Garbage games #1 - The brochure
Just to clear things up from the get-go, I will not be talking about bad games, as the title might imply. Instead I will be talking about games that are made out of recycled material. Is this considered clickbait? naaah. Well, maybe. Sorry.
I actually just wanted to share an idea I had, while emptying out the mailbox today. Not a full-fledged game. A snippet if you will.
hidden potential
There are these things, of which I see no inherent use for. That I condemn to be trash and pretty much throw out without any hesitation. Like this advertisement brochure that got crammed into my mailbox.
But what if I was wrong? Is there maybe an underlying beauty hidden in these floppy pages, aside from it being free? No. But it IS FREE, it is here and I see numbers... there should be something I could do with this, right?
Turns out, it didn't take much time to come up with something.
the idea
OK, we are playing a collaborative story game. Each participant receives a random page from an brochure. Cool pictures and such, but the treasure lies in the price tags.
Whenever it is your turn ( I guess we take turns), you can introduce a hindrance, a situation that needs to be overcome. Something for the sake of excitement and which might lead to an interesting outcome.
So: when the hindrance is introduced, an auction starts for narration rights. All participants will place a sealed bid. In this case that means, that everyone must cross out one of the price tags, in secret, on their sheet.
The person with the highest bid, will decide how the story progresses.
If two or more players have placed the highest bid, they share the spotlight.
When there is no price tag left on your sheet, you receive another one at random.
decisions
Introducing an auction mechanic of this manner, will grant a game a different kind of synergy.
We are in a situation, where we need to outbid someone, to be able to navigate the story in the direction that we envision.
We also might purposefully want to underbid everyone else, in the hopes of not having to be responsible for the awful fate that might be waiting for our protagonist(s).
Maybe we are trying to hold on to our highest and lowest values, by ditching all the mid-prices, in the hopes of taking control / weaseling out, when the stakes are high.
It is about control and the uncertainty of it.
conclusion
I had fun coming up with this concept and thinking about what kind of an effect that kind of a mechanic would have in a story game. Maybe I will feel inspired sometime to tinker with this, maybe my mind will go for the next shiny object. We will see.
But it isn't the first time I have dabbled in the wild sea of garbage-games. If anyone is interested in a trash-based oracle concept, they can check out: JustGoOutside&CollectTrash on my itch.io.