Domino programming

[Duncan Hecht]

Hi all,
I have a roll-and-write adjacent game (I’m calling it draw and draw), and while I’ve never encountered someone ends using a similar mechanism, I don’t think I’m making best use of it. In my game, players will draw dominoes out of their bag, and then line them up to create action sequences. Currently, players draw three dominoes and use two of them. Since each domino has two values, by lining them up, you get three groupings of two values.
For example:[ 2 | 4 ] [ 3 | 2 ] If I have these two dominoes, I have a 2&4 grouping from the first domino, a 4&3 grouping from the second number of the first domino and the first number of the second domino, and a 3&2 grouping from the second domino.
In these groupings, the first number corresponds to a shape and the second to a color. As such, players can arrange their dominoes in various ways to give them different groupings, ergo differing shapes and color pairings. The issue is in making this readable for players so they aren’t confused about which one is shape and which one is color, so I have simplified by actually printing the shapes and colours on the dominoes, which reduces players’ ability to manipulate them.
I feel that while this two dominoes for three action groups mechanism is an original idea, it could probably be used much better by someone else for a cleverer game, so I’m putting it out in the wild to see what someone else might do with it.

[John Armstrong]

Could you post a simple sketch that shows what you mean?
I like the concept.