First things first, hello you there my dear reader! Hope you're having a good day.

I've been toying around for the last ten-ish days with a domino-based system, then I designed the framework of the system and I played the very first playtest today. While the game foundations and the themes were great and my players loved it, the actual action resolution mechanics felt quite off.

Introduction

The idea of using domino in a bag building game is that it could answer the interest of deck building mechanics that have recently gone outside the board game world, while not requiring specific custom pieces since domino sets could be bought for as cheap as few bucks from amazon. Bag building board games are also pretty popular, I generally like them.

The elevator pitch for the game would be something like...

You’ve heard, read and watched stories like Alice in Wonderland, Over the Garden Wall or The Neverending Story, now is the right time to play one of them!

You and your friends got spirited away in a dreamscape known as the Land Made of Wonder. You only have each other, a handful of happy memories of the lands Back Home, what's inside your pocket and your heart to embark on a Journey through these strange unplaces.

Will you find your way home of will you choose to stay here?

The System in a Nutshell

The gist of the system is that every player (not the GM) has a bag with a double six domino set in it (a full set is required for each player). The characters' approaches are six, those tied to the tile faces:

1. Brave (⚀) - Brave kids fight back, even by using force, never give up and withstand all kind of pains and fears.
2. Clever (⚁) - Clever kids find all possible shortcuts, makes use of them well and are able to manipulate others.
3. Empathic (⚂) - Empathic kids are good at communicate and at reading between the lines, come to term and mediate.
4. Grown (⚃) - Grown kids have a relative big wealth of experiences, weigh up the risks well, are a good role model for others and could lead them easily.
5. Deft (⚄) - Deft kids know a lot of things of the world Back Home, have the technical know-how and are pretty good with their hands.
6. Inventive (⚅) - Inventive kids find easily solutions out of the box, understand and interact easily with creatures and places of the Land Made of Wonder.

• The empty faces in the tiles represent Wonder (◻), the strange things of the dreamscape the game is set within. One fourth of the times, a wonder tile will come up while drawing.

By drawing a tile from your bag (your heart), you have different odds of drawing different numbered tiles because character progression is tied down to a bag building mechanics. It's basically as if you could customize your own "dice faces percentage" by slowly sculpting the content of your bag.

Character progression happens by swapping non-blank non-sticked tiles with another player (this happens as you share a happy memory with them) or by putting a sticker to permanently change one/both faces of a tile, making it ineligible for swapping and making the character partially transfigured by the magic of the Land Made of Wonder (this happens as you reminisce a bad memory or change a happy memory into a bad memory). This makes the character progression similar to a deck building system, but tying down vignette-like character interactions in the downtime to the character progression.

This is partially inspired by Mask and the journey structure is inspired by the two phases in Mouseguard (here I call them the Journey phase and the Rest phase).

TL;DR Players have a bag containing domino tiles and bag building is tied to character progression.

Proposed Action Resolution

The original action resolution was a collaborative puzzle-based experience, that felt pretty fidgety and disjointed from the events in the game. I trashed it, but we had few hours left of playtesting with the basic mechanic in the bin.

As we were screwing around with domino pieces in hand, what did come up was that drawing a tile feels basically very similar to rolling 2d6s, but you've sculpted your odds of rolling that specific couple of numbers in advance. People felt a lot of control on their draw, especially after they got the chance to exchange some/many tiles with each other. Continuing that line of thought, drawing two tiles would be equivalent to roll 4d6s, drawing three to 6d6s and so on.

So, I winged a bare-bones Tile Pool system while playing and it worked pretty well.

• The GM determines the approach of the proposed action (Brave, Clever, Emphatic...) and determines the Difficulty, or how many successes are needed to succeed.
• You draw a number of tiles from your bag, mostly fixed. If you're skilled at something (and skills are free-form qualities tied to memories from the world Back Home where/when you learnt them, such as a memory like "I remember the day my dad taught me how to survive on the woods") or you use a wondrous tool, you could bring it up and draw one/two more and if other people helps they draw one from their own bag.
• The number of tiles with the approach's number on it are successes, the number of blank tiles are wonders (points the GM can bank to introduce otherwordly things and consequences).
  • If you meet or exceed Difficulty, you succeed.
  • Otherwise GM decides failure with a Twist (spending wonders) or success with a Condition.
• You put all drawn tiles back in the bag.

This is inspired by Mouseguard and is very very basic at this stage.

TL;DR You resolve actions by counting successes on a number of tiles drawn from your bag.

Considerations and Questions

• Is it clear? Do you find the essentials of the system interesting?
• I haven't played that many dice pool systems (except old WoD and Exalted games, Burning Wheel/Mouseguard and Fate I guess?) , since they aren't usually my favorite ones so I don't find really easy to improve on the tile pool system. What are things you saw implemented in a dice pool system you particularly liked?
• The system is player-facing and the GM is not required to have a bag (since they don't have a character "with a heart"). This creates a clear separation in between player roles.
• The Tile Pool system right now is very very simple, but at least it works. I've yet to gauge the odds to fine-tune the expected numbers of successes at different stage of "bag optimization".
• I know that domino tiles are known as "bones" and "bone throwing on rune casting circles" is an accepted form of divination. I like the sound of it and the idea of making domino trains on top of a four-sectioned circle is enticing, but I can't see this going anywhere right now.

Again, thanks for reading and for any incoming suggestions!