Day 6: Quarantine

Mechanics: Network Building
Theme: Capture, Diseases
Victory: First to reach a number of points
Constraint: Can be played with a 10 year old (sic)

It's an interesting set of circumstances for a game, and at first I thought "Oh, this one looks easy."   But then a bit of conflict and maybe even some designer's block set in and for a long while I've been unable to come up with anything that really convinces me of its merit.

But now I've got about three hours left before the end of my day and I haven't put anything together.  I've gone out to the cafe for the evening until I can bang out an idea worthy of being put up on the blog.  Even knowing that not every design will be good (or even decent), the thought that some people will read these at some point probably even more that one or two of the ideas this week have actually felt pretty good means that I'm setting a higher bar for myself.

It occurs to me that it might even be a good idea to just go ahead and write whatever the first terrible idea that comes to my head.  Just make today's game wretched so that I can dispose of the daily pressure of trying to make a good game.  It is tempting, but I can't quite let myself go there.  (not that what will come out will be good, but I've got to give it my best shot or I won't be happy with myself).

I think the main issue I'm having is reconciling network building for 10 year olds and disease capture.  Pretty much the who;e game, eh?  Well, I guess I don't have problems with a first to a number of points game.  Probably works best with network builders and capture anyway.

One of the issues I'm having is that some of the network building kind of ideas have to do with using the CDC and a travel network, kind of like Pandemic, but needing to build the network up as you go. Maybe a direct-response network to quickly quarantine disease outbreaks in the future or something.  Could work, but I can't imagine 10-year olds caring or quite grasping the theme, and that's problematic.

OK, time to stop wasting time...

Day 6: Quarantine (Go to the Nurse!)

A game for 2-4 players.

Setting and theme:
This game is set in an elementary school.  A massive outbreak of red head (a terrible variant of pink eye) has broken out.  You are each class officers, and have been given a special task.  The nurse is trusting you to gather up the students in each classroon who have red head and send them to her.  You need to act quickly, because Red Head spreads super fast.  If any class becomes totally infected, you lose the game.  So you want to work together to make sure that the whole class isn't infected, but you also want to impress the nurse with how good you at at your job.

Parts:
- 6 Classroom boards (Grades K-5).  Boards are square grids, approximately 10 by 10 grids.  Each has a different desk configuration, but all have 30 desks.  Boards are laminated.

- Spinner with four directions.

- 60 student counters.  30 are "healthy" students, and 30 are "Red Heads."  Student counters are all the same circular shape, with only the color of the center of he counter being different.

- Whiteboard/non-permanent markers.

- Erasers.

- Laminated nurse room themed scoreboard.


Mechanics:

Every classroom has 30 students.   Players will start by clearing out the kindergarten and them work their way up to 5th grade.

One student per player is already infected, but their placement is random.  For each player in the game, take out one healthy student, place in a replacement sick student, and shuffle the deck of student counters.  Then place them sequentially in the classroom at desks 1-30.

Each round, the youngest player goes first.  They spin the direction spinner.  Any student who is sitting next to a sick student in the specified direction becomes sick.  Replace their token with a sick student token.

Every time it is the first player's turn again, they must spin for new sick students.

After spinning and placing new sick students, each player gets a turn to try and separate the sick students.  Using their marker, and starting at the door to the hallway, each student can draw five spaces along the grid lines.  In the first round, they start at an intersection of the door and go in a direction of their choice.  In later rounds, they must continue from the end of their line on the last round.  Players lines can cross, but no two Players can draw over the same line segment (doors are two spaces wide, and Players can start out going along the outside walls).  Players can retrace line segments they have previously drawn, if they want to.

Their goal is to encircle/box in as many sick students as they can.  Once each sick student in the class is encircled by at least one player, the team counts their score and moves to the next classroom (if no one won the game on points).

So the sequence of play is:

1. Place sick and healthy students

2. Spin for new sickness
3. One at a time, players draw five lines in a row, starting from the door or the end of their last line, trying to encircle the sick students.
4. After every player turn, if all sick students are encircled, the classroom is cleared and points should be counted.
5. If not all the sick students are encircled, return to step 2.


