Hi, the game I’m working on right now, is called Tragedy. It’s a 1-4 player game about trying to get 4 employees out of a building, flooding and burning at an alarming rate. My issue is that the layout of the board is the player’s choice (they have to make their own office, with the special tiles provided) and the disasters that will occur is entirely random- this means that you can optimize the fun out of the game, or alternatively the dice can optimize the fun out of the game. I only just realized this, after writing the rules manual! In the comments I will leave a link to my rule book.
Here’s my Rulebook!
Please note that I haven’t gotten around to making the Iconography yet!
This is also my very first Rulebook!
Is the problem that the rules have to be too broad because of the players setting up the board combined with the dice rolling? I’m reminded of Zombie Kids Evolution with your ideas, and am wondering if you should have two Premade boards with varying player amounts (2 on one side, 3 -4 on the other) rather than a player designed board.
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Hmm… I was thinking of that, but all of my play testers bounced back saying that the building mechanic is where the game is most strategic. It could be a good idea to try making presets, so I have more control with my game, besides, i can then add special rules for each scenario if I want to!
What if you gave the players a randomized pool of options for selecting the board’s layout, so they don’t necessarily always have access to the best possible options and instead have to figure out ways to work with what they’re given? Maybe introduce a variable difficulty setting where they get more or fewer options based on how hard it is?
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Can you elaborate on what you mean? What kind of constraints could I add?
Also, when talking about variable difficulty, remember that it’s a board game 
Well it sounds like the issue with the game is that it’s possible to have an optimized setup for the board tile placement and that it takes the fun out of the game. Is there any element of randomness to how the tiles get placed? And are there exactly as many tiles as there are squares to place them on? If so, maybe you could add more tiles, shuffle them all, and draw 48, but then be sure to shuffle in certain types of tiles that the game needs to be winnable? Then you wouldn’t be working with the exact same setup every time. Also, maybe players could only draw a set number of tiles from the deck at a time to place, so they wouldn’t be able to completely plan the layout ahead of time, and you could reduce the number of tiles they’d be allowed to draw at a time to make it harder? Just some thoughts. I did a cursory read of the rules, so apologies if any of what I’ve said is way off or is already covered in there.
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Right now there is no randomness in board creation. It definitely could use some random constraints!
I’m thinking of a deck of cards, that you draw after you make your board, that’ll completely wreck any unfair strategy (e.g. there could be a 20% chance that your water pump ends up on the top of the office, so all electricity is in danger).
Alternatively, your option of having a restricted pool is also an awesome idea- I’ll look into it!
In a similar ‘escape within time’ game, I had a fixed layout for the board, with some squares marked as positions at which something would happen. I created cards and tokens which denoted locations, events encounters etc. - more of each than places on the board. The tokens look identical on the back, but their face denotes whether they are location/encounter/event. At the start of the game the tokens are placed face down on the table and shuffled, then players take turns pacing a token, face down in marked positions on the board. The card decks are shuffled and placed face down near the board. So - when play starts the players do not know what effect landing on any paritcular token square is going to have. All that may be too random for you but simply having locations on cards and then drawn during play may generate some uncertanty and unpredictabilty.
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