Starting almost from Scartch

The play tests for giant stone heads have given me a lot of feedback - and i've come to the conclusion that as a game it works if "you play it right" and fails if you don't.  Which is a problem.... Now obviously any game can have it's wheels fall off if players want to make it crash - or want to pick one player to be the winner - but I'm not talking about that.  It's players doing obvious, often sensible things, and the rules falling apart as a result.

So I need to think of ways of creating a game that a) rewards players for acting in certain ways without b) making it required and/or the only choice.

We've had two problems - which have been a) turtling and/or the disinterested player and b) the ease at which you can drag another player down at both your expenese.

Both of which actually revolve around the same issue - the lack of a positive economy in attacking.  Attacking costs you men, costs them men, and well the winner gets a benefit out of it - it's a fairly small benefit because more territotry is often not that impressive.  Lose 3 men to gain 1/3 of a man a turn.  Sure it might pay of in the end but it proberbly won't.....

Now the game works best when there are small battles - raids if you like -rather then wars of Genocide.  But at the momment players don't really have the option to engage in anything other then wars of Genocide.

So I'm going to create Giant Stone Head Version 2.01 and change a lot - just to see what happens.

The first thing to do is scrap the current resource system - I was heading towards this anyway.  So now we are going to have resource spots that tie directly into the two card decks.  So some generate projects and others generate ideas.  However rather then the value of these spots decreasing in a pyarmid numbers kind of way - what we are going to do is have different ones and you get one new card per a different symbol.

In addition the cost to play project cards will either be in cards (ala San Juan) or renown.  Renown comes from attacking so more later.  The upper half - the practical part of the card - will be paid in terms of cards.  The bottom part of the card will have a cost in renown (and cards) - this bottom part will most often involve building a giant stone head.  So to get the most out of there cards - and to stand any chance of winning players will have to attack.

So onto violence - we are looking at a big change here.  Players now have the ability to declare two sorts of attacks.  Raid and Conquests.  Raids are lower stakes and gain renown.  Combat as before - but in a raid the loser loses one piece, the winner loses none and gains a renown.  The attacker then retreats.  So they may attack - and gain a benefit without dragging themselves down and a small impact on the defender.

Conquests are old school attacking - winner is the person left holding the square with combat by elimination.  However such an attack costs renown rather then gains it - so wars over space will happen but a player doing it has to really want it.  And the new resource system makes the value of a space different for different players.

I'm sure these changes won't work out quite the way I expect but I don't think I lose a lot by trying them.