Scoring:
After all the sick students in a class are encircled, students need to count their scores.  Any sick student they have encircled counts for one point, but any healthy student they encircle is minus one point.  Both sick and healthy students can be counted for multiple players if they fall within the spaces that each player has boxed in.

The first player with 10 points is the winner.  If all the grades have been cleared and no player has 10 points, the player with the highest point total is the winner.  If there is a tie, the youngest player wins.

Prototyping....

Got in a few games of Borderlords (day 3) tonight.

Rough and ugly prototype, but the game was a lot of fun.  Who the winner was remained always in doubt, and there didn't seem to be a single dominant strategy.  We played five games I think and it seemed like everyone enjoyed the game thoroughly.

Day 5: Today's Hero

Mechanics: Real-time
Theme: Mall, Superhero
Victory: Most Experience Points
Constraint: Players should stand.

Ok, so today I'm going to stretch things a bit from a strictly board game paradigm.  This is definitely still a game, and my first thoughts were along the lines of a mission-themed card game, but then I almost immediately had some ideas that made it much more suited to play on android/ios devices, so I'm going to explain the concept as an app/game for those devices instead.  This is almost entirely because I think this would be a great worldwide/social game, and not particularly a game that really gets the most out of small group play.

Introducing...

Daily Game #5: Today's Hero: Mall Marvel

Parts:

Today's Hero is a game for smartphone or tablet.  There are no additional parts, per se.

You must supply your own superhero costume and identity.  Your hero/heroine identity is limited only by your imagination.

Theme, mechanics and setting: 

The world is low on do-gooding.  Every town needs a hero.  Are you ready to make a difference?

Today's Hero: Mall Marvel challenges every player to become a hero in their own town, and to make a difference in other people's lives.  It's a social feedback game, where everyone can see that you've done good deeds, and top players are those who have been willing to go out of their way to help others.

Every time you play TH:MM, the game draws three quests from a pool of user submitted and screened good deeds that can be done in a public environment like a mall.   You gain experience points by going out and doing those deeds, then recording a short video with the person you've helped, where they verify your deed.  Once the video is uploaded, you are awarded experience points for that quest.

Quests are mostly simple things: help someone put their groceries in their car, help someone fill their shopping list, keep a lonely dad company while the family is shopping, carry the bags for an older couple, stop traffic so some kids can cross the road, etc.  Users can submit new quests to the quest database, which is moderated by the user base.

Heros need to wear a costume of some kind to make themselves stand out from the crowd.  A superman shirt might be sufficient, but we encourage players to go all out.  Get a cape and a mask!  Wear some tights!  Make a real impression on the people you are helping!  :)

There is a dual scoring system.  Players get a base XP score from the verified deed being uploaded to the website, but they get additional points from other users who recognize their efforts.  If you are a hero, spend some time reviewing the deeds of your peers, and if someone has done some truly noteworthy heroics, you can award them extra points by upvoting their videos.

Every day, week, month and year, heros are given recognition on the homepage of Today's Hero on the Hero Roll Call, plus awards from participating businesses and charities who support TH in making a difference in the world.  You can also earn badges for your good deeds to put on your Facebook page and your TH profile on the TH homepage.

Today's Hero is about making the world a better place.  It's about you making a difference today, and having fun doing it.  Will you be Today's Hero?  Or will you just get to it tomorrow?

Day 4: Volcano of the Gods!

Mechanics: Secret Roles
Theme: Volcano, India
Victory: Last One Standing
Constraint: Plays in 3 rounds

Volcanoes!  In India!

A game of three rounds, with the last one standing being the winner.  But with secret roles.

Simple enough, right?

Did you know that one of the largest supervolcanoes in the world is in India?  The Deccan Traps is, by my understanding, basically a massive depression left over after one of the largest volcanic events in the history of the planet.  It's around 500,000 square kilometers, which for scale is roughly 25% larger than California.

