Introducing GOGT: Exploring Key Concepts

Creating a new board game is a journey filled with creativity, challenges, and exciting discoveries. There's a lot more than just making a set of rules and having a bunch of friends playtest it for you. There's the mechanics, balance, randomness, replay value, and narrative to name a few of things aspects. This guide aims to break down the key concepts and design choices for "Going Once, Going Twice!" (GOGT).

The Game World and Setting

In GOGT, players take on the role of a "collector" by randomly choosing a character profile. Collectors all come with a short bio and backstory, to help bring a bit of character to each of them. These in-world collector characters range from tech entrepreneurs, movie stars, and a dude with a stamp collection.

As a collector, your aim is to purchase items at auction and display them in your gallery for the public to view. The more your gallery matches your specific collectors requirements, and the more your items have a level of cohesion, the more points you collect. Your gallery is open to the public, so you generate income based on the items that you have on display - allowing you to invest and buy more and earn more and buy even more and earn even more!

Core Mechanics

What makes any good game memorable, is its core set of game mechanics. I want players to feel challenged through the variety of strategies, but never overwhelmed where they begin to feel the game is too complicated. The gameplay is fairly straightforward: buy items, get points, and win the game (by having the most points). While being layered with different strategies, I have always wanted the game to feel accessible and easy to learn. Along with that comes the replay-factor, which ties into the randomness and managing this aspect.

GOGT's gameplay mechanics:

• Clear plastic card sleeves are used in a unique way, ensuring items in the auction rarely have the same value across multiple play-throughs

• Players spend on items is tracked through the same card sleeves

• Whiteboards add an interactive element for certain auction types

Players take it in turns as the auctioneer for items, giving them the power to decide when to say "Going Once, Going Twice - SOLD!" - but dont worry, the auctioneer can also bid on an item so you aren't missing out on that vital card to complete your requirements.

The auctioning ends when a player collects enough items to match their requirements - but that's not where the game ends. Players then tally up their points, which are collected from a dozen different methods throughout the game. It's important to be frugal with your limited starting budget - spending the most will give you negative points, and spending the least gives you positive points. The more requirements you ticked, the more points you get. After players compare their spends, their assets, and add any extra points, the winner is the player with the most points!

Randomness and Replay Factor

Probably the hardest part of designing the game so far, has been balancing the game. What that means for those who may not have heard the term before, is the way in which different aspects of the game are fine-tuned to ensure that there is consistent fair (and fun) distribution of various elements. For GOGT, the balance issue has really been focused on the item atribute types and player requirements which correspond to these. The game is designed such that some players will be looking for the same item types, so there needs to be more of these - but there can't be too many, otherwise that would negatively affect the distribution of other item types, as well as there being an advantage to those players in the first place.

I have also designed the game to allow for different strategies to be adopted by players throughout the round. Again, you then need to consider that every strategy should be viable and that one isnt seen as the "only way to win". This is why there are a number of methods for players to collect points. For instance, it might just not be your day and the items you're hoping for aren't showing up. That doesn't sound like a fun time, and that shouldn't stop you from playing the game. Therefore you might adopt a strategy of purchasing low-value items no matter what their attributes, in order to build a gallery that produces a large amount of income per turn. You may not be meeting your character requirements, but you might be aiming for points from highest total assets and cohesive gallery items!

As mentioned above, plastic card sleeves house the item cards, which are shuffled and placed on the board. A separate deck of "value cards" is shuffled; during a turn, the top value card is slid into the plastic sleeve of the item card, and BOOM hey-presto! Would you look at that! The item has a random value that will be randomised every play-through! Players are also randomly assigned their character cards (of which there are many), so again it adds an extra element of randomness.

In my next few blog posts, my aim is to showcase the card designs and the board. Here's hoping you've kept up with everything I've said so far! Circling back to the first post from a few weeks ago - unfortunately I couldn't find the little sketch of "Tingston Von Tiddlywinks" so I've recreated it from what I could remember - maybe I'll do little sketches for each of the characters!

Tingston von Tiddlywinks, The Duke