This is a Peerful game. Everyone connects with their phone to a main screen, and plays on their own phone. (Like the Jackbox games.)
Shared Market
The main screen simply shows a busy market: goods entering, goods leaving, prices changing. (Like a more cozy/simplified stock exchange, I guess?)
You are obviously a merchant trying to sell your wares for as much as possible, and buy new wares on the cheap.
Your device shows all possible purchase options at the moment. Tap any one of them to use it.
To make it more interesting …
- Players get secret hints about things that will happen in the future. (Goods that go up, or down, or appear.) => There are random events that shake things up?
- Players have secret goods that they need to win. If they don’t get them, it doesn’t matter how much money they have, they lose.
- (Market value might also be realistically calculated. If people flood the market with similar goods, its price plummets.)
This sounds like a really simple game to make, but also not something with a lot of longevity …
Related Idea: Shared Map
The main screen only shows where players are, but not what the map looks like.
Instead, on your device, you get one chunk of the map. (Probably easiest to do long vertical strips.)
This means that …
- Wherever you are currently walking …
- Somebody knows where treasure, monster, or walls are.
- But it’s probably not you. It’s on the phone of another player.
This means communication and cooperation galore.
Your goal is to collect as much treasure as possible and bring it back to home base. Meeting a monster on the way makes you lose treasure.
(The alternative is a lives system, where meeting a monster loses a life, and losing all means elimination. But I don’t like elimination, especially not in Peerful Games.)