That's a massive volcano.

I'm not going to make a game about that today.

That said, checking the list of volcanoes in India gives me a rather sparse list.  There's only four, including the supervolcano, and three of them are in the Andaman Islands.  Plus, India and volcanoes as a theme brings up some images and connotations I'd rather not cover in a game, like the "Kali" worshiping human sacrifice cult in Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom.  While I could think up a game about rival priests tricking each other into sacrificing each other, I don't think the themes of the movie were particularly fair to Kali or to Indians generally, so I'll go another route.  At the same time, there is something about the adventure of something like Indiana Jones that sticks in my mind after thinking of it.  I'm not sure I can use it though.

Hmm....

Daily Game #4: Volcano of the Gods!

Today's idea might be a little less fleshed-out, but on a Friday night my inspiration isn't flowing quite as well.  Notably, this is not a game for mass production.  More like a game to make in your basement.  But please don't really do this.  I won't be held responsible for chemical burns or ruined houses.  I do not endorse actually playing this game.  (except it might be really awesome fun).

Parts: 

- One volcano game board.  A model of a volcano with four valleys that go off in different directions, and three calderas (calderae?). The valleys each have a small Indian village with lots (40 each) of little Indian-themed meeples who can be moved around.  Each village has a distinct color scheme.  I'm thinking the total size for this behemoth is something like 5 feet on each side square.  A big stinking volcano!  In the villages, there are small buildings.  Some of the meeples will stand on building tops, some are smart enough to go a little bit up the walls of their valley to try and escape the lava.  Players should collectively arrange the meeples (10 of each color placed by each player) before drawing their god cards, so that there is some balance to the arrangement.

- Four player role cards.

- Hydrogen peroxide, colored lava solution, dry yeast and water (player supplied).

- Lots of small sandbags (maybe 6 inches long by 2 inches wide, come with the game, but need to be filled with sand by the players, nylon mesh bags, I'm thinking.  If Hydrogen perozide dissolves nylon, I don't want to know about it.).

- Lots of small sangbag boulders (rounder, more like 3 inch diameter balls of sand in a nylon bag)

- Four pairs of rubber gloves.

- Four sets of customized safety goggles that are all themed to be part of a full-face mask for a Hindu god (I'm thinking Ganesha, Shiva, Kali and Hanuman, but what do I know?)

Story:

The Gods are Angry!  Really, really angry.

Four villages in the mountains of India have angered the gods with false prophets and crazy gurus.  Well, at least they angered the other gods than the ones they are prophets for.

Four angry gods, four vulnerable villages, three massive eruptions!  The last village standing can claim victory and their god will be bragging for eternity.

How to play the game:

Each player represents the God of one village.  But really, he/she doesn't care much about his/her own village.  Worshippers come and go, really.  Reincarnation and all that...

What really ticks gods off is a good prophet or guru for the other team.  Especially the ones in the red village!  Or maybe it was the blue village!  It's so hard to keep track these days.  Those darned prophets are just so annoying, they must be wiped out.

So the four gods in this region decided they'd just have a nice volcanic eruption to wipe the slate.  Or almost wipe the slate.  Maybe they will spare one village.  Maybe not.

Each "god" gets a role card.  Their role card specifies three villages they want to see wiped out, and one village they'd like to save (kind of optional, frankly).  These roles are kept secret from the other players.

After each god knows their role, they take a position around the volcano/board.  They can choose any area they like around the board, it doesn't need to be near their own village.  They get ten boulders and five sangbags each round of the game (each eruption).

"Shiva" sets off the first eruption by dropping the yeast and water into the already-primed with Hydrogen Peroxide and Lava mix volcano #1.

During the eruption, the gods can throw boulders at any village they want to smite, or toss sandbags in front of any village they want to spare from the terrible encroaching lava.  Gods tend to be a bit fickle, so "bluffing" by protecting a village you are actually mad at, or throwing an occasional boulder at your own village is allowed.

