[Tim Gee]

Who isn’t dying to play a game called Shipping Goods right? Naming games is something that I find really difficult. Luckily most games have a working title and then something emerges once the game experience can be fully realised. Well, we can all hope that is the case and if not that what all you folk are for! After all, this is about community participation!

Shipping Goods was another game that is being pulled of the scrap heap, and much like Outriggers (https://bgdlplus.com/the-process-the-first-idea-outriggers/) came springing back into mind while listening to another one of Gabe Barrett’s podcasts. This time I believe I was listening to optimising game design time with Trevor Laforce.

This was of my very first game ideas, but due to a combination of lack of experience and big ideas, it crashed and burned while making the prototype and put in the too-hard basket. I bailed out because the prototype I made didn’t work. After all, it required me to fit together Tetris pieces and I made crap ones. Now with more experience and ideas, I have redesigned it to perhaps tackle again:

I present Shipping Goods:

Theme: Pirates time high-seas trading

Story: Merchants competing to ship the most good and build a shipping empire

Mechanics: Timed puzzle, economics

Win Condition: Most money

Game Play: There are 4 Phases to each round

Phase 1: Buying goods. Players buy goods to stock their ship with. Goods are Tetris shaped pieces. The price to buy is based on a deck of cards that states the price for each resource. There is a sell deck that states how much each is worth when selling. A card is drawn at the beginning of the round at each deck to set the market. The sell deck cards are almost always higher than the buy deck.

Phase 2: Players organize their goods on the ship. They have 30seconds/1 minute to organize goods. Bonuses for the way you stack your deck? Any goods that don’t fit perfectly on the boat can’t be shipped.

Phase 3: Sail to the market and sell goods.

Phase 4: Upgrade your ship. Buy more ships to be able to ship more goods.

Extra Idea:

Bonus goals for certain arrangements of goods.

Goods are in bags (one bag for each good) so it’s a blind draw for the shape you need for your puzzle

Different ships can have different abilities/layouts

An event deck (pirates attack, rough seas) cause unique challenges

Play as a captain – each captain has a special power.

[Conor Reed]

I’m just reading back through these ideas to try and make a decision, and I got thinking about this one. Another potential extra idea for your list could be stacking the tiles atop each other (as long as they lie flat). This would allow you to squeeze more on your ship, but potentially increase the risk of cargo loss (for example if you encountered a storm or something, higher stacked goods are more likely to be lost). It might potentially take away from the timed organization phase since this would probably allow for most anything to be arranged somehow, but there would still be the risk trade off in doing so.

I don’t know, just thought I’d leave that here for you!

[Conor Reed]

This could also play into the “bonus goals for certain arrangements of goods” idea, like their cargo is less valuable when they stacked their eggs under their milk and not on top of it (or some more appropriately pirate themed example)

[Tim Gee]

That’s a great idea. It plays into an idea had where you could choose not to sail your ship because you wanted more time to organise your goods to get bonus… would you say don’t put your rum on top of your chickens?

[Conor Reed]

Yes that’s certainly more fitting! And yeah it’d be interesting skipping sailing and waiting for the next round, assuming that would mean you go through another buy phase so could end up with even more goods to ship AND the sale prices would all be different so you run the risk of having invested poorly (or equally very luckily well).

There could also be a risk of some goods being stolen or going bad when stored on the ship “overnight” instead of sold.