Orcs in the Boardroom

This game has been floating around in my head for sometime. The idea of combining all that business jargon with images from Tolkien makes me smile. The thought of a group of face painted, heaving orcs struggling with a PowerPoint presentation, laugh out loud. Can you imagine Severance Package? Or an Instillation Wizard? Downsizing?

While these ideas have been swimming into my mind for sometime, the game, as a project, has been on the back burner. All this changed for me this week when at lunch James brought a game he designed for a class project. Then, over the next few days, we talked about tweaks and improvements. It got the game creating juices flowing again. Suddenly, while I'm in the shower, I'm thinking about game mechanics and how to strike that balance between strategy and luck.

So, because I'd love to hear your feed back and maybe one card ideas, here it is.

Orcs in the Boardroom has three decks of cards and uses tokens to mark favor. The first deck of cards is Personnel. You start by getting one of these, this is the person you are trying to make CEO. Each personnel has ranks of Aggressiveness, Diplomacy, Magic, Technology and Thievery. The second deck has Tasks, these are the things you do to gain favor, these change over the course of the game and a certain number of them are always available. The third deck, is the Work deck. The cards in the work deck allow you to hire and fire, do side projects, sabotage your opponents and strengthen yourself. Some of these cost favor, while other can earn you favor. The game is won by either having 50 favor, or 8 staff.

You start a round by drawing a Task from the task deck. If this causes the number of shown Tasks to exceed five, discard one. This is your choice. Next, you can complete tasks or play Work cards, these can be done in any order. An interesting element of this phase is you can make arrangements with other players for them to help you complete tasks, they set the cost, though. So, if you are a little short of the Agressiveness required to complete Corporate Jungle, you might offer to split the favor with the player controlling Bloodspitter the Orc. Once you are done, you allow the other players to complete tasks if they have the resources. They also can wheel and deal with other players to combine forces to complete tasks. At the end of you turn you draw back up to five Work cards.

Synergies, Market Segments, Corporate Audits, win-win and Incent, here we come.