Sometimes an idea will pop into my head fully formed. Sometimes these ideas are games. Tonight, I woke from a dream and had a vision of a dice rolling game, complete with name: Bid, Bet, Buy.

At some point recently I had been thinking that it seems many, if not most, of the games on The Game Crafter involve a lot of dice rolling. There don't seem to be many Euro games. Perhaps that was the genesis of this dice-heavy game of my own.

Back to the game. In a way BBB is similar to traditional gambling like craps or roulette. Players will bet on which numbers will be rolled on six-sided dice. The distinction is that players use chits to not only bet but also influence the game.

Bet. On one side of the board is the betting area. For each chit on a given number that is rolled, that player wins coins. There is an exception though. If there is a winning bidder in the Bid section for that number, the bets are void. Numbers 1-4 earn 2 coins, while 5-6 earn only one because they cannot be Bid on.

Bid. The bidding side has the numbers 1-4. Here players bid to control all the returns of a given number. If they are the winning bidder by having the most chits, they get one coin for each die of that number. However, if there is a tie, nobody wins, and the chits are wasted.

Buy. There are two things chits can outright buy: dice rolls and game progress. The number of dice rolled is determined each round by how many chits the players allocate toward dice. And finally, players can place chits toward ending the game. This allows a player to hasten the end if they think they are in the lead.

So, in a nutshell that's the game from my vision. Only testing will decide if it was inspiration or a dream best forgotten.

Inspiration can come from all different places. Sometimes we ask for it, other times it just happens. So far this new game concept is a combination of the two. As mentioned in the last post, working on a mech combat game was inspired serendipitously by a chat room conversation. Now this new update to the idea has been largely inspired by comments from my friend Paul; comments I asked for. (Thanks again, Paul!) (Read the comments here.)

My takeaway from the feedback was 1. doing a Battletech clone is problematic, but 2. some of the mechanics I envisioned are worth pursuing. Honestly, I had qualms about the first problem right away. It seemed difficult to do a mech-type battle game without copying Battletech. Further, though I was into BT for a time way back in middle school, I have hardly played it in the last 20 years. So while working on even these very early brainstorms I was trying to think of a different genre that would work equally well, but nothing seemed to fit.