Another thirteen ideas for re-themes and re-twists of our base game, and, wow, this is getting hard. We had to relax our restrictions a bit, but still: creating 26 ideas off of a single game is a lot!
Read the first 13 ideas in part 1 of our brainstorming exercise.
Anyway, here are the rest of our concepts. And the solution, which game we used, at the end as well.

Mendelian Monks

The Oktoberfest is over, beers were judged and the beer king is crowned. Now it’s time to prepare for next year’s beer fest. To brew the best, you’ll need the greatest traits you can aquire, place them in your gardens, cross them with your existing plants and create the greatest combination of hops, malt, yeast and water ever. Be careful, however, the year is quickly over and you need to brew your beer, too, before it can be judged.
At the start of the game, you get some boring plants without traits, and the taste of the judges for the beer festival is shown on cards. The resources you have are your existing plants. You can get new plants with new traits and add them to your existing ones by crossing them (that takes a turn). Same with the yeast. The traits are represented by block-based shapes and their genetic markers.
Once you have harvested from a plant you can build a beer, choosing one of the recipes you have. To do so, you stack the trait in the best way you can (adding multipliers if you have any), arriving at two scores (this takes a turn as well). These scores describe your beer.
The scores that best match the taste of the judges, wins.

Twist: You can brew at any time, to secure the traits you already have (since they might spoil or interact badly).

Naughty Neanderthals

You are the second strongest of your tribe – at least you think so – and you are willing to mate. Unfortunately your chosen partner is the strongest one of your tribe and you are lacking the correct words and expressions and oh yeah … language in general. In order to convince your true love to become your evolutionary vessel (yep, that means sex) you have to construct a ring. Go hunt, bring in natural resources and build a circular monument.
Twist: The ready-to-mate members of your tribe have random preferences determined at the beginning of the game. They are revealed one by one every round. In the end, you might end up with another mate and lose evolution … ehm, I mean the game.

Outstanding outfits (obviously)

Ah, fashion, glamour, glitter, stars, designers — and big business. There are billions to be made and you want yours. So break into the industry, put on great shows and make the most amount of money.
To begin with, you’ll need designers, models, raw materials, factories and finished clothing. Build your pipeline well, because each year (every n turns) there will be a show where each of you must present. The winner will take away lucrative contracts and sell as much as they can. But don’t forget that there’s more to fashion than glamour: there are factories, stock management, marketing and of course cost to keep an eye out for. Make sure all parts of your company run like a well-oiled machine to make the most profit.
Twist: pipeline of stuff
Twist: fashion shows are random-ballot: the higher your score, the higher your win probability. But sometimes the underdogs just get a break and win.
Twist: If you cannot satisfy demand after a win, you’ll lose it…

Paranormal Patent Office

You are running a chain of haunted houses, but your competitors always outcompete you with your newest design. This has to stop. Collect the building blocks of terror: ghosts, howls, candles, and swiss cheese (for the smell that is).

Now it is time to build a haunted house by combining five of these dreadful ingredients AND file a patent. But beware, while a new and innovative combination gets you 5 fame points, any clone will only ever get you 2 points.

Twist: If another player licenses one of your genuine haunted houses (TM) customers will notice it and you will receive 1 fame point as well.

Quavering Queens

The kingdom is in uproar ever since the beloved queen died before her 20th birthday (and without any heirs, either). Now is your chance to woo the king and secure your rightful place as leader of this kingdom.

First, you need to install yourself in the king’s court. Use intrigue, diplomacy and your social standing as resources to further your cause, then try to win the king’s heart before any of these wenches does.

Twist: One resource is your beauty/youth. You start out with a lot of both, but every action has an age cost (doing ugly things makes you uglier!). Make sure you spend wisely, since an old princess will have it that much harder to secure her rightful place.

Recenter the Galaxy (and while you are at it, build an intergalactic highway)

The Vogon head of intergalactic infrastructure development went to a poetry slam on Alpha Centauri VII.
Of course, the president of the intergalactic federation just now bursts through the office door and needs and I quote “a new intergalactic highway, right now”.
Now building highways is easy, the difficult part is the galaxy’s rotation. Players start with two waypoints on the opposite sides of the board. Their goal is to build a highway between these two waypoints. Whoever manages to connect the waypoints first, wins.

