Nice Games Jam: "Chaos Canyon"

Max Kunze, Nice Games Club Guest Booker, takes over for Mark while he's still sick this week on another Nice Games Jam! Mark actually created the prompt for this episode, and your nice hosts find a way to inject many explosions into this board game made from it that you can try out yourself using the rules below!

The playtest session we alluded to in the episode is on Patreon! If you want to hear how we playtested it over Miro, check it out there!

Prompt Create a game where risk is extremely attractive and the consequences of failure are disastrous. Game type Card game Player count 2 - 4 Materials

25 cubes

42 cards

1 Chaos Cube (six-sided die)

Setup

• Set the 25 cubes in the center of the table so everyone can reach it. This is the stockpile.
• Deal out 3 cards to each player, hidden from the other players.
• First player is the person who was most recently in a car.

Rules

• On your turn, choose a card to play and follow its instructions.
• Types of cards:
  • Excursion: draw 1, 2, or 3 cubes from the Gas Stockpile bag
    • You have the option of rolling the Chaos Cube
  • Casting Curses: Have another player roll the risk dice
  • Bad Weather: Skip the next player’s turn
  • Raid: Steal a gas cube from another player’s cache
    • You have the option of rolling the Chaos Cube
  • Foresight: See what cards another player has
  • Theft: Steal a random card from another player
• If the card allows you to roll the Chaos Cube, you can choose to roll it to increase your rewards. But there's a risk that you will both burn the cubes in your own collection and in the stockpile!
• At the end of your turn, draw back up to 3 cards.
• Play continues like this with each player playing one card until there are no more cubes remaining in the stockpile. The player with the most cubes in their own collection at the game's end wins!

Future changes

• We want way more excursion cards
• We want to have a way for players to steal from each other
• More cubes!
• MAYBE: Casting Curses doesn’t grant the possibility of granting +1 cube to the recipient of the curse
• Add Sabotage back in: Remove X cubes from the Stockpile bag (1, 2, or 3 is noted on the card). You can remove a larger number by rolling the Chaos Cube, but that also carries the risk of blowing up your cache!