It was only a couple of months ago that I lamented the lack of games using the Discworld environment. Imagine my pleasure in seeing a poster for Ankh-Morpork at the Treefrog Games booth at the Australian Games Expo held in Canberra, Australia January 22-24, 2011.
The game is played in the city of Ankh-Morpork and is largely based on area control. Each player has a hidden objective such as controlling a number of regions, earning an amount of money, causing mischief for other players etc. These roles are secretly drawn at the start of the game and only revealed when the first person has achieved their goal.
Players draw five cards each from a deck with each card having one or two icons representing actions to be performed serially. This may include placing a minion in one of the city regions, attacking another player's minions, purchasing the main building in that region (with associated benefits), etc. Usually only one card is played unless a card has an icon allowing an additional card (ala Dominion +1 Action). 755
Cards may also have more verbose actions per free form text on the card.
After completing their turn a player replenishes their hand back to five cards. It is possible to hold many more cards via draw card actions so five cards represents the minimum size hand. Players usually only play cards on their turn however as some cards affect other players (such as requiring them to pay a tithe), there are also cards which can be used by other players to block those actions.
The real fun is in the Discworld characters. If you've read any of <PERSON> books you'll know that they are filled with a wide range of characters of generally dubious nature, making for some very entertaining roleplaying when playing cards.
Our first game only lasted 15 minutes as the winner had a goal of controlling 4 regions which they were able to do very quickly. The designer <PERSON> was sitting in on many of the play tests and he commented that the area control winning condition would usually happen fairly early on as it becomes much harder as the game proceeds. He also noted that with more experienced players the quick finish we experienced would be far less likely.
As this was a prototype I can't comment on the artwork but with some of the ink coming from artists already involved in <PERSON> work there are obviously some delicious things to come! There was also mention of high quality resin figures in a more deluxe version so this looks likely to become very collectable. 755