strategically), that a one-token bonus for finishing first might cure that. It works as it is, though.

Hey, I thought of something to do with Lonely Mechanic #1: build a Rube Goldberg device.

Get a piece of paper and pencil and assign them to a player. Figure out what you want to do (eg turn on a light switch) and find something that loosely corresponds to that goal in the NAICS list (eg 3351101 5, “Electric lamp bulbs and tubes (including sealed beam lamp bulbs)”). Generate another extant ID number, this time at random (315191W 5, “Knit outerwear, nsk, total”), and have your device triggered by some event involving that product.

When you’ve come up with a good use, have someone draw that step, write a quick description as (1) at the bottom, and pass to the left. Then either increment or decrement one digit of the generated ID number by two, OR roll a ten-sided die to replace that digit, trying to get closer to your ultimate goal (in our example, we could do it in one increment, four decrements and a reroll for the W). Obviously, the player holding the paper for any given step would have to draw and describe the use case the group came up with. This might work better with players who can’t draw.

Okay, premise: card games are small-scale economies driven by the consistent input of random values and the idea that certain of these values are worth more than face in specific contexts (eg as a sum of 21, in a set of four, or in response to a Jack). I’m talking about trump (playing) card games, here, not CCGs.

Now, a question: are all board games essentially set dressing on top of a mildly complex graph with a simple economy, driven by consistent random inputs?

I imagine that Reiner Knizia would say yes, and with good reason. There’s certainly evidence for it–Risk, Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Sorry. Heck, Candyland. Monopoly and its thousand licensed knockoffs demonstrate the viability (economically, anyway) of separating setting from rules.

Then again, chess, checkers, Stratego and Terrace have no economy and no randomness. If we accept that my description of board games above is accurate some significant percentage of the time, these obviously need their own category–but is that because they’re nonrandom, or because they have no economy? (Or do we accept that description at all?)

I’m sure you’ve all seen this already, but I still think it’s inexplicable that Boardgamegeek’s list of games that should have zombie expansions, but don’t, doesn’t include Clue.