One thing I wanted to do is design a dice-based word game. I got a little bit into it, and found that my original thought wasn’t really practical to implement – having some “communal” dice and some individual dice, and you form a word based on those things. It’d work as a videogame (though it wouldn’t feel interesting), but it doesn’t work as a physical game.
Part of the pleasure is moving the dice around and manipulating physical stuff, but if the dice are communal, it’s hard to move ’em around and think of a good word to make.
So maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is that some of your dice just let you take other player’s dice. I really liked the contrast between the bigger dice and the smaller dice, and I liked having color-coded vowels, consonants, wilds, and powerups. Looked nice and vibrant without being overwhelming or confusing.
There’s another potential layer in having characters with unique skills, and potentially powerup cards & such. But I feel like until the core word game makes more sense, it’s not worth diving into those things just yet.
I like the idea of having powerups let you take other peoples’ stuff, but I’m not sure I like my stuff being taken.
I wonder if maybe it’d be worth having the communal dice form a 2×2 grid, and you’d have to use your individual dice to form the outer layers of a Boggle board. Then maybe if you place your dice, your opponents can also place their dice, and you do it in turns somehow… Hm.
How would that work? I like the idea of being able to build off of other peoples’ letters, but if you can do that, then everyone in the end will just get a kind of communal super-word. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe the goal is to build a big word matrix cooperatively? Hrmmm. I don’t think so. One of the real joys of word games is beating someone with a better word.
Hm. The Boggle board thing is worth exploring. The original concept for Word Ace was actually around Boggle, not Scrabble. We ended up doing a Scrabble thing at the time because I’d communicated the original idea badly. But maybe there’s something there.