After the gods are all out of bags and boulders, and the lava has stopped flowing, players should remove any meeples from the board that have fallen over, been knocked off the board, or have been touched by the lava.   Then players count the remaining villagers from each town.  The town with the least villagers is cleared away (their remaining meeples are taken off the board).

Their gurus were obviously not strong enough to cut it, so the survivors (if any) fled to the coast.  Enjoy the beach, suckers!

Any fallen meeples from the surviving towns are restored for the next round.  Players divide them evenly for replacement in each surviving town.

All the gods rearm themselves for round 2 (10 boulders, 5 sandbags).  Any boulders and sandbags left from last round stay on the board.

Any god whose village was destroyed stays around to smite and drop sandbags.  Honestly, they weren't that important anyway.  Let's cause some havok!

So there will be two more explosions and two more rounds of total craziness.  It's more fun if the gods make lots of god noises and yell and scream while they smite.  Trust me on this one.

After three eruptions, only one village remains, and that village's patron god is the winner.  The winning god buys drinks for everyone after cleaning up the mess.

Day 3: Borderlords

Day 3 setup: 

Mechanics: Worker Placement
Theme: Confidential, Lords
Victory Conditions: Diplomacy
Constraints: Must be under 15 minutes



This one is mind blowing to me, but that could be down to the fact that I just played Phase 10 for a couple of hours and drank about half a liter of beer.  Phase 10 is not one of my favorite games, by the way, but it does the job sufficiently well when you just want some casual gaming while talking about upcoming vacation plans.

I was happy to see worker placement come up.  I've been working in a significant way on a game with a worker placement element.  Significant meaning that I put more time and effort into it than just one day on a blog.

But there's an immediate conflict with the constraint of a 15 minute game.  The worker placement games I've played are more labored affairs, with the shortest ones clocking in at around an hour.  So cutting it down to 15 minutes will be tough.

Additionally, all the worker placement games I've played use some victory point win condition.  At least off the top of my head that's true.  So trying to tie worker placement into diplomacy is also difficult.  At least that's my first impression.

Also, there is a small conflict with confidential and diplomacy, though there are definitely games that do some level of confidentiality and diplomacy (like Diplomacy itself, even).  But especially in a short game it makes it seem difficult to come to a definitive diplomatic solution.

The final element is Lords.  OK, that's easy enough.  It makes part of my setting for me and that's one of the things I'll work with to make this happen.

Game #3: Borderlords

A 2-4 person game.

Game Parts:

- Resource cubes in six colors (30 cubes of each color)
- Meeples in 4 colors (5 meeples in each color)
- 4 Player mats with removable screens.
- 1 Resource mat with six resource areas.
- 1 tribe mat with five border tribes.  Each tribe has an area for a resource cube and an area for a team's meeple.
- 2 six-sided dice.

Setting and victory conditions:

Each player is a border lord on the edge of a great empire.  They are all trying to impress the Emperor by making alliances with their barbarian neighbors.  Whoever manages to lock in the most alliances after three rounds wins the game.

Mechanics:

Player boards have 11 total spaces, and the screens conceal their boards from all other players.

There are six resources:
1) Wheat (Brown)
2) Gold (Yellow)
3) Weapons (Gray)
4) Cloth (White)
5) Wine (Purple)
6) Olive Oil (Green)

There are five tribes:
Elk
Wolf
Bear
Beaver
Fox

There is a space on each player board for each tribe and each resource.  The screen can be flipped up to reveal all the resource areas.  The tribe areas on the player board have a hidden resevoir/cup to hold resource cubes and keep them hidden at all times from other players.  This is known as the tribute box.

Each player gets five meeples.

Before the first round, players roll two dice to see who goes first in rotation.  Highest roll goes first.  Play proceeds clockwise thereafter.

The first player rolls one die for the Elk tribe.  The number corresponds to a resource.  If they roll a 1, it is wheat, 2 is gold, and so on.  They place one cube of that resource in the tribe's resource area.  Players proceed clockwise to roll for the next tribe, until all the tribes are allocated one resource.

