Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Not Much Interest For Me

I am not planning on entering this month's BGDF challenge. I'm not really sure why. A lot of things I think are factoring into this choice. First of all, I've got too many plates spinning regarding my hobby time that I want to get finished. Another thing that seems to be stopping me is that usually within a day or so after the announcement of the contest, I have a clear vision of the game, or at least the gimmick that I want to exploit. In this challenge, I'm pretty much drawing a blank. Mostly, oddly enough, because of the theme.

The basic theme is interesting enough. However, since it's pretty clear that the game needs to deal with HIGH TECH spies (or spies with COOL TOYS), that's another implied limitation not spelled out in the limitation list. And for some reason, I don't want to force that consideration into the rest of the limitations, which I think are fairly interesting in their own right. I guess, I could just simply add some HIGH TECH cards into the mix; but that wouldn't very interesting; I'd want to spend most of my 800 words trying to come up with an interesting way of dealing with high tech weapons. I think I'd need those words to do the solo/everyone limitations interestingly. Suddenly, the game begins to have to get watered down a lot to fit the pieces together.

Hmmm, maybe that's the real reason why I'm not particularily interested in it this month. There's no limitation that lends itself to a rather interesting solution. Instead, I can easily see every entry being some variation of "all players control an evil lair whiile they all control an agent getting into the other player's lair." One of the main ways to win the showdown, I believe, is to try and create something very different from the rest of the games, and the one interesting approach I thought of would be something like everyone playing a spy going to some Spies R Us auction/flea market to purchase goofy spy-ish weaponry from various inventors, but clearly evil villians know this place exists, so they (the players in their dual roles) have cleverly hidden bombs and booby-trapped weapons throughout the flea market. But it's not something I thought was strong enough to pursue.

Now I miss playing Before I Kill You, Mister Bond.

Naturally, in the negative-opposite world that I live in, it's the theme that has seemed to inspire a lot of people to actually try this contest this time around. Constraints be damned, which is usually the thing that I find sort of interesting to play with. Who says a theme can't sell a game?

However, I'll still go off and cast my vote. Hopefully, I'll be happily surprised by a few of the entries who can make something interesting and different enough to stand out.

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