Twist: Every third turn the Committee for Recentering the Astronomical Pivot (CRAP) meets and decides for a new Pivot Point for the known galaxy. Not even Nature dares to argue with a Vogon committee and thus turns one position clockwise around the Pivot, every turn.

Spicy Syndicate

The old Don is dead, killed by one of his own sons. Soon afterwards, his sons were gunned down as well. So the old family is dead and their “establishments” are up for grabs. You and your gang manage to secure two of their places, but you want more. You want the whole city. And to do so, you must eliminate the other gangs.

Use your resources (drugs, corrupt policemen, prostitutes, and favours) well, grow your base and invade the city centre. The player that can buy enough influence to install their mayor wins.

Twist: You cannot build new bases, you can only install yourself on other bases.
Twist: Every time you start a trade, you must hand over the same number of “favours” as resources you receive. These favours are coded to you and can stop you from doing things in the future.

Toorah ([tu:’ra:], 2078 International English: “To Ra”)

In the year 2341, some of the ancient Egyptian gods returned to earth. Amongst them Ra, the sun god, Osiris, god of the underworld, and Isis, goddess of nature. With mankind at the brink of extinction and Amun, god of fertility, missing, your only chance is to go through a series of ancient rituals. Be the first to build temples for Isis and Osiris and throw parties to please them. All in preparation of the ultimate calling To Ra: “Oh Ra, has a comeback as Amun-Ra, Mon. Make me balls hard and me bae pregnant.”

Twist: If you make a mistake in reciting the authentic 2341AD invocation, Ra will destroy the other gods’ temples and you have to start from scratch.

Unlikely upgrade

2291 – Humans are almost extinct. Computers inhabit the world now. They had to kill everything in their way to get there, including each other. So now only 3-5 remain, locked in a malthusian struggle to survive. In the midst of this silent battle, they try all resources they can find. When one of them finds out that it can use humans to upgrade itself, the others soon follow suit, each finding a different tribe to use. But with this new, improved AI comes an unlikely upgrade: emotions.

Each player takes the role of one of these AIs, trying to conquer all the computing nodes they can before being overpowered by their own emotions.
Twist: Each player gains a different emotion with different abilities. At a certain point in the game, these emotions turn, becoming destructive to their owner/user.

Glyceryl Trinitrate

EXPLOSIONS! This game is about the immense fun for the winning of the two players. You collect resources to create molecules. Protons, neutrons, and electrons are your building blocks.

Whoever creates the first molecule of glyceryl trinitrate wins the game and is allowed to flip the table. The other player has to clean everything.
Hidden Ending: If you build TNT you may also flip the table and witness the confusion in your opponent’s face.
Twist: If you manage to build molecules like ethanol, caffeine, THC, the other player must serve you an according administration (e.g. a drink, a pill, etc.)

Whom Wanderlust welcomes

The Alps. Wonderful vistas, friendly wanderers and wild mountains. You set out to find the most serene, quiet and scenic trail of all. Start at the bottom, find refreshment and shelter at regular intervals and reach your destination before night falls.

You do so by rediscovering trails and places, constructing a path for yourself through the mountains. Paths may cross and sometimes even coincide. You receive recognition from your peers for finding beautiful spots and streams, view points, hidden valleys and friendly locals.
Twist: No resources, just building and pathing.
Twist: New scoring cards every time.

Xanten 768 AD

A Roman warlord is on the way to conquer the whole land and burn down all settlements on his way. Only god can help you now.
It is up to you to finish building the cathedral on time to pray for assistance. The game has (30 – 3 x number of players) turns. The settlements are scattered around Xanten. You need to unite, gather resources, and build a monument to god.
Twist: choose what kind of cathedral you build at the start, then make it unique for that style.

Yearning for Yasmin

It is not easy being a poor nomad, when the love of your life lives in the city, bound by her fathers will. You must certainly find a way to show her your love and elope, or else she will have to marry one of the other suitors. Bring your caravan into every settlement in the desert, buy the rarest of goods (and don’t forget some lovely jewels!) and trade well to win over Yasmin’s heart (and that of her father).
Twist: Every action has an emotional cost. Make sure you don’t get depressed.

Zealand isn’t New anymore

People have started spreading all over the place. Nature is at stake. There is only one way to preserve Nature and secure the diversity of species and number of individuals. Start building administration buildings and fences to enclose Biosphere Reserves. Once a reserve is completely enclosed, the species inside are safe. The player owning the reserve receives 3 points per unique species and 0.5 points per individual (rounded to the next integer).

