I’ve really been enjoying the board game course. I’m currently playtesting two new games, but have decided not to wait until those are ‘finished’ and will therefore keep moving forward in the course. My mashup idea is based on two very simple boardgames I used to play as a kid:
Snakes and ladders
Labyrinth
Goal: Snakes and Ladders
The goal is the same as in Snakes and Ladders: players have to travel across the board to reach the end. Sometimes they can skip ahead (ladder), sometimes they fall back down (snake).
Mechanic Borrowed: Labyrinth
The board is not a static entity: each turn a player can change it by taking an extra tile and pushing it into the edge of the game board, shifting all the tiles in that row/column and producing a new extra tile.
Extra mechanic:
To remove the RNG element of the dice, players each get 6 movement tokens (labeled 1,2,3,4,5 and 6) instead of a die. That way, after every cycle of 6 turns, they have had the exact same amount of movement points, and they each receive a new set of 6 movement tiles. This introduces a strategy element to the game (which tile do I use on what turn, and what tiles do my opponents have left? If they can only move 1 or 3 tiles forward, can I force them into making a bad move?)