Just in time to distract me before PAX Unplugged, but too late to be added to the fliers that I already printed to bring with me, it's new game time!
Werewolves of London is an area control game with blind bidding and (my favorite thing) two layers of prisoners' dilemma. You play as predatory businesspeople by day, literal predators by night, competing for control of the city. Each area where you have majority ownership earns you two resources, Money and Meat. Money is used to bid on territories, either to acquire new ones or strengthen your position on ones you already own. Meat is your victory points (though extra money that you have at the end of the game can also get you a few extra points).
At the start of each round, you bid on up to three territories. Other players can see the amount that you bid, but not where it's going, until everyone has placed their bids and reveals simultaneously. Whoever has the most money on a territory gets its resources and possibly another bonus of some sort (whoever has the second most might still get some benefit as the minority shareholder). Money stays where you put it, so if another player wants to steal your territory they'll have to bid higher than whatever you already put in.
So, that prisoners' dilemma thing - when werewolves keep mutilating little old ladies, Scotland Yard eventually starts paying attention. There is an investigation meter, and if it ever reaches the end then it's game over, everyone loses. The meter goes up based on how much meat is collected at the end of a round, so players can choose to give up some of their victory points in exchange for slowing the investigation (but this must be declared secretly, so you don't know if anyone else is doing it until it's time for everyone to collect). And once the police do start to investigate, any player can bid on the Scotland Yard territory to bribe them and move the meter back down (this is instead of owning that territory). But once again, since bidding is secret, you don't know who is or isn't doing this until bids are revealed.
Current state of the game is that I have a rough sense of the basic rules, enough to test it, and I have a map that definitely isn't the final one I'm going to use but is enough for me to start some proof-of-concept testing. Just playing around with that has already given me some idea of where to focus with writing decent rules rather than just rough ones. I think there's a lot that still need to do there before I even feel ready to spring this on playtesters, but it's a start.
The other big challenge is with the map. I need to figure out how I want to divide up the territories so that there will be a good number of them and most (if not all) have something interesting, rather than there being a few in the middle with Famous Tourist Attractions and then just a bunch of nondescript residential neighborhoods with slight variations. And I'll need to figure out what are good bonuses to put on these territories that are meaningful for the game and at least kind of accurately reflect what's actually there in real life. Hopefully I can get a few people who know the city better than I do to give me feedback on that. I guess next time I'll have to write a game off of a song about Philadelphia.
EDIT: I'm calling it now - if Werewolves of London is successful, I will write an expansion for it, and it will be Lawyers, Guns, and Money.
