So I already put my bragging rights at stake in the Iron Game Chef contest, which means I need to design a game. This year involves not only the standard time limit and ingredient requirements, but a set of rules limitations as well. It’s a timed constrained game writing exercise! It’s a good thing those all make me gasp with excitement, because I’ve only got six days left and I haven’t so much “started.”

So here’s where I’m thinking of going. This isn’t an opinion poll–I’m going to make the game that I believe in the most; I just want to have a sketch-record in case I come back to some of these later. You’re welcome to steal anything here and make your own game, of course.

• Enemy of the People: Two groups of players work in tandem, able to communicate only via a shared map. One plays a group of Navajo scouts in 1360 AD, the other a modern-day group of archaeologists, both trying to unravel the mystery of the abandonment of Mesa Verde–the former group via the spirit world, the latter via science. The game is played on a strict time limit, because once the sun goes down, the mystery starts to reveal itself in a supernatural, lethal fashion…

  Ingredients: Anasazi disappearance, 1300s. “Entomology,” “Accuser” and “Companion.” Multi-meaning die rolls and pregenerated characters.

  Problems: Huge and clunky. Not sure I can do this without a very coordinated pair of GMs, which I don’t want.

• We Are Rock Stars: 1998, California. Brilliant geeks search for identity and social acceptance while struggling not to let their offbeat interweb startup get washed away in the tide of venture capital–or see the tide recede.

  Ingredients: Dot-com boom, late 1990s. “Entomology,” “Wine” and “Invincible.” Multi-meaning die rolls.

  Problems: InSpectres probably does this as a subsystem, and better.

• Alexandretta: Merchant caravans roam the highways and seaways of a young and exotic island empire, racing to clinch deals, watching (and affecting) the wash of supply and demand to maximize their profits.

  Ingredients: Loosely based on the heyday of the Silk Road. “Wine,” “Companion” and “Accuser.” Color-based resolution and custom card deck.

  Problems: I don’t know anything about economics. Also, not sure this is actually a role-playing game.

• Welcome to the New World: Accused criminals are denied trials and sentenced to hard labor at a lunar prison colony where all light is blue, and visible colors a jealously guarded luxury. The prisoners’ desperate secret is that only they can produce the physically inexplicable property of color–and only by their suffering and death. Lethal, oppressive horror.

  Ingredients: “Wine,” “Companion” and “Accuser.” Color-based resolution, obviously. Historical basis: pick one.

  Problems: I’m not sure I have the balls for this, and I don’t know anybody who would actually want to play it.

I’m kind of scaring myself, right now, by leaning toward the last one. I’ll pick for real tonight.