A game theme around the carved wooden totem poles found in America’s Pacific Northwest.
The indigenous people living along the coast of America’s Pacific Northwest carved large wooden poles into a variety of different shapes, usually animals. These poles are used to tell stories, recount legends, symbolize religious beliefs, or perhaps just serve as architectural signs.
From a game-making perspective, the monolithic vertical nature of the totem poles is an interesting game guideline. The fact that these poles often feature stacked animal figures adds another neat aspect. By stacking animals in a linear fashion, you can see how the game grows itself. A good children’s book that captures this idea is Totem Tales.
While this could have a dexterity element to it and actual animal pieces, there are other games that focus specifically on stacking animals (such as HABA’s Animal upon Animal). Instead, the real draw could be the interactions between various animals. Perhaps most creatures can’t be placed on top of a hedgehog or porcupine, but the armored turtle can. Maybe the raven automatically moves to the top of a totem pole anytime somebody plays the bear.
If animals are represented by cards, one route might be to have each card-animal playable for either its action or to put that animal on the top of a totem pole. These actions might be offensive or defensive. Examples of offensive might be to remove a bird-type animal of your choice from the opponent’s totem pole or to prevent your opponent from starting a new totem pole for 2 turns. Defensive actions could be protective spells that prevent any changes to one of your totem poles for 3 turns, or for temporarily reduced costs to construct new totem poles.
“Playing the fox to the totem pole would put him on top of the mouse, gaining me an extra point, but if I use his ability instead, my opponent must play an action next turn instead of an animal, keeping him from starting a second totem pole”
Below are a some thoughts on various win conditions:
-Tallest / race to achieve a certain height. The simplest win condition, this is simply where each player would attempt to stack these various animals as quickly as possible to achieve a certain height first, or to simply have the most animals stacked by the end of a preset number of turns.
-Race to empty one’s hand of card-animals. Similar to the race to a certain height, this is a little different because players don’t care about how tall their totem poles are. This might require that your game have options to start multiple totem poles if certain requirements are met, which has the advantage of giving a player different places to play new animals. This might give your game a nice solitaire feel, possibly opening up a single-player option. This also fits within a traditional story that has the totem pole animals struggling to climb on top of each other before the sun rises in the morning.
-Most victory points achieved by various animal combinations. Rather than simply stacking animals, you could implement a way to give various bonus points for having certain animals near each other in the stack. Maybe having an eagle near a rabbit gives the bird-of-prey extra points, while having the badger near the ground it loves to burrow in grants it additional points.