The Giant Brain

That’s Genius – Design Goals

So ‘That’s Genius’ has gone through a couple of playtests since I last posted. The core idea is really solid, and it has been a great laugh coming up with stupid inventions and everyone has enjoyed the basic mechanics so far. However a few things are currently in flux, but before I get to that I thought I would talk about design goals.

Whenever I work on a game I try to come up with a set of goals I want to achieve with that project. For B-Movie I wanted something quick playing and amusing, very much a “Beer & Pretzel” game. For ‘That’s Genius’ I still want the element of creation and humour from B-Movie, but I want to get a bit more tactical depth worked into the gameplay. However I don’t want it to drag on forever either so I’ll be aiming for around 30 mins as the playtime. So those goals are:

• Creation based gameplay
• Humour
• Quick to play – 30 mins maximum
• Tactical depth

With that in mind I have changed the following so far:

Card Costs: Are out the window replaced with a good news/bad news style of card abilities. By this I mean you can choose to activate a card ability for free but there will usually be a positive and a negative to that ability.

Random Element: For the next two or three playtests I’ll be playing around with the concept of removing the dice roll completely and just inflicting a cost on a player who chooses to score an invention. This may make the game too easy to win, or just plain boring but it was suggested by one of the players and I think it has some merit.

Card Abilites: These are undergoing constant flux at the moment, currently on the third printing of the cards, so not much point in telling you specifics at the moment. Suffice to say the more tactical elements I am going for will rely heavily on having interesting and balanced abilities.

R&D: The tokens you place on a card to show ownership are called R&D, and I am toying with making them a finite resource, perhaps a way to trigger abilities. Have to play with it and see.

I am off to the drawing board and will be back soon to tell you all how it went.

Iain

Back in the dim and murky past I had a game jotted down in one of my notebooks that was about creating evil plots. The ideas was that you were all Masterminds, in the James Bond sense of the term, competing to make plots whilst employing henchmen and the like to protect your plots. The main mechanic was inspired by B-Movie, but instead of each of you putting together movies seperate from the others, the plots were all interwoven in the middle of the table, a grid of EVIL!

The idea never really came to anything, and it has languished, forgotten until the other day when I wrote down ‘Laser Guided Shark Cannon’. I had been thinking about the evil plot game recently and realised I could use the core idea, that of my grid of words all interconnected, to make a game about making crazy inventions. Thus was born the working title of my new game ‘That’s Genius’.

The game will be a single deck game, where players compete to make inventions. The central mechanic will involve players putting together inventions in the middle of the table, completing them when they think they can, then using those inventions to give them an advantage. The card design will be a bit like B-Movie in that the word on each card will be the core component. However, I have decided to try and work in a bit more tactical play into this game.

Borrowing from games you like is a good way to get a game design project off the ground, and I had thought about using a resource system to pay for each card played. This manifested itself in a borrowed mechanic from the game ‘Infernal Contraption’ by Privateer which is good fun, but I don’t like elimination mechanics that much. In that game you pay for cards you play by discarding any 1 card from your hand, thus giving you some interesting decisions to make. For now, It’s Genius will borrow from this. Each card will supply one or more resources, probably marked Physics, Chemistry and Biology, which will be used to pay for the card you put into the grid.

Each card will come with one or two words on it, like the Monster/Make-up cards in B-movie, the resources it costs to play, the resources it provides and an ability. As I was jotting down ideas for this game I liked the idea that the inventions completed would continue to have some kind of game effect. To this end each card will have part of an ability on it, and when complete inventions can be turned on in order to create a game altering effect. This will need some testing as the more cards remain on the table, the less cards there are to be drawn if I include a reshuffle mechanic. Mmmh.. will have to see how that plays out, may be that the game will last long enough with one go through the deck, but then there might be scaling issues as you add and subtract players.

Anyway, i’m going to get designing and writing. If you want to chat about this idea, or any game ideas you have and would like help with, then head over to the collective endeavour website and I’ll be happy to help out.

Iain