Unlike just about every game I’ve made before, Woebegon Inbetween might have different mechanics for different parts of play. Tonight I’ve been redesigning the sneaky bits, discarding my original idea of using a blackjack mechanic for something just a little different. I figured I’d write it out here and see if that shakes loose any more ideas.
I’m working with playing cards , and I’ve split the deck, using the numbered cards for actions and saving the aces and faces for something else. Players have hands of three cards for now, and each card played gets redrawn immediately.
Anyways, the pattern of playing hide-and-go-seek within the game provides an interesting challenge. Sneaking isn’t what they’re doing, it’s how they’re doing things. Meanwhile, the NPCs are just going about their business, maybe stumbling across the kids, meaning it’s not really a contested skill check. So instead I’m going to pull out an old favourite of mine, the guessing game.
Both NPCs and kids play cards, which are then revealed and added to the previous card played by the same person. If the totals match, then the kid is caught. But at that point it’s still missing something.
The choice of card needs to matter, so, in addition to the chance of getting caught, there are also target numbers for actions to encourage the playrs to use higher cards to accomplish things, or lower cards to just hide. That adds a bit of tactics to the game, but it still needs to go one step further.
Cooperation is something I really want in the game. It should make accomplishing things easier, but also make getting caught more likely. So, anyone can add their most recently played card to another’s to try to beat a target number to accomplish an action. When an NPC comes around, though, everyone involved will each have to be checked to see if anyone is caught.
Finally, kids just aren’t very good at things, except maybe sneaking, so I decided to handle the chances of accomplishing things differently for them. Kids only use their most recent cards for accomplishing things, while adults use the 2 most recent cards they played. There’s a lot more fiddly bits to these rules, but they’re starting to look workable.
I’m definitely playing the tortoise in this race, but I know from past contests that I can produce a lot of work fast. This time it’s about persistence.
