GG,
Good topic. I’ve actually designed several games.
I’m a history/geography and government/ecomomics teacher on top of being an english teacher, so some of these games were designed to be used in the classroom a little.
1.) A North American Risk-style game with the 50 US states, the 13 Canadian Provinces, Mexico, Greenland, and even Washington D.C. as a 66-territory game.
I used a real map with real borders, but I created “continents” which would both give you more armies and special abilities. Some example are as follows: The Mid-west, New England, the Deep South, the Great Plains, Canada, etc. Special abilities also were matching the region. One innovation was that some of the “continents” overlapped each other, for example, Texas was in 3 distinctly different “continents”, so if 2 (or 3) different players wanted to control their own “continent”, then they would all be fighting over Texas. Also had some interesting special abilities, such as, whoever controls Washington D.C. MAY roll an additional attack or defense die as long as he has that many armies to lose. One of the continent’s special abilites was that cards could be turned in and armies placed at any time in the game, even as a defensive response to an opposing player’s attack. The game was actually pretty fun. I’ll probably pull the game out next year for high school US history and geography.
2.) A Monopoly variation I call, “Econopoly”, or “Economic Monoply”. A card deck and rule set made to be played with a regular Monopoly board game which would make the game more realistic and fun for high-schoolers taking Economics class.
The rule set included the economy of Monopoly with 5 different levels: Depression, Recession, Booming economy, and such. The cards included real economic terms and factors such as: Natural Monopolies, Eminent Domain, Anti-trust laws, World Wars, Stock Market Crash, Labor Unions, etc… The expansion card set included “illegal” actions, such as price fixing, price gouging, bribes, etc… There’s even an illegal card called, “Speed Demon”, where you may roll an additional die when moving. Of course, if you do something illegal, there is always the chance that it will come back to bite you in the rear later, so you could be forced to go to jail, or have other negative consequences.
3.) A “Magic the Gathering”-style card game based on the “Age of Empires” series of computer games, so there are no “magic” cards, just a lot of fun.
4.) Various house rules adjustments to “Axis and Allies”.
5.) Various house rules adjustments to “Risk”.
6.) Various house rules/Knightmare Chess-style adjustments/cards to be played with a regular chess game.
If anyone is interested in the first 3 games, I could probably dig out the Word document files and post them.