Over the course of the game, each tribe values this resource most highly.  It is double the value to that tribe of any other resource.

Over the course of the game, players try to earn resources and covertly pay off the tribes to gain their favor.  The player who has provided the most value to a tribe at the end of the game will win the alliance of that tribe (in the case of a tie, the tribe will ally with the player who provided the most of their favored resource, if it is still tied, the tribe allies with no one).

Round 1-3:
Each round, players continues around in their clockwise order.  Each player rolls 2d6 for a resource (in order 1-6) and then places that number of resource cubes on the resource mat.

Players are given 1 minute to place their meeples behind their screen onto the resource areas they most want to gather.  They may place meeples in any combination they want.  Five meeples on one resource is valid, as is spreading their meeples over five different resources.

The timer is set, and then the players must place their meeples.  When time is up, the players must reveal their meeple placements to the rest of the players.

Each player that has placed a meeple for a particular resource earns a stake in that resource for the round, divided by the number of meeples that have been placed in that resource type.  Remainders after division remain on the resource mat for next round (they go to waste in round 3).

For example, if there are 8 wheat and only player 1 put any meeples on wheat, they would collect all 8 wheat cubes.  If player 1 and player 2 both put 1 meeple on wheat, they would both collect 4 wheat. If player 1 put 2 meeples and player 2 put 1 meeple, then player one would take 4 wheat, player 2 would take 2 wheat, and 2 wheat would remain on the mat until next round.

After all the resources are collected, each player has one minute to secretly place the cubes into their tribute boxes.

On rounds 1 and 2 the play then proceeds to the next round (rolling to add resources, allocating workers and then distributing hidden tribute).  Each round should have 1 minute for allocating workers, one minute for distributing tribute.

After round three, each player must reveal how much tribute he paid to each tribe.  Elk tribe is first, and each player reveals how much tribute they paid to Elk, based on the value to the Elk tribe (their primary resource worth 2 points each cube, all other resources being worth 1 point).  The player with the most points wins their alliance, with tiebreaks explained as above.

The player with the most alliances at the end of the three rounds is declared the winner.

Day 2: Karate Painters

Today's challenge looks pretty rough.  I almost re-rolled it given the themes that it gave me, but I'm going to try and make it work anyway.

Mechanics: Maze
Theme: Karate, Famous Painters
Victory: Most Courage Points
Constraint: Each player should have different abilities.  

Yesterday's project game really coalesced in my mind quickly, so I was able to really just write the nuts and bolts of the game out immediately.  This one is far more opaque to me, so part of this post will be just describing my thought process and how I might start to create a game from this mess.

Leaving aside the issues with theme for a moment, I've got a little quandary with my mechanics and my victory conditions.  My first impression is that there's not going to be a great way to award courage points in a game based in a maze.  So I did a bit of trawling on BGG looking for a game that used Courage Points in a novel way.  My finding: Viva Pamplona!  It's an older game (1992) by five-time Spiel des Jahres winner Wolfgang Kramer.  Maybe not one of his best efforts of all time, given that he's also created gems like Tikal, El Grande, and Princes of Florence.

But I like the mechanic he's using.  Basically, instead of earning Courage Points, you start with a pool of them and you lose points by taking certain actions.  Hide from the Running Bulls in a safe spot?  Lose a point!  This is something I can work with in today's game.

As an aside, this is also one of the reasons why I'm excited to do this project.  Boardgamizer has a lot of mechanics and victory conditions that I haven't played with before.  Forcing myself to learn about them and broaden my game understanding horizon is a good thing for my future development as a game designer.

Speaking of which, I'm not sure I've ever played an actual board game with a maze mechanic.  BGG has lots of games listed with this mechanic type, but I've never played any of them.  I think I'm going to trailblaze a little here in this area.  I'll wing it on this one.

