Nice Games Jam: "The Bike Boom"

Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast!

In the first Nice Games Jam in a few months (and we made it a long one!), your nice hosts explore the history of bicycles to develop a racing board game.

• Our last Nice Games Club episode:

  Eddies
• Two Wheels Good

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  Jody Rosen
• Safety Bicycle

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  Wikipedia

Prompt

Design a racing game in a historical setting.

Game type

Tabletop game

Player count

2 - 4

Materials

Map book

4-sided dice

Meeple to represent racers

Setup

• Choose a map to race on in the map book (only one made right now)
• Choose a starting point and an ending point on the map
• Draw a conditions card from the conditions deck (not made yet! We just used rain, where you have to make a Stability check each time you make a turn)

Rules

• Same area through time
• You choose your rider and bike (each with different stats) based on how the map looks
• You spend your resources to get new bikes or upgrade a bike
• We started with penny farthings (bad stats), you can buy better ones later.
• At the start of the race you draw a “condition”, affects the course to make more stability checks
• You also randomly get a start and end place (we just set it as corner to corner for testing)
• Types of stats:
  • Speed: how far you can go
  • Weight: how heavy your bike is, how hard uphill is and how fast downhill is
  • Capacity: how much you can hold on your bike
  • Stability: how easy it is to get past stability checks
  • Durability: how much failing a stability check affects you