Returning to Corlea

You may remember last year I wrote about a trip to an archaeological site in Ireland, where an impressive iron age road made of oak had been discovered in a bog in County Longford, and how I made a simple race game inspired by it.  I didn't do any further work on that game, but the idea of basing a design on the Corlea trackway stayed in the back of my head, waiting for another idea to combine with.

I'm not really particularly imaginative about game mechanics, but thoughts about combinations of mechanisms that might be fun to fit together jump into my mind once in a while. And so it was that I started thinking about an area control game (players put tokens in various areas and, at various points in the game, score points according to whoever has the most points in each area) where the placement of these tokens is controlled by a worker placement system (players put "workers" onto spaces on a board to take actions, and these placements limit those available to other players).  The action spaces on the board would, however, be on a modular board that grew during play, so every now and then a new "slice" of board would be added, opening up new options.  Thinking about this a little more I thought that it would probably make sense for the workers to always move forwards along this extending track, and the turn order would be decided by the worker furthest from the front taking the next action, taking a cue on this from the delightful game of taking a walk in Japan, Tokaido.

That was all well and good, but some basic mechanisms do not a game make, for me at least, and I feel that I need some sort of theme (which may change later) to guide my decision making as I build and develop a prototype, so I was pretty much stuck until I remembered the Corlea trackway.  Slices of a board that grow during play could representing building sections of the trackway, and there are several tasks that can form the core of the game: cutting down trees, splitting the logs into planks, transporting the wood to the bog, and building the trackway itself.  It all started coming together...

So the core of the game is about those four key tasks: cut timber, make planks, transport planks, and build trackway.  Each of these actions is triggered by moving a "chieftain" (the tokens used for action selection) onto an appropriate space on the trackway.  When an action is triggered it moves a wood token along the board, indicating its current status and availability for further tasks, and points are scored according to who has the most "workers" (wooden cubes indicating clansmen as labour resources) assigned to that task.  Workers get moved around as part of various actions.  I also added a fifth task, which is to feed the workers, which scores points and allows the points scored for each task to be rearranged (this is indicated by little score tiles on each task space.

Finally I added a little extra interest in the shape of three types of special cards which can be acquired by sending a chieftain to appropriate action spaces... Offerings are items which you craft and can dedicate to the gods when you build a section of trackway (as an aside, these trackways commonly had offerings laid beneath them, but the archaeology of the main Corlea trackway showed surprisingly little evidence of this) to give you end-game scoring bonuses for sets. Skills are bonuses that apply to your workers all the time, like breaking ties for scoring on a task.  King's favours are one-off bonuses that you can make use of at an appropriate time.

I've done a bit of solo testing of this so far and just the one try with another player, and it plays OK and isn't terrible, but doesn't quite hang together right yet.  In particular, the trackway sections all seem a bit samey (there is some variation, but it is minor) and the way workers get deployed and moved about just doesn't feel right as it is.  I think there is a basis of a game here, though, so it will be staying in the development heap for a while to see what I can do with it.