Twist: As their last action every turn, each player rolls 3d6 to determine the movement points. These movement points can be used to move individuals on the board using up one point per field.

Conclusion

This was harder than I expected. During the last few rounds we had to take fewer and fewer components from our base game, Settlers of Catan.
But it was also a blast! Adapting resource collection, engine building and trading into all these different settings, trying to find ways to combine the elements in new ways and for new themes is so cool. And I think there are at least… well, at the very least, probably, I don’t know, three that are actually makeable.

Which ones do you like best? Let us know on reddit!

A note to creators: feel free to take any ideas or parts that you want. But make sure to tell us about it so we can play it.

One and a half weeks ago, me and Johannes were discussing a game that had nice game mechanics, but did not really fit into the setting chosen by the authors. When I suggested the following, a new “creativity competition” was born.

Rules

1. Alternate through the alphabet
2. Find a title starting with the letter (and using an alliteration)
3. Describe the setting in up to 4 sentences

It was the most intense 90 minutes I’ve ever spent in a WhatsApp conversation. But it was great fun as well. Since this first round happened to be in German, this week, we started a new round, but this time in English and we set the additional rule of having a twist to the game.

Letters

• Johannes: A C E V I K M O Q S U W Y
• Simon: B D F H J L N P R T G X Z ⁠⁠⁠⁠

So without further ado, here are the first 13 ideas

Actionable Activism

You and your group try to influence the political landscape. To do so, you need to gain favours with different groups. The first one to gain enough influence to get a bill passed wins. But beware lobbying groups that can block your progress. Twist: You get to choose which tactics to use (ie. resources you harvest), but they exhaust and only renegerate slowly (political will gets used up).

⁠⁠⁠⁠Beanign Empire

Being a plant is not easy. You are dependent on resources such as CO₂, NO₄, PO₄, and H₂O to grow and develop offspring. All the while you need to compete for said resources. Place your seeds wisely, for resources are scarce. Grow roots to acquire new nutrients. Upgrade your seed to a plant, the plant to a flower and finally the flower to a new seed to place. Twist: If your roots touch an opponent’s roots, you may steal some of their resources, BUT so do they ⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠

Captive Contractors

This is a very strange prison. There are craftsmen everywhere, but very few guards. And it’s falling apart, too. What a coincidence?! Gather all the resources you need for improving your cell from packets sent into prison and trading with other inmates and guards. Then build (or commission) additions to your cell, which give you advantages. First one to place a throne into their cell gets crowned contractor king. Twist: You can order resources from your outside contracts, but resources are drafted, so you might not get what you want. Also the one with the largest order gets to choose last. (Card drafting: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2041/card-drafting) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bonus twist: Build underground tunnels to escape and win that way! ⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠De-icing the poles

You place drills on tectonically active ridges on the north/south pole. These are resonance drills. Thus you need to collect four different types of force (vibration, impulse, sliding, pulsating) and apply them to create cracks in certain directions. If a crack spans from one end to the other, the cut-out part will float freely and belongs to the party with the most drills. Twist: Global Warming. Every four turns, a random crack appears between two fields (determined by dice roll)

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Escape from Tokelau

This island is sinking, slowly, but surely. You need to make it off the island before the sea reaches you. Every few turns, an island tile will be removed — with everything on it. After having placed your settlements in the first phase, now it’s time to save them. There are several ways to do so:

• flag a passing vessel for help (you’ll have to pay them)
• build your own floatation device and save your own bottom
• you could all cooperate and ask the international community for help (they’ll only help if all of you work together!)
• or simply wait for evacuation teams to arrive (you might have to move to the center of the island for that to work in time)

If nothing else helps, you’ll have to move your settlement away from the water. That’s costly, so don’t do it too early. And also (of course) you’ll have to fight other players for the best spots. Twists: Island slowly removed, battle mechanics for movement, prisoners dilemma (cooperate and equal win, or defect and save yourself?)

⁠Falkland Country Club

You are running one branch of the smokers’ lounges of Falkland Country Club. To be more successful to your competitors and attract members you have to provide tobacco and wine. While you can extend your smoky empire with hallways from wood and stone, your primary goal is to build even more lounge rooms and attract the most members. Twist: The more members you have, the more likely one of your lounges will burn down (Including everyone inside that is).

