Hotdog Cart prototype

As I write this, I recently got back from some discussion about the hotdog cart game with my friend Shane. Though it shouldn't come as a surprise, it's always useful to have a smart friend to bounce ideas off of and make you justify your decisions.
The prototype is coming together and should be ready for a playtest, hopefully tomorrow. So let me introduce you to my silly game.

You been daydreaming about it -- serving steamed tubes of emulsified god-knows-what to families at the ballpark. I've seen you lookin' at eBay listings for "street-legal hotdog carts." Well, let me let you in on a little secret. Forget street-legal! You want in on the real cutting edge  action? I'll tell you where the real action is.

It's underground hotdog carts. Way underground. The newest flavors. The hottest dogs. Too raw for Sunday afternoon.  You'll come home each day, forearms covered in steam burns, eyes burning from the accrued salt and mustard and kraut juice, and you may wish you'd never gotten into this business. Some days, you won't know if you're slinging franks or just in the midst of an drug-addled dream.

But one thing's for sure. You ain't never had a 'dog like this at Nathan's.

– Tim Simmons, owner and proprietor of "The Raw Dog"

 (With appologies to Chris Onstad)
 
Hotdog Cart (the current working title) is a fast-paced game designed to capture the frenzied life of an underground hotdog cart vendor. It's a game of constant action and thinking on your feet designed to be played with 3-6 players over a short time period. The intention is for it to be easy to learn, fast, short, and silly.

In more concrete terms, I've decided to go with a card game using a custom deck, where the core mechanic is that everyone is simultaneously trying to fill orders from customers by playing sets of cards representing toppings from their hands. Customers are worth different amounts, largely based on their requirements and how much you go above and beyond with what you give them.

I've always really liked the idea of analog games without turns, but they often end up with lots of bent cards, hands colliding, and then the adjudicating that results when it's not clear who grabbed what first. While thinking about this, it occurred to me that the issues are very similar to those we programmers run into when writing concurrent programming, and some of the same basic solutions apply.

Basically, the key is to minimize the situations in which players contend for a shared resource, in this case, cards, but also any event that would cause play to stop or otherwise effect what other players can or cannot do. I do this largely by giving each player their own resources. So in this game, each player has her own draw pile and her own discard pile. Additionally, there are clear rules for when a player can or cannot access a customer. Finally, no one player can hog all the resources, starving the other players of resources.

The pieces

The game consists of two decks of cards, the toppings and the specials.  The toppings are 24 cards per player split into three suits (red toppings, yellow toppings, and green toppings), each of which has a card of each rank. For the prototype, I just bought four decks of normal playing cards and pulled out 2-9 of each of three suits, hearts for red, spades for yellow, and clubs for green. Diamonds, and ace through ten are unused so far. I went through and used markers to color-code the faces to minimize confusion between spades and clubs. Eventually, I intend to print custom cards for this, but more on that another time.

The specials deck is comprised of customer cards, which list their requirements and any bonuses that can be earned as well as a value when the basic requirements are met, and upgrades, which must be purchased, but which confer lasting bonuses to the player, such as increased hand size or the ability to discard a customer.

Finally, there are money chips. I'm just using cheap plastic poker chips. When a player completes a customer's order, they keep the customer card in their money pile, and it is worth its face value. However, if the player earned bonus money on the customer, or if the player needs to make change of a customer card due to purchasing an upgrade, they use the chips to represent that money. Money is also used as victory points at the end.

The table is laid out with a draw pile and space for a discard pile for each player. Additionally, the player has space in their tableaux for a special card in play and two upgrades to their cart, hotdogs, or buns. Finally, there is a shared space in the middle with the specials deck, any unclaimed special cards, and a shared trash pile for all cards that are taken out of the game.

