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Gaido (The Guide) a concept for a card game I'm working on

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trollitc
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I've finally gotten my idea for this game out of my head and onto some virtual paper. Here's the rough instructions for playing this 20 card game. Please, please let me know what you think. Thanks!

There are a total of 16 landscape cards, and 4 Journey’s End cards, represented by different birds. There are also 24 tokens.

To start the game, shuffle all 20 cards. Each player draws 3 cards to form their starting hand. Any left over cards are placed within easy reach of all players as the Draw Pile. Place all 24 tokens within easy reach as well.

This game is played over three rounds.

To start off each round, pick a starting player.

One each player’s turn, they draw one card, and then they may either play one card into one of four stacks, or discard one card into the discard pile.

There are four different landscape cards with arrows on them. These are played on the table in four stacks, one stack for each different landscape. They may be played facing any direction. Cards have numbers of arrows in this order, from Bottom (pointing down), Left, Right, Top.

1,1,1,1
2,1,1,1
3,2,2,1
4,3,3,2

Every Landscape card has arrows on it that point in four different directions. The number of arrows are the number of potential points earned by the players they point at.

If you have a Journey’s End card in your hand, you may also play this on any of the four stacks, as long as at least one landscape card is already in that stack. Journey’s End cards are always played facing towards the player who put them on a stack. (OPTION 1 - you must play a card on a stack so that more arrows are present facing you. i.e. if someone plays the 3,2,2,1 card on a stack, with the 1 facing you, you can then play the 2,1,1,1 card on it with the 2 facing you).

As soon as you play a Journey’s End card on a stack, no other Landscape cards of that type may be played on that stack and the stack is scored.

To score a stack, the player who played the Journey’s End card removes it from that stack. That player may then rotate the top card on that stack 90* left or right. Starting with the lowest number of arrows, each player takes a number of tokens equal to the number of arrows pointing at them.

That landscape may no longer be played. If a player has or draws a card of that landscape, they may keep it in their hands or they may choose as their action to discard it. You may only discard Landscape cards, and then only if that journey has come to an end.

The round ends in one of two ways. Either when all 4 of the Journey’s End cards have been played, or as soon as the last token has been taken.

Each player counts up their tokens. The player with the most tokens is the winner of that round and is declared the Gaido (guide). If there is a tie, each player is declared a Gaido.

Each time a player is declared a Gaido, they take one token from the pile and set it aside. This is their reward.

At the end of three rounds, after all Gaido have been declared and they have claimed their tokens, each player totals up their rewards. The player(s) with the highest rewards wins.

JewellGames
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Great theme

I really like the unique theme of birds returning home. Awesome.

I think your rules would benefit from just a few sample pictures of the cards and their interaction for the player to get a better idea of the rules.

Do you have pnp cards available?

trollitc
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I would upload a few

I would upload a few pictures, but it doesn't seem I can do so in a reply here. You can see what I have at the post I wrote on my own site below!

http://trollitc.com/2013/10/game-school-gaido-following-a-game-from-conc...

It's not quite ready for PnP yet, but once it is, I'll post here if anyone's interested!

As an aside, I did get to play test it today, and it went quite well! Still some bugs and issues, but it plays rather nicely.

JewellGames
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OK, I get the game much

OK, I get the game much better now. For some reason I initially thought the game was about birds travelling long distances not a guide leading people to a bird lol.

So I see you use tokens as a score keeper and have a limited number so when they run out the round is over (or when all 4 journeys end). This provides tension as you say but also issues with ties for a final tokens. I am not sure if you had that design go from 40 > 24 to cut down on tokens needed or because it really does add tension but the lowest gets first dibs isn't bad. I would think having the last journey's end would provide tension that too since there are only 20 cards anyway.

Just an idea I had IF you decide against a lot of tokens.

Provide 4 player tokens (penny,dime, nickel, quarter for playtesting), each player then tracks "distance traveled" on the tracker board. Visually, the players can instantly see which guide has traveled the farthest and maybe target them. Also, in this case the straight tracker actually fits with the theme a little more than cubes earned.

If tokens did go away maybe the gaido(s) of the round get a perk for the next round since they are "out in front to survey the area". On their first draw of the next round when they draw that card they decide whether to keep or place at bottom and redraw.

What happens to cards you can no longer play? You mentioned discarding them but didn't really go into depth on how that works. Very rare case but hypothetically if someone played an end on a journey and I had the other 3 matching journey cards, those cards are now dead in hand and Im basically top decking and playing whatever I draw?

These ideas could be a totally different direction than your vision but just some thoughts I had. I look forward to see the progress.

JewellGames
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If you get a chance check out

If you get a chance check out my game, I would love to bounce feedback off each other.

Rivers - A lite 2-4 player card laying/area control game {standard 52 card deck}

trollitc
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You've got some great ideas,

You've got some great ideas, thanks for suggesting them.

I gave some serious thought to a tracker type player board, but I want to keep this game as compact and tidy as possible. The idea of doing an entire game in 20 cards and 24 tokens was really appealing to me.

With the discards, it could happen that you get an entire hand invalidated, and are playing from the draw. That's the bad news. The good news is that it happens seldom, and when it does a round of card play lasts about 5-7 minutes, at the most. So you're not in that 'I'm screwed!' position for long.

-B

JewellGames wrote:
OK, I get the game much better now. For some reason I initially thought the game was about birds travelling long distances not a guide leading people to a bird lol.

What happens to cards you can no longer play? You mentioned discarding them but didn't really go into depth on how that works. Very rare case but hypothetically if someone played an end on a journey and I had the other 3 matching journey cards, those cards are now dead in hand and Im basically top decking and playing whatever I draw?

These ideas could be a totally different direction than your vision but just some thoughts I had. I look forward to see the progress.

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