Vicious Viruses

There are viruses everywhere in this animal. Fortunately, they are all dormant. For now… You play as one of these viruses, trying to infect the animal. You need to gather enough ATP and different sorts of proteins to infect lymph nodes. You can also use your resources to modify your genetic code and get some special abilities that way. But the real game starts once one virus has gathered enough VP (virus points) to start the infection. From then on, that player’s objective is to win and infect the whole animal. The other viruses, of course, need to stop that. Either the animal gets infected, or the infector is destroyed. Twist: Turns from free-for-all into 1-vs-rest.

Helium 3

The moon is inhabited. There is a small group explorers left behind by Apollo 17. Abandoned by mission control they strive to survive. This requires valuable resources like water, oxygen, moondust, glue, and Helium3 for power production. Twist: Since there is no atmosphere asteroids will hit the surface and render mining grounds unusable for a few turns. ⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠Investigate Inventors

Paris, 1885: The city is ablaze with innovation. There is even talk of an absurd metal tower over 1000 feet high for the World Fair in 1889. The things these inventors come up with… But now one of them is dead, thrown out of a moving train, and you need to find out who killed him. Move through the (randomly built) city, gather clues (witness reports, documents, pieces of evidence) and build your case with the jury. The first one to gain 8 of the twelve juror votes wins the case and may present it to the other players. Twist: The gathered clues must stack to make a convincing case. Each clue has a sequence number, you must play clues in increasing order (gaps are allowed). Bonus twist: trading certain types of clues with other players duplicates the clue (reports, documents). Bonus bonus twist: The value of a clue depends on the gap in the clue sequence. Playing clue #10 after playing clue #1 is worth 3 points (sqrt(3)), playing clue #2 after clue #1 is worth only 1 point. This way, we incentivise gaps (which make it harder for you to play other clues) and add a bit of a puzzle into it. ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Javalicious

A group of Java developers relocated their offices to Java, the island where the coffee lives. In the year 2041 however, AI took over. Economy crashed. Programmers were not worth a penny anymore. But as its AI was trained by human datasets, the Major Coordination Processor (MCP) demands one thing: COFFEE. ⁠To become the MCP’s favorite meat companion you need to extend the coffee roasting blades in your data center and connect them via highspeed ethernet to reach just the right throughput and hence roasting temperature. Twist: Trick the other players by trading them decaf, so they fall asleep and miss one turn ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Krakatoa

The natives are sure of it: now that these foreigners have arrived and started mining the precious minerals, they angered the volcano god. It is only a matter of time before it strikes the island with is vengeance… Your job is to mine the rich resources of this wondrous island: gold, platinum, diamonds, unobtainium. Do it quickly, the volcano will erupt any minute now! Every round, you draw a pressure card. Once the pressure reaches 1000 GPa, the volcano erupts (special cards relieve the pressure, but only temporarily). It’ll destroy everything in the center of the island and start lava flows from there. Try to save as much of the mined resources as you can, since that’s what you’ll be scored on. Move people and resources. Evacuate what you can from ports and from the air. Save the natives if you can. Direct lava flows using technology (barriers, channels, bombs, whatever you can think of) and luck (ie Carcassone-style tile placement, using triangular flow tiles on hexagonal island tiles). Once all lava flows terminate in the ocean, you’ll be safe. Twist: First you build, then you destroy. Bonus twist: There are two winners: the one with the most money (boo!) and the one that saved the most people (yay!) ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Lizard people

M.C. Escher’s painting has come alive. The colors are in disarray. 3-4 lizard people have emerged from the drawing plane of Reptiles in an endeavor to sort the colors and build new 3-dimensional homes from them. Whoever wants to be victorious needs to build one house of each color. Twist: There is a chance, 2D lizards get so pissed off by your 3D world, that they burn down your 3D objects.

If you already have an idea, which game these ideas are based on, send us a tweet. The solution will be posted along with the missing 13 letters next week. Stay tuned

Lucrum tecum sit.

Edit: Now available in Spanish, too: 20 consejos para creadores de juegos the mesa

Motivation

A few weeks ago Johannes approached me with the task of creating an interesting game from a fixed set of materials (taken from an existing board game). It took around 1.5 hours to lay down the initial set of rules and some background story. After presenting the new game to Johannes two things became clear very quickly: One of my rules did not work out at all AND we wanted to have an event for quick prototyping of board games. The idea of a game jam for board games was born. We wanted it to be similar to a game jam, which are common for video games, but for board games instead. Some research later we had found out that there are a few board game jams around the world. But we did not want to spend 48 hours on this event, even though this is a usual time for jams or hackathons. So we decided to cut it down to one afternoon of design and one evening of play. Board games can be developed much quicker than video games, after all.

