Design

When I created this blog I promised you design as well as reviews/session notes, but I've been so busy on other projects that I've not really done any solid design for a while - I've been limited to scheming while commuting to work.

Thanks to a snow day I'm now at home with some time to spare so here's my first thoughts on Codename: Dollyo a new game I first started about 2 years ago staight after Border Reivers, that has been paused for about 20 months :-)

Like lots of the new German boardgames available at the moment Border Reivers had a victory point mechanism (in the form of first to 40 gold wins the game), but it was possible to circumvent this mechanism by slaughtering your opponents before anyone reached the 40 gold target. In Dollyo I intend to do something similar, but with a couple of new (to me, at least) twists. The first is to limit the actions you can perform by the number of victory points you currently have. I like the idea of this, especially since it 'makes sense' in the setting of Dollyo, and I've not seen it anywhere else. The second is something that I've seen in Citadels by Bruno Faidutti (Fantasy Flight Games), the first person to reach the victory point target (in the case of Citadels the first to eight city districts) is not necessarily the winner - although you do gain an advantage.