Ok, so the last bit is the theme.  Ouch, this is a rough one.  Though it does occur to me that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably fulfill this theme by themselves with their names and expertise.  But I don't think I'll take that easy way out.

I'm going to broaden the scope of "Karate" to just be "Martial Arts."  That might be cheating a bit, but I find Karate a bit too narrow for my taste on this one.  Famous Painters I'll adhere to without any caveats.

Without further commentary, allow me to present:

Escape from the Shogun: Four Magic Brushes

Background Story: 

It is the year 2085.  Worldwide, society has largely collapsed after massive famines and energy shortages.  Governments, economies and societies all over the world have fallen and been remade.  Some technology and knowledge from our golden age around 2020 still remain, but much of the world is reverting to more simple ideas about how society should be formed.

In Japan, a new Shogunate has emerged.  Amazingly, the line of Japanese succession is still unbroken, and the Emperor still rules the country in name, but a new breed of Shoguns hold the de facto power in the country.

Shogun Arakida is a man of tremendous power and greed.  He has access to the resources of a once-great technological country and is happy to use them to solidify his power.  He styles himself as the return to a better time in Japan's history, and has reinstalled Samurai culture throughout the country.  His palace in Edo is staffed by over 500 modern swordmasters and he uses their power to control the country.

Recently, he has become obsessed with bringing back the best of Japanese culture and art, and creating a new era of wonder in Japan.  Coincidentally, one of his lead researchers into useful golden age technology found a rudimentary time machine that Arakida has started to experiment with.

His first attempts at using the machine were glorified kidnappings.  He sent agents back in time to capture five great painters from Japan's history.  His knowledge of Japanese painting is far from comprehensive, but he selected the five men based on a few pieces that he owns in his palace.

They were:
Sesshū Tōyō, landscape painter and monk from the Muromachi Period
Kanō Motonobu, founder of the Kano school during the Edo period, and painter of 36 Immortals of Poetry
Tomioka Tessai, multi-talented, prolific painter of great color and passion in the 19th century
Utagawa Hiroshige, the great master of wood block printing

The proud and noble painters were distraught at having been seized from their own times and brought to paint at this new Shogun's pleasure.  Gradually they have all been thrown into the dungeon of the Shogun's castle, only brought to the surface often enough to be forced to paint for the Shogun.

Now the adventure begins.  A sleeping guard has allowed Tessai to steal his keys and open the cells of the artists.  This may be their only chance to escape their bonds, but they make a pact that this must end with them.  Even using the time machine to return to their own times is too fraught with danger and irresponsibility.  They must destroy both it and the plans for making another one, so that no more artists will be enslaved in the future.

Across the hall from their cells is a storage closet for the materials they use to paint.  In the future these materials have nearly magical powers, and in the hands of masters like themselves, it is possible to create art that is nearly indistinguishable from reality.

The Mechanics:

The four artists start in the Shogun's dungeon.  Armed only with their wits, courage, and their magical artistry, they must find their way to the time machine and destroy it.  Only the artist who has retained the most courage will have the bravery to destroy the machine and trap themselves in this hellish time.  Each artist starts with 30 courage points.  The artist with the highest CP total will destroy the machine, but it will take a minimum of 1 CP to do so.  If all artists are captured or fall below 1 CP, the game is lost.

There are a few elements to the game.  It is a randomized dungeon, using a tile-laying mechanic on each player's turn.  Some tiles have samurai guards who are patrolling the dungeon.  They move in regular patterns, moving every turn and taking every left turn they come to. If an artist is ever in the same space as a guard, he is captured (unless he can use an art power to evade the guard).  If a guard can ever see an artist straight down a hallway, he will move one space per turn toward the artist (or the last place he saw the artist) until he captures the artist.

There are also tiles with safe zones.  These areas are places where the artists can hide away from the guards.  Staying in a safe zone drains the artist of one courage point.

