I’m curious on how many cards you’ll do since the amount of cards is technically limiting strategy is it not?

@sundancer – absolutely. Well, maybe limiting actions, rather than strategy. Like I said, it’ll either be genius, or a disaster.

I took myself along to a local boardgaming club the other day (hey, it’s been nearly two years since The Event Stay Indoors and there’s only so much Uno my wife I can play against each other til either of us need a new challenge – although Uno Flip is a great variation on the game). I played a couple of games over the three hours-or-so and it was really cool.

It also made me realise that most fantasy football games (I’m looking at you, Blood Bowl, squarely between the eyes) take far too long, and a game that lasts about an hour – and absolutely not more than 90 minutes – is just right (it’s also the length of an actual football game; recreating a 90 minute sport in a 4-hour boardgame is where BB always seems to fall down).

I was introduced to the game Manila and was pretty impressed. I didn’t always fully understand what was going on (being new to the game and not knowing all the rules up front) but I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game.

After getting my head around the rules, the abstract mechanics (not necessarily the rules themselves) felt ideal for a sports game – in that I felt that on each turn your options are limited, you choose what you want to do and sometimes even just the “least worst option” (invest in a ship, “bet” against ships making to harbour, buy options to influence – positively or negatively – the progress of each ship) then the game “plays out” – you roll some dice and move some ships but after making your decisions, you have no direct control over what happens. In the next “round” you get to respond to what happened by choosing differently this time around.

There’s no “micro-managing” of pieces; you make a larger, general decision and hope things work out for you. There’s no “well if I go here and this roll doesn’t work out, that can go there, but I’d better make this dice roll first, in case that doesn’t work out….” you just go “if this comes off, I’ll be quids in” and then see where the boats end up and adjust your strategy from there.

It just felt like a nice mechanic for a game where you play the role of a sports coach: you send your players out, you give them instruction, you hope they execute the game plan and you change things if it’s not working out. This idea also borrows heavily on one of my favourite ever turn-based computer games, Laser Squad Nemesis – where you plot what you want your guys to do, submit your orders, each player’s turn plays out together, then you deal with how things went (or didn’t). It adds a bit of chaos and uncertainty without everything being whittled down to “well I need to throw a 4 or less, so that’s a 2/3 chance, but if I do this, that’s a 5 or more which is only a 1/3 chance, so I’ll do x”.

The whole idea might be a complete waste of time.

I’ll let you know if it is 😉

(and crow about it, if it isn’t).