A New Project

While Preposterous is not 100% finished I have decided to start work on the next game, since Preposterous' purpose was to prove my proposed hypothesis that:

given the right situation players would enjoy the process of telling stories to one another.

So far however, my next incarnation of that concept is proving difficult to formulate. I have started my further exploration into this different type of gameplay by attempting to create a game based around the murder mystery genre.

Alibi - A game of accusation!

In this game the players first all take it turns to pick characters from a pre-generated roster, they then are informed that as a group, these players had been to a wonderful party, passed out drunk and awoken in the house just to realise they cannot remember what happened the night before and a crime has been committed! The players all write down a possible crime & hand them in to one player, who reads them all out, players then vote for the most entertaining sounding crime as a group and all collectively write it down in their notes; the player who came up with the crime then goes first. The players take it in turns to roll dice and explore the mansion, each time they enter a room they draw a card and spin the clock spinner. They then make a note of the card they drew, the room it was found in & the time the spinner says, the idea being that by racking their brain, the character has remembered seeing something suspicious the night before. The player now has a clue & must continue searching the house for more clues, once the player has at least one card for each of the four classifications (means,motive,opportunity and clue) that player can return to the foyer to call the players to finish their stories, that player then rolls a single d6 and all remaining players only have that many turns to finish their stories. At the end of the game players explain how the clues they found lead them to believe the crime occurred in this manner, the most believable/best version of events. Once the vote is cast, the player with the best version of events wins. In the case of a tie, the player who used the most cards wins. Players can have up to 3 clue cards, one means, motive and opportunity card at a time; when the player draws another of any of these cards they may select the one they want to use.

So far the game is in need of some serious changes. Firstly the existence of the board is possibly unnecessary, secondly the cards having their own segregations seems to slow the game down a little. Perhaps it would be better if the game was based around a single possible version of events that the manipulate one player at a time, this system would have a time line and a lot of note taking. However internal consistency would be met. Also the initial aim of this was it would be interesting to have a game where character work backwards to discover and establish the character instead of retro-actively. I will continue to explore this game concept while at the sime time looking into other game concepts.