black gold is a game for 4 player.
to setup the game a 9 * 9 grid of cards are placed face down. the 81 cards consist of 26 Mountain cards 52 Desert cards and 3 oil geysers.
The four players each start in the middle of one side of the board. At the start of each players turn they roll a dice to determine how many 'action points' they will have for that turn. every action costs action points. A player can choose to
- reveal an adjacent square (cost 1AP),
- move to an adjacent revealed desert (1AP),
- move to an adjactent revealed mountain (2AP),
- build a pipe on desert (1AP),
- build a pipe on mountain (2AP),
- Turn an already placed pipe (3AP), or
- build a pipe on an oil geyser (5AP).
They first few turns are generally spent exploring the map looking for oil geysers. Players must then built a pipeline from the oil geyser back to their home square. Pipes have a set direction, they except input from 3 sides and output to a pipe on the 4th side. If a player has a complete pipeline from a geyser to their base at the start of their turn they gain one point.
There is one less geyser than players to force players to fight over resources (with 4 geyesrs the last player to start scoring can't afford to leave their pipe undefended, but cant attack). The randomness of the map can give a player an advantage if all the geysers are near them, but then all the other players will harass them together balancing the match.
Some rules that can be tweaked to adjust game play balance
- Cost of actions
- Weather scoring occurs at the end of your turn or the beginning (do player get one turn to interrupt your line after you complete it or not?)
I'm planning to covert this board game into a casual mobile title. The game will allow 4 player round robin multiplier on one device. I would also like to implement adhoc multiplier and facebook support (call these stretch goals ;)
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