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Some sort of new card game mechanics

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larienna
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Joined: 07/28/2008

It is not a completely new mechanic, in fact it's the fusion of 2 cards mechanics together and I sure that there is already a game out there that already did it. Anyways, I tought about it yesterday and it is giving me good ideas for some of my games which were stalling.

There are some kind of card games where you must combine a certain number of element to perform an action and each card is one of these element. I'll give you an example which is not a board game but still illustrate the situation.

In Saga Frontier 2, you have 6 elements : Fire, tree, stone, water, tone, beast. Then there are spells, some spell require some combiation of these. For example Tree-Stone, or Fire-Fire-Tone, etc. Now as a card game, we could make card for each elements and when the player has the proper combination of elements he play the cards and the effect occurs.

With this kind of mechanic, you need to write somewhere in a rule book or on a character sheet what are the required elements and what is the spell effect. I wanted to find a way to remove this extra material and keep just the cards.

So what I tought is to write the spell effect on the element cards instead. So that each card could either be used as a ressource to cast a spell or as a rule text for a spell. Here is an example :

Card 1 : Fire : Effect A ( requires Fire-Fire-Stone )
Card 2 : Fire : Effect B ( requires Fire-Stone )
Card 3 : Stone : Effect C ( requires Stone-Tree )

Now with the 3 cards above, I could play all the 3 cards together to perform spell effect A. Or I could use cards 2 and 3 to perform spell effect B. But I can also use cards 1 and 3 to perform effect B. Which mean that I would show card 2 to the players for the rules and place card 2 back in my hands. But there is no ways that Ic ould cast effect C.

To complexify things, you can make sure that the element of the cards is not required by the spell effect on the cards, forcing you to use other cards. You could even add number beside the elements of the cards which could be use to compute damage and stuff like this.

Of course, since each spell would require to play between 1 and 4 cards, you need to have a good card flow to fill up your hand.

In generalm the goal of this mechanic is to give more than 1 usage to each card in order to improve the strategy level. It's like in duel masters where you can use either a card as mana or as a spell.

FateTriarrii
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Joined: 01/04/2009
Some sort of new card game mechanics

It sounds sorta like Pokemon (the card game) with you different manas, except for the fact that the spells ARE your mana cards. It sounds like a great mechanic! The only thing I could see going wrong is if the players (in whatever game you incorporate this mechanic in) got the correct combo of cards so slowly, that they always play one when they have it (thereby eliminating your carefully inserted strategic content).

w0rf
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Joined: 12/31/1969
Some sort of new card game mechanics

This is a good idea and quite clever imo. I may be looking at this differently because I don't know the larger scope of your game, but it seems to me it would make more sense to require you to play Card 2 when casting its spell, even if you have other cards which fill the requirement. This would save the extra step of verifying a card in your hand contains the spell (and showing your cards in hand to your opponent), and have a built-in cost for casting certain spells that might discourage people from trying to stock up on one particular spell's elements and casting it over and over and over again.

For more common / less powerful spells, the same spell could exist on multiple cards so that you could draw Effect B later in the game and still have another opportunity to cast it. This would be consistent with most magic systems which allow you to cast numerous low-level spells but only one Hadoken per day.

Just my $0.02

NetWolf
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Joined: 12/31/1969
Some sort of new card game mechanics

The easiest way I can see to balance this is to have "stages" of cards. For example:

Stage 1 Fire: Provides one Fire element and grants access to a single, powerful spell (written on the card)

Stage 2 Fire: provides two Fire elements but only grants access to a single, minor spell (written on the card).

Stage 3 Fire: provides three Fire elements and nothing else.

This way, you have to have the smaller cards, because without them, you have no powerful spells, but at the same time, you cannot fuel these powerful spells without large sources of the same elemental power: the Stage three element cards. This could also allow for some interesting strategies where a person can use primarily stage 2 and stage 3 cards, producing a large amount of minor effects quicker than a person who slowly builds up to a large Stage 1 spell effect.

I would also add in opposition so that each spell can be countered by an equal and opposite effect. Someone wants to play a Fireball for example, using 8 Fire Element cards to do so, but it can be countered by the opponent if they decde to use 8 Water elements.

Yogurt
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Joined: 01/09/2009
Some sort of new card game mechanics

I agree with w0rf that discarding the card with the Spell Recipe on it should be required. That lets you streamline the game and control distribution of the spells, as he notes. It also makes the recipes simpler. You can drop one of the Fires from a card that is itself a Fire.

Check out San Juan which is another game that uses cards as a both something to construct and the raw materials for construction. There are no suits in San Juan though. You simply must discard 5 cards to build a Monument or 2 cards to build a Sugar Plant or whatever. It still makes for agonizing choices, because your hand refreshes irregularly.

(It's a brilliant game and you can try it free on BrettSpielWelt.)

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