Sky Barons

It's been a while since I posted. Now that the air temperature in NW Ohio is above freezing, my brain has thawed sufficiently to make good words pretty. Well, mostly thawed.

I've been taking a bit of a break from design work for the last few months. I'd like to get back into it and complete some of my on-going projects. But first, here's a completely new one:

A couple weeks back, I made a prototype for a new cooperative strategy game I'm calling Sky Barons. In it, you play the leaders of a floating, steam-powered city. Once the capital of the tiny nation of Falkyria, the city is now the sole refuge of the Prince, the heir-apparent-in-exile of the Falkyrian throne. As the Prince's closest advisers, you build and expand the city's industry, culture and defenses in order to restore the prestige of the city and return the Prince to the Falkyrian throne.

The design is fairly simple. The city is made up of hexagonal tiles, each of which provides either a resource or allows a special action, such as building a new tile. Players place workers to collect resources and add new tiles to the city. Meanwhile, two threats build in strength over time -- Air Pirates and the Armies of the Usurper, the Prince's uncle who seeks to steal his throne. Periodically, one of the threats hits "critical mass" and an attack occurs, forcing players to plan carefully between expansion and defense. To keep pressure on the players, they must also reach their prestige goal before a set number of turns expire.

Sarah and Donna helped me out with some play-testing. The resource management aspect of the game works well, but the rules for the two threats needs some work. The initial design had a lot of components for the threats, and simply did not make the game challenging enough. However, I have several ideas for how it improve it. Hopefully I will have more to report on that in the future.

One of the aspects of this design that I'm excited about is expandability. Since the game board is made up entirely of interchangeable tiles, it would be very easy to create alternate tile sets that players can mix and match, similar to the model that has worked so well for Dominion. I could even have optional resource types and threats to choose from, so you would have a lot of variety from one game to the next.