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Hello all,
I have little to no experience in game design, but the Wargames Atlantic "One Box Wargame" challenge reminded me of a fun game idea I had a while back. As this forum has quite some talented designers writing (and no doubt lurking) in several threads, I thought I'd write my idea down so someone can maybe run with it, either for the challenge or any other purpose. Any further discussion, feedback etc. is of course welcome in this thread!

The Goblin Election is about a Goblin tribe in search of a new leader. The previous leader died in an unfortunate accident no doubt caused by an overconsumption of mushrooms combined with confidence befitting of an Ork Warlord (but not a Goblin).
After mourning the death of the great leader, involving a lot of mushroom mead and almost emptying the tribes food storage, several Goblins are running for the election to be the next in charge.

Each player represents a Goblin with the (over-) confidence to be the next great Goblin leader.
To win the election, the player must gain the support of at least two thirds of the goblins in the tribe. For example, in a tribe of 18 goblins, the player must gain the support of 12 or more. Each goblin is represented by a Goblin miniature. Each player collects Goblins in front of him, while Goblins in the middle of the table represent those yet undecided.

Players can take different actions on how to gain followers for the election:
- Recruiting: Gain D3 Goblins that are currently undecided (in the middle of the table). This represents the aspiring leader going from door to door trying to gain new supporters.
- Hold a speech: I'm currently undecided what works best. Draw from a deck of cards, where the possible speech is written and deal with the results? Or just role some dice to determine the success of the speech? I would like to have the potential of things going horribly wrong. For example insulting an opponent that is ill received by the audience, causing supports to switch side, etc.
- Go on an expedition (WIP Name: Loot 'n Hoot): To show who is the greatest leader the player leads his supporters out into the wild, trying to loot, grab or steal something of value. This may be spider eggs, some shiniest from da 'umies, or an accidental encounter with a bear. I would like a mechanic were the player is confronted with a scenario, e.g. "You enter a cave filled with bioluminescent mushrooms. Do you A grab the mushrooms to refill the tribes food supplies (gain D3 supporters) or B venture deeper into the cave (a spiders lair. Role a D6. On a 4+, gain that many supporters impressed by the spiders defeat, else lose that many supports, injured by the spider)"

If the supply of undecided models is empty, the player would gain these supporters from a random other player (determined for each individual model).

So, closing comments: I believe this could be a fun little game, but it needs something to spice it up. A mechanic for catching up after series of unlucky roles and the opportunity to take out a weaker opponent for good to reduce the game length would be useful. Furthermore, having a set of scenarios that add funny (or rather silly) encounters or accidents would really help this, but this may run the risk that these short stories might get stale after encountering the Glow-Mushroom cave filled with spiders for the third time.

I hope that, if nothing else, this was a fun read. If anyone wants to build on this, please feel free to use it in whatever form you like. I'm lacking the time and skill to turn this into anything more that a fun little idea in the back of my head.
Take it from here!

I am sorry to be critical, but I do not see this as a game design idea. It's purely a vibe - both for the "game" as a whole and for individual actions.

There's no "game" there, imho, everything is random, just a series of rolls to watch, like in Snakes and Ladders.

Where is the player agency? How are player decisions varied, some situationally better or worse but not in an obvious way? What mistakes can players make, that cause them to think "I should have done X not Y, but couldn't see it at that time. I'll remember this next time"? How can one player force the other into making bad decisions?

The vibe there is hardly relevant without some solid mechanical foundations behind. At this point it doesn't matter if the game is going to be about a goblin election, a real world election, starship auction or mafia power grab.

A nice starting point could be to take a look at a list of mechanics for inspiration:

https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic

Which of course absolutely doesn't mean new mechanics can't be invented or existing ones combined in surprising, non-obvious ways! Quite the opposite, it is likely to be the right course of action, if done well.

I would ditch the idea of an action just giving you d3 goblins. It's a direct path to victory, features a kind of swingy RNG and just isn't very interesting.

I would make this into mostly a card game with chits. The Cards would do all kinds of very gobliny things to both gain recruits, counter opponents cards, and steal from others.

Get 5 to 7 cards in a hand, make them really funny and make it all dastardly and tricky and have players take turns playing a card. Start with 7 play 1. Next turn draw back to 7 and play 1. etc etc...

The meat of the game is then in the cards themselves and they interact with each other.

Cyel wrote:

There's no "game" there, imho, everything is random, just a series of rolls to watch, like in Snakes and Ladders

I have to disagree with this right here - what OP described reminds me of a 'book game' i had where it was essentially a dungeon crawler and you were supposed to play the game multiple times with the 'downtime' in between playthroughs allowing you to buy equipment and allies which affected how well you could deal with new threats and therfore how much further you could delve.
I had another which was a scifi planet exploration variation and you got to pick your away team and generate their stats before going planetside - you could run out of spare crewmen if you did really bady and doom the mission

Those game books were the basis of point&click adventure games