Post Posting Break

The break was not intentional... I just happened to have a lot of stuff going on and neglected to let the world know of it through this site.

To save everyone from the details and skip to the now, I've started up an online class on Game Design (focus on non-digital) with 1400 other people.

http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/

I came up with this idea for the first challenge and thought I would share it.

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Title: Ambulance Dogs (Code name: Doggie Bowser M.D.)

Players: 2-4

Time: 20-30 minutes (longer if drunk)

What you need to play it now: Four different tokens of any type, three decks of playing cards

Little backstory to put behind the cards: Ambulance dogs were used to find wounded soldiers in the trenches during WWI. The most popular used were Rottweilers, German Shepards, Labradors, and Bloodhounds (the four tokens). Black cards are for soldiers that the dogs made it to in time. Red ones are soldiers that have already passed on and are therefore lost. On that note...

Objective: Find the most savable soldiers.

Win Condition: Have the most saved soldiers (black cards).

Game over: When you have run out of cards. (Right now I have played around with five rounds - thus the number of cards I have given. First time around I had four decks involved. One play through nipped that in the bud quickly.)

Set up: Open up two of the decks and remove the Jokers. With the third deck you'll need to remove the Kings, Queens, Jacks, Aces, and 10's. You'll want to keep one Joker. You'll want a total of 125 cards total. 62 black cards, 62 red cards, and one Joker. Go ahead and shuffle those bad boys together.

You are going to make a five X five grid with the shuffled cards placed face down.

X X X X X
X X X X X
X X X X X
X X X X X
X X X X X

Movement: Once a player is on the board, on their next turn they may move up, down, right, or left unless that space is blank or occupied by another player. When they move to a new spot that has a card, they flip it over and follow the card rules. If all players are unable to move, remaining cards on the table are moved to the discard pile and the "trenches" are rebuilt with fresh cards from the deck.

Let's break for specific card rules.
Originally I threw this together so that players would be moving their tokens flipping over cards and just collecting black and red. That was pretty boring when I sat down with it. So to spice it up, I added some variables.

Black 2-10 Cards - player keeps this card.
Red 2-10 Cards - players place it in the discard pile.

Red K,Q,J Face Card - in addition to the card you flipped, flip over the card to the South automatically. Keep any black cards turned over, including face cards.
Black K,Q,J Face Card - in addition to the card you flipped, flip over the card to the North automatically. Keep any black cards turned over, including face cards.
(Feel free to just draw a random arrow if you'd like. Since I didn't want to write on my cards at the time, I just used an actual direction I could keep track of that made sense to all players around the board.)

Aces (any color) - in addition to the card you flipped, player chooses one card to flip that is either up, down, left, or right. Keep any black cards turned over, including face cards.
Joker - in addition to the card you flipped, all remaining cards up, down, left, and right are flipped over. Keep any black cards turned over, including face cards.

Playtime!
1 - Each player grabs a "dog" token. (Feel free to fight amongst yourselves who wants to be what dog.)
2 - Player who owns the largest dog goes first and from there go clockwise. If no one owns a dog, then who ever is the oldest goes first.
3 - The player then places their token down anywhere on a card on the grid then flips that card over. If it is a black card, then the player keeps it. If it is one of the special cards, then do as instructed above. The token stays on that spot until their next turn.
4 - The next player places their dog down on the spot of their choice and follows number three.
5 - All players will continue until no one can move because of the constraints of the movement rules.
6 - Then it's time to pick up the remaining cards - if there are any - and move them to the discard pile. When the trenches (card grid) needs to be rebuilt, all tokens will stay in the spot they are at.
7 - The player next to go will automatically flip over the card they ended with the last round since the board had been reset.
8 - Lather, rinse, repeat.
9 - When all the cards have been used up out of the deck (there should be five rounds with enough cards for five full grids), the game is over.
10 - The player with the most saved soldiers (black cards in this case) wins.

Goal of what I would like to see accomplished (besides having a good time):
I want to see players being able to not just leave it to chance cards but also use some strategy with their movement to block off other players from collecting soldiers. However, if they really don't want to think about it, they should have just as good of a time.

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I'll have more later. Art pieces I had done during my quiet spell on here - and more news at 11.