Making a Game 2

My office drones come in all colors.
Also, they work weekends for free.

Okay, so last time we worked on making a depressing office simulator board game. Lets look at some basic game play elements. I need to have a tile laying system so we can play office workers. I'm thinking that you draw from one deck, and play anywhere on the office. You want to play yours farther from the breakroom/bathrooms, and closer to the printers and the office supply. Some actions in the game will let you play extras or even force opponents to remove workers. The tiles will have to be placed to that the workers can leave, but I think maybe making it worth more to make the cubicle farm maze like should be an option. I can already see some neat options here. But I think this is just something you do while playing the actual game. Some extra player interplay as they do their thing.

I think everyone starts a project from either a dice role or from a card deck at the beginning of the game. Cards could let me go more projects with funny names and a greater variety of what the goals are. This would both add replay value, and add some good humor. We could have projects range from "Upgrade accounting software" to "Develop new flagship product." The points values could be more targetable for each one, and some could have a random amount of points with a random size of the project. On the other hand, keeping it to a table you roll dice on makes it easier to make the projects as you can keep the list very generic. I.E.

1-2 small project

3 internal upgrade

4 Sales/marketing

5 large project

6 Flagship product development

I think keeping the projects more vague and as a dice list will be better for two reasons. One, people are immensely more creative than I am. Their projects will be much more personally entertaining than anything I could make. Though, I figure there will be about a 75% chance that each persons first project will be TPS reports. Second, I am already going to have a deck of cards for the actions you get to play during the turn. Each deck I add after that will both increase the set-up of the game, the time required to play, the clean up and the over all cost of the game. I am at a deck of cards, a deck of tiles, a board, a die or dice, and the rule book. I'm working for Settlers of Catan, not Twilight Imerpium. 

So lets look at a normal turn then. I think this is a good place to get some of this nailed down. 

Texas holdem. - This hand is potentially good.

1. Start a new project if you have none. (roll the die/dice and find out.)
2. Hire a new worker ( place a tile on the board)
3. Play a card (or cards?) from your hand. (send an opponent to pointless meetings, jam a Printer, Get your employees to stay late etc.
4. Pay your employees/supplies etc. (If your project goes over budget, its worth less) 
5. your employees work on the project. ( Crap, I think I'm going to need tokens of some kind to keep track of the project status.) 
6. You check to see if you finish your project.If the project is done score points equal to its value. This will be reduced if the project is done late, and if it is too expensive.
7. You draw back up to the main hand size. Lets start with 5, its a good middle ground of options and not over complicating starting hands. I don't know if multiple cards played a turn is an option yet, also I don't know if players will be able to force discards on their opponents.

I could probably shrink this list and combine some of these to make it easier to grokk mid-game. Atually, I think We do it in a round system, with each player doing steps 1,2,3 and 7. Then after everyone goes, the round does steps 4 5 and 6. I think that should make for best interplay between players, as long as I make the game force some way of changing initative.

We can call each round a work week, though that adds another thought.  How many turns in the game?  I can go either "play until someone gets X points", or "play for x turns". If we play for turns, I am tempted to make it either 26 or 52 so we can have a half year or full year respectivley. But that sounds like a ton of turns! Anytime I see a turn tracker that high, it just becomes one more thing to track and it increases the complexity of the game. Conversly, playing to a point total can cause game states where if all players are playing poorly, the game will go longer than if they are all playing well. Furthermore, a good player will acutally cause a poor player to have less time to play the game. 

Still, I think I have gotten some good work done. Next time its time to see what kinds and how many cards I need to do.