Hello, time to make another board game!
Project Grill Marks is a cooperative board game where you play as a team of employees frantically building up resources, then using those to fulfill orders. I've got a prototype you can try out. Check out the tutorial below:
If you'd like to see how it plays, I'm going to record a solo playthrough (and if I can, I'll try other player counts too) sometime later this week.
If you don't want to watch the video (it's like 45min, so I understand), the gameplay is pretty simple. You simply must survive 5 rounds of play in order to win.
Each player uses one employee's 8-card deck (mix decks together when there are less than 4 players). Each round has 2 phases: Prep and Service. In the Prep phase, players take turns drawing a card from their decks and playing them onto one of the stations; except they only have 2 minutes to do so. Afterwards, in the Service phase, the values on the cards are added up (taking into account any card effects) and that total is how many of that ingredient can be used to fulfill orders. Then with any profit that is made, the players can buy a single Upgrade. And that's about it. There are a few twists: there are different Bosses that change up the game, they have requirements that need to be met and if they aren't, the players lose. Also, starting with the 2nd round, Events will mess with the players as well. And on top of that is how the Employee cards all interact with each other.
You can check out the prototype rulebook here (although at this point I still need to list out all the different effects):
Project Grill Marks Rulebook (prototype) - Google Docs
(The download for the prototype is in the rulebook)
So yeah, going into this jam and seeing the theme, my gut instinct was to make a cooperative game where the players work together to "defeat" the villain mascot character. Since I prefer creating games that are generally about small-scale, non-violent conflict, I decided that this "boss battler" could has the "Boss" be your literal boss. Gameplay wise, I wanted to make a card game that captured the frantic chaos of the video game Overcooked. One of the challenges I put on myself this year was allowing the game to scale at different player counts (past years, the player count was locked to a single number). Mechanically, I was inspired by real-time games like Dutch Blitz, but specifically there's this board game (that honestly I've never played) called "7-Card Slugfest."
Anywho, I'm about out of time for this post (got a baby to feed!). This week I'm focusing on playtesting and I'll start working on art and thinking of story. With the basic game design about finished (aside from stat and effect adjustments from playtesting), I can get MeBID started on programming as well. I'm going to need to find some new team members as well, particularly for music. It would be nice to have a song or two to count as the game timer (plus I really like how last year's game came together)
See you next time!
