Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast!

Nice Games Jam: "The Bike Boom"

Jul 18, 2024

00:00

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
-
Jody Rosen
Safety Bicycle
-
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