Each artist has an art power he can use while they explore the castle.  Toyo, the landscape painter, can create new safe areas at any time.  Monotobu can create life-like portraits that act as decoys to draw the guards away (they will go directly to the portrait and be frozen there for one round until they destroy it).  Tessai can create
blinding displays of color.  Any guard who sees one of these color displays down a hallway is frozen for two rounds.  Finally, Hiroshige can create lifelike scenes that can mask a hallway's contents to any guard.  Guards will not proceed down hallways that are masked, nor will they see artists on the other side of a masking.  All artist abilities cost 5 CP.

The game ends when all artists are out of CP, all artists are captured, or when an artist successfully reaches the time travel machine and is able to disable it.

Day 1: Fridge Factory

These are the conditions for Day 1's game:

Mechanics: Card Driven
Theme: Factory
Victory: First to win a number of rounds (2)
Constraint: Plays in 3 Rounds

Parts:

- A deck of 54 custom cards.
- 2 sets of "100 dice" (d10s with singles on one die and tens on the other)
- 3 "Shift Winner" tokens.
- Rule book

Theme overview:

There's an emergency at the factory!  We need to pump out as many refrigerators as possible in the next 24 hours.

Both players are shift foremen in the factory.  You have one day (three 8-hour shifts) to crank out as many fridges as you can.

Mechanics overview:

This is a two player game.

Each player starts with five cards.  Your objective is to make as many fridges as possible each shift, and to win 2 out of three shifts.

There are 54 cards.  There are three general type of card: workers (12), parts (28), machines (4), and plans (6).

The game flows in this way: the player must have a plan and a staffed machine to process parts into fridges.  Fridges vary in value depending on how they were processed, with more demanding plans creating more value.

Parts, labor and machines are color coded.  There are yellow, green, blue and black machines.  There are 9 colored parts of each color.  There are 3 workers of each color.

Plans call for certain combinations of color to make the final fridges.  There are four "paired" plans that can make parts with only two color combinations (Y/G, G/B, B/BL, BL/Y).  There are also two universal plans that make fridges with any color.

The base value of fridges from the paired plans is 2.  The base value of universal plans is 1.  In any type of plan, fridges made when all three colors match will be worth 4 points.

Each foreman can set up as many assembly lines as he wants in his area of the factory.  Any plan that the foreman draws must be played immediately onto the table, and he may allocate machines and labor to it as they become available.  Machines and labor can be reallocated to another plan once per round, but on the round they move they cannot process parts.

Once the "assembly line" is set up, he may play one applicable parts card per round through the line to collect points.  Each worker assigned to a machine can process one part per turn.  He should immediately score the points on his scoring dice, and then place the parts card in the discard pile.

Game Flow:

- Each player starts with one universal plan and a random machine.                                      
- Each player should place the plan in front of him and place their machine on the plan card.

The rest of the plans and machines should be shuffled into the draw deck with the parts and worker cards.  Each player draws five cards.  The top card on the deck is placed face up to form a discard pile.  Players play rock, paper scissors to determine who goes first.

Each round, the action proceeds as follows:

- Draw cards until you have six cards in your hand.  You may draw one card at a time from either the draw pile or the discard pile.
- Allocate any labor, machines or plans you have in your hand that can be legally played.  Also, at this time you may reallocate any labor or machines you want to transfer to other plans.  Labor and machines cannot process parts the same round they are allocated/reallocated.
- Process any parts you can legally process. (1 part per worker assigned to a machine)
- Discard any number of cards you wish to discard, face up into the discard pile.

Play continues until there are no cards left in the draw pile.  Both players may finish the current round (drawing from the discard pile if possible), but after the round is complete scores are tallied and the award for winning the shift is awarded to one of the players.

Thoughts:

I think this one will be a short, simple game that offers some impactful decision-making.  Do you go for universal machines and pump out as many parts as you can?  Do you go only for matching sets, or do you just play as fast as possible?

Final note:

My dad worked at a fridge factory for most of his life, and was fortunate to be able to retire a few years ago.  I'm glad he gets to spend his time now doing work he wants to do and enjoying his well-earned rest.  This first game is dedicated to him.