[BASIC] Main Quest: Ideas

MAIN QUEST
STEP 1: Generate Ideas (for BASIC game designers)

If you’ve never designed a complete game before this course, follow this set of constraints.

Come up with ideas for creating a board game, card game, or tile-laying game (that is, it must either have a board, cards, or tiles as physical components). It may have more than one of these components, and it may involve additional components beyond these (such as dice or pawns). You may choose any theme you want, as long as it is original – do not use an existing IP (intellectual property). In short, if your work would violate someone else’s trademark or copyright, don’t do it. You will undoubtedly work with other people’s IP at various points in your own career; take the opportunity now to do something original with your ownIP.

I’m going to place two more restrictions to help you. First, you may not make a trivia game, or any other game that relies on large amounts of content (such as Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Apples to Apples, or Cranium). This is purely for the purpose of keeping your scope limited; if you have to generate 250 cards with unique trivia questions on them, it will leave you far less time for playtesting the game mechanics. I would put Trading Card Games (like Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon TCG) in this category as well, since it requires so much time to create a large number of cards.

Second, you may not use “roll-and-move” mechanics in any form. Do not throw dice and then move a pawn around the track. Do not use a spinner or a teetotum or card draws or any other random-number-generating device to determine what a player does on their turn. There are several reasons for this prohibition. First, the mechanic is highly overused, and it is practically impossible for you to make a game that will not feel like a clone of Monopoly, Trouble, Sorry!, Chutes & Ladders, or any of the other myriad games that rely on this as their core mechanic. Second, the mechanic essentially makes the key decision each turn for the player, so the game is making interesting decisions but the player is not. By divorcing player intentionality from the game’s outcome, you usually end up with a game that is not particularly fun to play (no matter how fun it is to design).

ONE IDEA PER POST. Feel free to post up to 3 ideas.

After you have posted, read two (2) other posts in this FORUMS and offer constructive analysis and critique. Your feedback can be helpful during the design process.

Please select the Main-Quests folder when posting your initial post and include hashtag #Basic.