- Click image to enlarge.
8 neutral-coded starting positions, each consisting of a pantheon and a sky god. Limit of two starting positions per player.
Other deities start at 2 neutrals each
8 Temples start at 2 neutrals; other earthly territories are random drop
Underworld territories all start at 1 except for altars which start at 3
40 Heavenly territories (8 pantheons, 32 deities)
57 Earthly territories (8 temples, 49 random drop)
24 Underworld territories (5 portals, 8 crypts, 3 altars, 8 empty)
Starting territory count:
2p: 20; | 3p: 20; | 4p: 16 | 5p: 11 | 6p: 10 | 7p: 9 | 8p: 8
Original post (first version of gameplay idea):
As I'm certain many of us are aware, some genius decided to take the idea behind Conquer Club and make a board game out of it. As expected, it was pretty crappy: There were at most six players, no fog of war, and worst of all, there was only one map to play. But it sold! It sold like crazy. It sold so well they decided to make more. They even went above and beyond with game mechanics that Conquer Club just doesn't have: Special cards, special pieces, special rules.
I've been playing around with the idea of a map inspires by Risk Godstorm. Much as I hate the idea of another Europe map, I've clocked in a lot of good hours on Godstorm and I think the mechanism of calling down the gods (and goddesses) themselves to help you smite your foes could work fairly well for Conquer Club.
For the uninitiated: Risk Godstorm is a variant of Risk, published by Avalon Hill, that takes place on "Ancient Earth," a fantasy version of Europe divided into archaic and mythical territories:
In addition to regular units, players gain faith tokens that they can use to build temples, buy and use special cards, and summon god units that add specific bonuses to your army (I'm glossing over a lot of information; look up more specific rules if you'd like). When troops die, instead of being removed from play, they go to the Underworld:
- Click image to enlarge.
Here they can fight over certain bonuses and make their way to crypts from which they can be re-summoned to temples on the surface.
Translating gameplay elements into Conquer Club terms is no mean feat, but I've a few mechanisms in mind. First of all, each player gets a temple territory that acts as a capital (the temple is not a separate territory from the ground it's on). Each temple is marked on this map with its civilization's name:
Note that this is only a sketch to show the configuration; it's drawn on the (very copyrighted) Godstorm map itself and ours will obviously have to look at least somewhat different.
A temple can assault that civilization's four gods, which in turn can assault each other and the temple. The gods are as follows:
==] Sky: Provides 2 deployable troops, assaults any territory within your home region. Everyone starts with their sky god.
==] War: Provides an extra troop for every 4 territories you own on earth.
==] Death: Has 5-troop auto-deploy; can one-way assault any underworld portal.
==] Trickster: Bombards other players' gods.
The list of gods I'm planning to use:
The gods are demanding and their favor decays by 1 troop per turn (except for the Death god because that's silly).
The underworld looks something like this:
It starts entirely neutral. The red rectangles are doorways that any Death God can attack. The stars are crypts, each of which give you 1 troop to deploy (they probably connect back to the surface by some method I haven't decided yet, like having exit territories at certain points; maybe if we're lucky conditional borders will get implemented by the time we're done and they'll just connect to any temple you own). The circles are altars; owning two gives you +4 and all three give you +10. The underworld does not give you troops (if possible -- depends on whether the 3-troop deployment minimum can be breached by negative bonuses).
In the real Godstorm, you collect victory points and the game ends after five turns (and five turns is really a long time). In our case, it suffices only to conquer the whole of Earth for the glory of your gods.
In any case, that's my proposal unless I've forgotten anything. I'd appreciate any thoughts, and I'd really appreciate any artists willing to help in that department.
