Im starting my first game and ive picked a fairly simple concept to keep things easy for development. Im going with the classic marbles, the kind where your knocking your friends marbles out of a circle. On paper this is a very basic game, you dont even need a crazy amounts of animations because its just spheres. What im digging into is how far do you think a game needs to expand on its original to be fun?
My proposed design changes basically turn it into something like auto-chess. Marbles have health and get 3 abilities, on throw, on hit, and on round end. The marbles may only have one or two abilities depending on rarity, builds, etc but most of them have an on round end ability. When the round ends the marbles activate and begin to take a dedicated action depending on the ability.
The way this ideally plays out is that marbles are generally fairly resistant to ring outs but as their health lowers they become weaker and more easily thrown about. Health lowers a bit by direct hits and more from special abilities from other marbles. The players throw marbles into the ring during the round to try and get marbles out or setup the field with special marbles that play into the auto-chess feature between rounds. After so many rounds the player with the most marbles wins.
Ideally the places I see the fun factor come in are when they throw marbles to try and either ring out another players marbles, combo abilities between marbles (Say 2 marbles with synergizing abilities make contact), or watching the auto-chess function play out between rounds as a sort of loose betting on your horse situation.