Wednesday, October 4

The tales of a casual games designer: Part 9

I've decided on the slightly dangerous concept of giving my game an extra 'gimmick' which will be that it will come with a CD with, hopefully, about 40 voice tracks on. If desired, before playing, the players will place the CD in their CD player and set it to shuffle. Then when hey're decided on their teams, the stage etc they play one of the CD tracks at random which will introduce the day's weather and how it will change the stats of certain riders. For example - "Well, it's Bastille Day today and the French riders will be doing everything they can to take the victory on such an important day! For this stage, all French riders can increase oneof their stats by one point", or there'll be bad weather ones that have negative outcomes.

Of course you don't have to play WITH it, but been thinking about it and it adds a nice bit of flavour to the game. Thoughts?

3 comments:

Mal said...

Sounds excellent to me. :) Sure, you could've used cards or dice, but the reinforced theming you get from the commentary sounds great.

Jackson Pope said...

That's a great idea! As you say - the game would work fine without it, but it would definitely add to the setting and aid suspension of disbelief. It's also nice to combine traditional board games with digital technology in a way that's more interesting than video Trivial Pursuit.

Anonymous said...

Yup, I'll add my voice of assent to the enthralled masses..
Sounds like a really neat idea, and a CDR possibly won't add all that much to the variable production cost of the game. Could you include an introductory piece of music too? Probably not anything copyrighted.

I'd include a table in the rulebook that summarises the effects, so that gamers who can't or won't use the CD can still get the randomising effect.

Speaking of CDs that come with games, Manila by Zoch Verlag came with a demonstration CD.. showing you how to play the game!