New game: Dwarven Guild of Engineers

 I needed something to occupy my brain while I was mowing the lawn this morning, and what I wound up was figuring out the first-draft version of the scoring system or one of the games I mentioned back in this post.  And with that, it's now developed enough that I can talk about the game in some detail.  So, because I don't have enough other projects to juggle, I will now present to you The Dwarven Guild of Engineers.

DGE is a card-matching game sort of like Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, but with a little more meat on the bones.  Each round, a "Patron" card is drawn with a request, such as "make my mines more efficient" or "help me to travel underwater."  Each player has a hand with a mix of "Base" cards (such as "helmet," "drill," or "flagon") and "Modification" cards (such as "flaming," "photosynthetic," or "with extra cushioning"), and plays one card of each type to make an invention.  Once everyone has played their cards, all players vote on which invention best fits the patron's request, with the limit that no player may vote for their own invention.  So the invention to help with mining might be a Flaming Drill, or maybe a Steam-Powered Hammer, or a Backpack With Extra Cushioning (though that last one might need the player to explain their reasoning a bit).

Now here's where it gets a little more fiddly.  These dwarves can invent all kinds of things, but that doesn't say anything about how well they actually work.  To represent this without getting heavy on character stats or anything, each Patron, Base, and Modification card will have a color on it.  If either of the cards you play matches the patron's color, you get bonus points, even if you didn't win the vote (although winning the vote is still worth more points, even without matching colors).  If both cards have the desired color the bonus increases.  However, after voting the group must also roll the Malfunction Die, which will pick a color that gives penalties if it's on either of your cards (again, bigger penalty if both cards have it).  If the patron and malfunction colors match, then there is no bonus for patron color and the malfunction penalty gets even worse.  Continue until you feel like ending the game, and whoever has the most points wins.

One last wrinkle that I've thought up for this game is "Goblin" cards.  This is a resource each player has to mess with the other players and/or the scoring system while everyone is still working on their inventions.  I haven't come up with too many of these yet, but the kinds of effects I'm thinking of are things like "force another player to trade one card with you" or "reroll the Malfunction die."

Current status - I've got the basic outline you see here, ideas for about 50 Base cards, 35 Modifications, and 15 Patrons, and a handful of Goblins.  I don't know what my target numbers are but I definitely want more cards for each deck, and I need to settle on specifics of how many cards you get and when you draw new ones (seems obvious enough for Base and Mod, but for Goblins I'm really not sure yet).