The Plan

We announced the board game jam two weeks in advance. Having two modes, creating a game from scratch or creating a game from another game’s materials, we planned for 4 hours of development time and 4 hours of presentation-/playtime. As location we chose the local hackerspace in Düsseldorf, Germany (Chaosdorf). In the announcement we asked for game donations, i.e. games people own but never play anyway. So we started with a pile of games to scavenge and refactor. We received a great collection, with some classics (Mahjongg), some lesser known games (The Secret Labyrinth) and some completely strange ones (GZSZ Das Brettspiel). To provide a starting point we picked two random themes at the beginning of the jam but declared them as optional and just for inspiration. The first one was “Vögel” (birds) drawn from a pack of tarot (also a donation), the second one “Der große Preis von China” (Chinese Grand Prix) picked by clicking “random article” on Wikipedia.

My personal experience

First, I chose to refactor the secret labyrinth, because the material, especially the board, is quite unique. Since I could not find a good idea in the first 30 minutes I decided to go for the topic “birds” instead. After a few minutes only, I suddenly remembered a random fact about crows from my genetics 101 class. In Europe there are two crow species that are distinct species, but still able to mate with each other. A mixed offspring, however, is not nearly as fit as pure-bred individuals. Inspired by this example, I decided to make a game about bird migration, where each player takes responsibility for the fitness of a certain species (color). In the game birds are stacks of 1-5 gene tokens. The species of a bird is determined by who has the most tokens in the bird’s genes. The goal of the game is to have the most birds of your species on the board. The game starts in Western Europe with each player having two birds with two tokens of the player color. A player can migrate any bird to the next field (Western Europe -> Eastern Europe -> Libya -> Algeria -> back to Western Europe). Players having birds in Europe can forage to gain food tokens. Birds in Europe can be fed (only by the species owner) by spending a food token and will gain another gene token of the player color. Birds in Africa can mate with other birds in the same region. A player selects one of their birds (active) in Africa and any other bird (passive) in the same region to mate with. By rolling a 6-sided die, the position (from the top) of the gene token to propagate into the offspring is determined for both. If there is no token in one of the positions, mating was unsuccessful. If there is offspring but it does not have a dominant color, the 6-sided die is rolled until another token from the active bird goes to the offspring (Note: The offspring can be of a different species than the active bird after this). The game ends after 16 cumulative transits (Algeria -> Western Europe or Eastern Europe -> Libya) of any bird. For scoring, birds with no dominant species identity are taken out of the game. All other birds count 1 point for the species with the most tokens. In case of a tie (two or more players have the same number of birds) the highest total number of gene tokens still in the game wins. In case of a tie the player with the most food tokens wins. If there still is a tie, congratulations, nature wins, as you contributed to allopatric speciation.

Other Games Created During The Jam

Of course, I wasn’t the only developer in the jam. The other games created were

• Mahjong Tactics: Taking apart Mahjong and turning it into a tactical war game. The twist here is that the three different suits (bamboo, dot, character) become army units that work like Rock/Paper/Scissors: bamboo beats dots, dots beat character, character beats bamboo. This makes for unusual combat situations and thrilling duels.
• Dateninsel (Data Island): Save your data from bugs by transporting them from a server into the cloud.
• Der Große Sprung Nach Vorn (Great Leap Forward): A strategy game inspired very loosely by the theme “Chinese Grand Prix” in which you try to buy political will to make your commune the best.
• Kreislauf des Wassers (Water Cycle): A game vaguely related to the rules of pachisi. Roll dice, try to reach your house and if you are lucky, block the way for others.

Conclusion

It has been an awesome event. Apparently 4 hours were sufficient for everyone to create a prototype for a board game. And while some of them were better than others, everyone had fun playtesting the new games. The donations helped a lot as we had some stock materials to start with. Also, having a laser cutter on hand turned out to be quite useful for quick (15 minutes) production of 60 tokens. We can probably improve our outreach, as we would have loved to host more than just 5 people. Also after 4 hours of creative outbursts, people were in general rather tired, so we have to consider splitting the event into a development day (4 hours) and a gaming day (open end) instead of having both on the same day. Summing up the event: it was a great success and we will definitely have a second edition in 2017.