[INDIGO] is a mancala co-operative card game set in the vastness of space. Plays 1-2 players.
Potential Name Ideas:
Spaceology
✅ Kernel Access
Violet Summers
Category:
Legacy | Card Game | Mancala
Theme:
Adventure | Horror | Space
The aim is for 2 modes of play. Campaign and Scenario.
Scenario:
Players build a 30 card deck and play through an Act (We consider this the more casual way to play, for game night where you’d want to introduce the game to your friends or just revisit a specific part of the story)
Campaign:
The ‘main’ way to play the game. Players start with an initial deck of 20 cards and play through a series of Acts. In between Scenes, players will have opportunities to purchase cards to grow/change their deck through out the story. Aim is for players to keep the same deck throughout the entire arc of the series.
Players select a constructed deck they’ve created / modified for the mode of play.
They’ll reference the Acts cards for setup and any deck modifications.
A play session is an Act, made up of a series of Scenes. (usually 2-4 scenes per Act, and 3 Acts per box)
The Act card is double sided and tells you what cards to use each scene. It also acts as an objective guide, giving players goals to aim for.
Players can choose up to 2 actions.
1. Focus. One of the end zone actions on the player mancala board. Player draws the amount of tokens on the space worth of cards and then distributes the tokens as they wish on their skill spaces.
2. Use a skill. (Social or Combat) Selecting one space on your mancala board, and deciding if you’re using the Social or Combat action from that space, then selecting a Target to apply that action on to. (This usually means placing tokens on a card) Then redistributing tokens from that space left or right, one token on each space until you run out or reach an end zone, where the remainder, if any, tokens are dropped off.
At the moment the Skills are: (1 from each category is randomly paired with each other at the beginning of a character’s campaign)
Social – Aggressive, Calmly, Comedic, Witty
Combat – Physical, Technical, Defensive, Special.
3. Outburst. One of the end zone actions on the player’s mancala board. Allows you to your character’s special ability, but with drawbacks. The drawback is you have to exile x cards, and put x negative tokens out. (each character has unique costs) Often these are very powerful ‘game breaking’ effects, unique to each character. After you do your outburst effect, redistribute tokens on that space in a snake pattern among your skills.
4. Move. Based on your character’s limits, you can move your player token around on the map.
5. Play a card. Your hand has no limits. Your mancala board has limited spots around it for cards. (At the moment, the limit is 6) Playing a card, doesn’t necessarily activate it. Few cards have an active effect when played, most are passive and are instead triggered or activated as an action.
6. Activate a card. Select a card near in play near your mancala board, activate the card and do what it says, usually involves selecting a skill and moving tokens around.
7. Draw a Card. Players can draw 1 card as an action. Think of this like digging in your bag or pausing to think. (It is more efficient to use the Focus action instead, as you can draw multiple cards with that action. But this is a good backup. )
You must choose 2 actions. After you’ve taken your 2nd action, the turn is passed to the next player. Once all players have taken a turn, the setting takes a turn. (The scene makes progress?)
Referencing the Main Location card, the player changes the board state as it states. This usually means an Activity token is placed on each location with room, and new conflicts are revealed. Note: There can only be 3 conflicts out at a time. (4 in 2 player, 5 in 3p and 6 in 4p) If the conflict pool is full, new conflict cards are stacked in a queue. When a conflict card is removed, it’s replaced with the top card in the conflict queue.
[Core Set] In our large 9×9″ box. 6 compartments:
4 for Cards. (216 Cards) 2 for tokens.
2x Matchbox (tokens)
4x Tuckboxes (cards)
2x Player Mancala Boards
1x Weather board
2-3x Location boards (Scenes will use different maps)
??x Cardboard Tokens (weather / Noise / location tetris pieces)
10+x Enemy Tokens (many unique)
2x Wood Player Tokens
20x Player Mancala tokens
A number of positive/negative generic mancala tokens
x mental tokens
x physical tokens
x activity tokens
(The above could be the same tokens, just double sided. Activity tokens, the colors don’t matter)
1x Metal $100 Bitlith.
[Chapters] in our small 5×9″ boxes. 3 compartments.
2 for cards. 1 for tokens.
(Components for 1 player)
Aim is for depth of the box to have space for storing cards horizontally with a dividing tab sticking up. Somewhere around the 3″ mark.
Mancala Actions:
The way I currently have the rules, on your turn you can pick a skill and essentially test it against something else in play (usually an enemy or a location) I think this means that every enemy will need a ‘response’ stat for all 8 skills. Some guy from the government shows up to take you in. You can respond to him by communicating aggressively, comedically, calmly, or with wit. You can also punch him, wince, use an item on him, or do your special move (blow him up with your mind? Is magic part of this?). Some of these are going to be more effective than others. (Shown as lower numbers on the enemy card) And I suppose if you surpass those values on the enemy card, you can place ‘damage’ tokens on them. If he has a wit value of 6 and you use your wit skill when it’s at 8, you’re doing 2 damage to him. (I’m thinking damage is just an abstract way of representing mental and physical harm to something) witting an enemy to death might be difficult. Essentially talking them out of their job to hunt you down. not likely, instead you might wit them one turn and then next turn lay em out with a punch.
I like where the mancala token spread is at right now. One end zone you lay the tokens out like a snake patter over the skills, essentially evenly distributing them. And the other end zone lets you put them out wherever you wish. Hoping this gives players some sense of agency. I also imagine, depending on which of your skills touch the end zones, you may try to maximize their potential by capping your tokens there around 3-4 so they stay out of the end zones when using them. I like the logic puzzle there. I think so far, the games biggest enemy will be analysis paralysis. If you’re not thinking 3 turns ahead… it won’t be the game’s fault. and there might be more pressure to ‘get it right’, and thus longer turns. Which might be fine in a low player count game! I know I like to take my time in solo games.
