Sabradical!

Back! I made some progress on the 2-player monster game while I was gone, leaning towards a series of modes for the monster, which will support certain strategies, and require certain responses from the city player. Once a mode has been entered and subsequently left, it cannot be returned to, so the choice of when to change modes, and which to change to, could be nicely dicey.

Also, I've long pondered how to modify the board game Tales of the Arabian Nights. I really like some elements of it, but it also has some pretty serious problems. I've been reading this book about travel and transformation in the original 1001 nights stories, and its giving me some interesting ideas about the game. Specifically:
- It talks about travel being for religion, trade, knowledge or love. These are some interesting motivations for encouraging player travel, something the game currently lacks.
- It talks about the nature of political boundaries in the stories, and how there are not solid, real, guarded borders, but rather that you need to visit a ruler in the capital in order to have truly arrived in a given location. It got me thinking about breaking the board into regions, establishing capitals and creating a concept of each player's influence in a region.

This ties into some previous ideas I had about changing the basic scoring and victory systems, so this might seem a little vague. If I finish the variants, I'll of course post them on boardgamegeek, and link to them here. Its a game with a cult following, that deserves a better outer game to go along with its stunning book of paragraphs.