Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Before the game was really given more than an initial “This would be cool!” thought, I knew I wanted it to use a variation of the same basic playing card mechanic that drives the conflicts of my first game, Cannibal Contagion. The short form of this is that each player involved in a conflict plays a round or two of cards, until one player has won by throwing down the highest card. It moves pretty quickly and involves a lot of cross-table smack-talking as each player “steps it up,” adding increasingly over-the-top narration with each consecutive card-play.

I want to enhance this mechanic a bit in Billions and Billions of Bullets to add a bit more strategy to the play. Ultimately, I want to stick as close to the core speed and flow of Cannibal Contagion’s mechanic as I can, replacing the tongue-in-cheek description of the former with a cooler, slicker flavor. To add a bit more player strategy to the cards, each player will now have a variable-sized “Stash” of cards that they get to hold onto between conflicts. When the time comes to actually play cards, they will draw more based on whatever relevant “action” Characteristic is involved, adding the cards temporarily to their Stash. Cards get played from the Stash, allowing the player a bit more versatility and strategy in their approach to the Conflict.

To enhance the narrative feel of the conflicts, I’m considering expanding the ground that the players are allowed to traverse when “stepping it up” during card-play. While conflicts in Cannibal Contagion consist of immediate concerns that can be easily resolved, I am thinking that I want B&BoB’s conflicts to be built upon a greater scale. I’m wanting each stated “action” to involve more than just one thing - I want a larger scope of narrative empowerment.

There’s an example I frequently use when describing the versatility of the Gun as a focus to problem-solving: “Your girlfriend of four years is breaking up with you, and you don’t want her to - what do you do?” Of course you could shoot her in anger, or threaten to do so, or take any of a similar arrangement of more direct-violence actions. But you could also murder her parents secretly and frame it on some other goons, who you then make a scene of publicly murdering, and thus win back your girlfriend’s love and trust by getting “revenge” for her sake. Complicated, yes, and in other games this would require numerous conflicts, numerous uses of the mechanics, and numerous chances for failure. In B&BoB, I want this grander scope of conflict narration to be able to be handled with a single go at the cards. I want each conflict to be able to handle that span of time, effort, expenditure, and more, and I want the involved “stepping-ups” to encourage that.

The question I pose to myself, then, is how to frame conflicts that have a larger scope than those that I have been used to until this point. Because of this new “expanded territory” idea, the basics of scene-framing might have to be seriously revisited and adjusted in the new game. In Cannibal Contagion, a scene is very much like a scene in any movie or TV show, comprising of a set period of immediate time and focus. Looting the sporting goods store might be a scene, breaking into a hangar and stealing an airplane might be a scene, and so on. The focus in that game is always in your face, and once that core focus is settled, the scene ends and the next one is set up.

If I’m going to bring in an adjustment to the scope of the conflicts, however, then I’m going to need to expand the scope of the scenes that contain them. I’m still musing on this one.

Initially, one of my ideas was to have both games be ultimately interchangeable. But as my vision of B&BoB has evolved, I recognize that it is now most definitely its own game, and the direction it is heading right now is quite divergent from the action and zaniness of Cannibal Contagion. However, I’m pretty certain that the games could serve as great companions to each other.