I also like the idea of a ‘focus’ end zone where you take a beat to think, gather yourself (draw cards/consider your options!) and then decide where to place your energy for your next few actions (by distributing your mancala tokens where you want!) VS a more chaotic ‘outburst’ or ‘overwhelmed’ end zone where sure, your explosion on the situation (might be small if you don’t have any tokens there) might shake things up in a way that lets you complete the tasks at hand, but I like that the trade off is basically permanently losing access to a card. (At the end of campaigns you might be able to buy cards back, but you’ll probably prefer to spend that money on NEW cards and not constantly rebuying old ones) I think of this outburst situation and losing a card like, you throw a tool or option out the window during this situation. it’s no longer an option. I imagine there will be cards that play with the discard pile a bit, letting you you reuse previous cards and such, and losing cards from there, might have you rethink your strategy. (And I suppose in a ‘one shot’ mode situation, you’re probably going to gun for personal bests, and cards removed this way will probably be worth negative points. )
Also, right now, I feel the mancala is an interesting approach to some of the skill tests used in games like Arkham Horror, where you have to rely on a random component to see if you pass/failed, vs here where you know if you’ll pass or fail by just looking at your situation, and you may have to pivot to a different strategy on the fly. You may have been aiming to have tokens on physical combat, but accidentally over a few turns moved everything to the defensive space. while not ideal, you can humor your way (it may share a space with defensive in this case) past a situation allowing you to kind of rebalancing where your board is at.
Had an idea, would probably need to be more color neutral, but what if during campaign setup, you pick your 4 skill tiles. There’s every combination of social/combat skills. Then when you setup for each chapter, you shuffle them and place them out (hoping for dual layer, but this should work fine single layer) adds a little variety to your games. Avoids stale strategies of like “well aggressive is always next to the end zone, so i always need to do x” kinda stuff. Also I feel like a token like this, may help remind players that when taking a skill action, they’re picking one of the options on the token. (they’re two different colors, they’re different somehow) is hopefully the idea. small visual reminders when possible. Also you like my aggressive emoji? ha.
Updated it. Just have player’s tokens in their color. And tokens for the end zones even, they’ll switch up each game like the others. (just always on the ends) and potentially, if it makes sense, maybe there’s a mechanic that flips the end zone tokens. (say the back size is the opposite, outburst turns to focus and vice versa. ) Something to play with!
Had an idea for ‘generic’ tokens (these could be double sided, one side white, one side black). I’m thinking they could be temporary and permanent tokens (but i think to avoid confusion, permanent tokens might should be a different material altogether like a wood cube). Anyways Idea with temporary mancala tokens would be, like they can be used when taking a skill action, but they can only be used once and are trashed after instead of being dispersed. Permanent tokens would stick to a certain skill and not get dispersed. I suppose the black side could be ‘negative’ tokens. Failing some kind of event could put a damper on your skills, you’ll have to manage around that negative point until you use that skill (and it’s temporary like the white ones) could be fun to play around.
The above are location grid iterations. Left is newest, bigger 20mm spaces. right is older 15mm spaces. I’m leaning towards bigger. The arrows on the tiles are maybe a way to limit placement. Making it a little more of a puzzle when placing rooms out. Idea is, you’d move on the board and if you’re moving into a green area, you’d draw a location card. it has a shape associated with it and you’d draw one and place it out. the rule being you can only enter/leave through the arrows. Is that interesting? is that worth the trouble?
the above is an updated iteration on map tiles. location cards are assigned 1 of the 5 (currently) tetris shapes. When they’re played, you’ll take it’s shape and place it on the grid, and then your player token on top. This adds a puzzle, you’ll need to explore in ways that makes room for future locations places, but also I like each play will be different for different players. Over time you might find your ‘optimized’ way of putting pieces down, and that could be different for someone else! I’m hoping to sharpen this down to a slick and smooth flow. The base grid is a 4×7 space. (This could allow us to have different types of base grids at different sizes later) And i’m thinking pieces you place, cover up base space and become 1 space. So if you put a square 2×2 down, it’s no longer 4 spaces, it’s now just 1 space to move around. I think thematically this will make enemy interactions suspenseful. Enemies aren’t 4 spaces away, they’re ‘in the next room’ or ‘down the hall’. And my hope is, the longer the game session goes on, reducing the amount of spaces to move around, might help with some mental overhead. You’re not worried about all 28 spaces, more like 12-15, cutting down on the math when trying to plan your future turns and movements. But we’ll see.
I also like the idea of tiles, because they naturally create 2 zones. Kind of a ‘inside/on the tile’ and an ‘outside/off the tile’ zone. And no reason why different tiles could have different effects based on their shapes. For example say you have a card that says something like “while you’re on a T tile, you may move a token from an end zone to your comedy action space to draw 1 card” etc etc.
As I design scenarios, I’ll need to keep in mind how busy this board can get. try to keep rules to a minimum. Stuff like “are there limits on how many people can be in a room?” and do some enemy’s take up more room than others? Not just people but aliens and creatures that might pop up. Really want to keep the flow of the game smooth and inintuitive. If you put an enemy token out, it should represent any limitations it has. Creature takes up 2 spaces in a room? the token should be 2 spaces wide. stuff like that.