Gameplay

Each player has a hand of five cards drawn from her draw pile. She may never have more than her max hand size in play at once, but she may discard and draw whenever she likes, so long as its not her turn to draw a special. When a player's draw pile is depleted, she takes the discard pile from the player to her right and turns it over onto the space for her draw pile. It does not get shuffled.

Cards from the special deck are drawn in turn, and once the player to your right has drawn a card from this deck, it is your turn to draw and you may no longer draw from your toppings deck until you have drawn from the specials deck. Special cards are drawn to the space in front of the drawing player if no other card is there, otherwise they are drawn and placed in the center of the table, in the shared space. Players may only act on the special card in front of them, but may put their card into the center and pull one from the center and put it in the vacant spot in front of them at any time.

If at any point, a player is touching two specials at once, has too many cards in her hand, draws multiple cards at once, or has an empty discard pile while the player to her left has an empty draw pile, any player may call out, "health violation!" and that player must discard her entire hand of toppings immediately.

Customer cards have requirements such a "One pair, no red," or "a run of 3 reds and another run of any suit," and toppings cards meeting the description must be played in order to fill the order and take the customer as money. Many customers also have bonus values such as "+2 for a pair" that add value if the player fulfills that portion of the order. This way, the player can attempt to make the best hotdog they can in order to maximize the customer's value, or they can try to fill orders as fast as possible -- its their choice. When the player fills an order, he or she must declare that the order is filled then place all toppings used into the trash pile.

A pair means two toppings of the same rank. A "set of three" means three of the same rank, and so on.  A "run" means a consecutive run of cards of the same suit. All or almost all customers require a combination of pairs/sets, runs, and possibly voids in one or two suits. If a card is used for one pair or set, it cannot be included in another, but may be used as part of a run. Similarly, a card cannot be used in two different runs for the same customer (e.g. it is not possible to have 2, 3, and 4 of green and 3, 4, and 5 of green, reusing the same 3 and 4).

Upgrade cards have a cost which must be paid to the bank in order to move them from the special slot into an upgrade slot. The card then has a description of its effect. Players may buy, sell, or trade installed upgrades with money or other upgrades.

The game ends when the customer deck is depleted. Players may fill the orders of any customers in the special slot, but may not draw new cards at this point nor move a special card from the center into their special slot. The player with the most money at the end of the game wins, but only if that is more than the total base value of all the unfulfilled customers at the end of the game. Otherwise, nobody wins.

Hopes and implications

The idea would be that the toppings get different names based on their rank and suit. The 4 of red might be "Ketchup" and the 9 of yellow "nacho cheeze." In this case, 9 of green would likely be "onion" and 9 of red would be "chili" meaning that a set of three 9s would make a chili cheese dog with onions. It'd be fun to try to set up some of these traditional combinations, but it becomes more interesting when the game results in sillier, weirder combinations. The intention is that every time a player fulfills a customer order, she should read aloud the resulting hotdog.

There needs to be an incentive to try to cycle through the customer deck reasonably quickly to keep the game going. The fact that everyone but you is moving through the toppings decks, discarding and drawing and improving their hand should be enough incentive to deal with it quickly. My hope is that the game will be fast enough paced to keep the pressure on, but not strictly a contest of card manipulation. The game needs to make you think enough that you're pausing here and there to weigh your options.

The initial concept had a specials hand that got passed around, and from which each player picked a card.  The specials hand would then be replenished when it was empty or at a cost of one dollar for each card remaining in it. The idea was that you would be encouraged to pick the card that is both best for you and best to deny the players who come after you in play. While I very much like the idea, I don't think this is the game for it, as it just seems unnecessary. Still, it's an idea to keep around for later games.

So far, I think I like how it's shaping up. I've got a bunch of customer cards to write up and upgrades to invent, but I think we'll be ready to play tomorrow, if I can get people together. I'll put together an article on the playtest along with some pictures or scans of the crappy prototype cards I'm using. I've also ordered some supplies for making the next version, which I'll go into more later, once I get my hands on 'em.