Design: CivDice

Although Cattle Baron is the boardgame design I've made my priority, I have several other game ideas that I hopefully will have time to work on this year. Of these, I am most excited about a design with a working title of CivDice that I came up with around April of last year. I actually went so far as to blog a few entries about it on the Board Game Designer's Forum (where I called it Civilia).

I chose to prioritize Cattle Baron as my goal, because CivDice is much more involved and is going to take a lot of playtesting and tweaking to get right. However, I thought it might be fun to share some of the ideas that make up this design.

After being inspired by this post by Shannon Appelcline on the now-extinct Gone Gaming blog, my goal was to create a boardgame that simulated building a civilization and having your empire compete against those of other players. The primary constraints were that this game would have systems for expanding your empire, advancing your technology, trade, and warfare and be playable in two hours or less. This is a major challenge and I'll be happy if I can even come close.

Not surprisingly, CivDice features lots of dice. I certainly understand that dice have a poor reputation among eurogamers, but I'm hoping I'll be able to use them here without creating a game that rests primarily on luck. I'm of the opinion that by using medium-sized pools of dice, plenty of choices for how to use them and sufficient methods of altering dice rolls, the luck will be cut down to acceptable levels.

Players will roll dice equal to the current population of their civ, and the dice must be spent in order to move, attack, collect resources, or acquire resources, buildings, or advisors. Player's dice will be public knowledge and players will take turns spending them, so the order in which you do things will be important when competing for items.

One of the wrinkles I'm trying to include is to dovetail the dice mechanic neatly into manuevering on the map. The map will be a tiling of equilateral triangles, with cities and units resting at intersecting points. This means that from any location (that is not on the edge of the board), there are six neigboring triangles (some or all of which contain resources) and six adjacent places to move. Of course, there are also six sides on a standard die to make this a perfect way to generate player options.

Other new twists I plan to add involve the technology tree. Other than the default method of eliminating all other players (which will be very difficult in most cases), all victory conditions or means to earn victory points will be acquired through advanced technology upgrades. You won't even know what you need to do to win until you've advanced a bit along the tech tree. I am also planning a simple system for technologies to have general requirements, while not locking players into a set advancement path.

As a side note, I played a few games last night (Fairy Tale, Vegas Showdown, Pillars of the Earth) to bring the game count to 35. Also, I'm planning to make my more durable Cattle Baron prototype this weekend.

Third and Fourth Life?

By now almost anyone with any technical savvy has heard of Second Life. For the few who haven’t, Second Life is a virtual online world. Unlike just about every other virtual online world, the makers of Second Life don’t provide content for you to collect, kill, race, destroy or otherwise interact with. What they do provide are tools for you to make your own content and a virtual currency so you can buy/sell it from/to other users. This currency can be traded for real U.S. dollars on their custom exchange so that developers can actually profit from their creations.

Second Life is pretty amazing and has received plenty of recognition as “the next big thing”, but I’ve always felt there were a few things holding it back from widespread acceptance. First is a heavy bandwidth requirement – pages load slowly just because that many 3-D objects are enough to clog up most users’ networks. Second, 3-D creation tools are complicated enough to stump the average user. And finally, new users need to download a client just for this purpose. Eventually, I thought at one time, the technology will catch up enough to eliminate the first two as issues (and the third one isn’t that big) and Second Life will supplant the World Wide Web. Although that "eventually" seemed to be a ways off.

However, two new software projects are underway that might change all that: Whirled and MetaPlace. Both of them allow users to create their own content. Both plan to have their own currency that can be exchanged for real currency. Most importantly, both of them are web-based. Most web-based content is more segregated, and smaller, so bandwidth should no longer be an issue. Web-based content is generally much easier to create than 3-D content, so the learning curve of the editing tools is far less of a barrier. Finally, all content can be accessed by anyone who has a web browser (meaning everyone) with no additional client download and can presumably can use links to and be linked from existing web pages.

Both projects are currently in Alpha. I think whichever gets to market first will have a huge edge in becoming widely adopted. I could also imagine either or both being adopted/bought/merged with one of the major social networking sites. It will be interesting to see what happens.