Character Project: Game Idea Progress

Figure 1.

Cards

 Sports/God Control/Perspective-trickery

Outline

Like a lot of parents, Greek gods too tend to get quite passionate about their children’s sport competitions. At this year’s Olympics, the tension is stronger than ever before. Pressuring their kids (demi-gods and others), all have decided to take over the games, mess with each other’s champions, in the delusional hope of collecting the highest number of medals – and of course, establishing their family’s superiority in the Pantheon.  

The concept would take the form of a simple racing board game. Players are impersonating the gods playing with mortals' lives. One after the other, they roll a dice to make their associated child move along the track (thanks to their shouting range going from +1 to +3). The board would be divided in 12 consecutive events (themselves subdivided into squares), with the chance of either winning either a bronze, a silver or a gold medal once you’ve walked past any of the trial’s finish line. However, some of the spaces the champions are landing on order the gods to draw a card from a special deck and play it. 

Examples of cards players could draw:

• Allows the use of a power specific to the god being impersonated:

  I.E 
- Zeus: Strikes another god’s child with lightning – child can’t move for one round.
- Aphrodite: Makes another god’s child positioned ahead infatuated with her own child – child brought back to where Aphrodite’s child is on the track.
- Hermes: Gives his child a pair of winged shoe – child is allowed to a +4 movement.
- Ares: Commands all the children but his own – every other god’s child must move back -1
- Etc.

• God of mischief Card: a non-playable god (not involved in the competition) sabotages the other gods’ schemes for its own amusement.

  I.E.

- Puts out the Olympic flame: all is dark, allowing the mischievous god to mess around with the collected medals – the gods’ current amount of medals is passed on the player on their left-hand side. 

- Transform the god’s kid into an actual kid – child suddenly finds itself a passion for grass and doesn’t move for one round

- Etc.

• Titans get involved Card: parts of the game board are moved around and rotated, messing with the champions’ position (see: Figure 1, bottom left corner).
• Bare Foot: +1 Extra move
• Foot wearing a sandal: +2 Move
• Foot wearing a winged shoe: +3 Move
• Foot stepping on something: -3 Move
• Etc.      

Three types of character to design:

• Gods
• Children and their 'goat or other species' counterparts
• God of Mischief (could either be Eris, goddess of discord, or Pan, god of panic etc.)

At first, I had the intention to design the characters in a very comical, brightly coloured way, with champions as clueless kids and Gods and Goddesses as overly loud dads and soccer moms. (The latters’ skin tone would be of a specific colour to differentiate them, their tunic would bear a resemblance to track suits, they would wear whistles and headbands; Dionysus’s glass of wine could be designed as a pint of beer etc.)

However the whole thing might also be best suited to a stylised, black-and-orange look to mimic Greek vase motifs / a slightly more realistic-heroic look in the style of Renaissance frescoes / or a more modern look in the style of Leyendecker’s illustrations.