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Diseases

4 replies [Last post]
j1hopki1
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Joined: 04/13/2011

I want to make a game called Diseases (Is this name taken?) where each player plays as a disease and whoever kills the host wins. I don't have much of the mechanics worked out because I am having problems deciding how a disease kills. Any suggestions for win conditions? I'd like it to be a short cartoony card game. I think there will be different organs to infect and mutation cards. On a turn a player draws a card and plays a card. Thanks.
Joe

Orangebeard
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Joined: 10/13/2011
Variation?

Maybe whichever disease lasts the longest in the host wins? Perhaps there could be different places in the host where your disease can hide or maybe some way for the disease to replicate itself? Players could try to avoid anti-bodies or other cards that will hurt them.

If you stay with the "kill the host" idea, you would probably need something general like energy or health to represent the condition of the host. diseases kill in many ways, but at the end of the day, they all basically just exhaust the host.

I think the mechanics that develop for this game could easily be applied to a computer virus or similar infection type game.

Good Luck with your design!

loserforsale
loserforsale's picture
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Joined: 11/08/2011
My suggestion for a health

My suggestion for a health mechanism would be that each organ has a health meter, which can be reduced and when it drops to 0 the organ is permanently disabled, which would in some way affect the rest of the body. The win condition could be to shut down enough organs to kill the host, with some organs being worth more than others. Over time, organs would slowly recover health.

I'd suggest that points for shutting down an organ go entirely to the player who dealt the last blow, reducing it to 0, but of course you could also do it by who inflicted the most damage or some other factor.

I don't know how serious this game in intended to be, although cartoony suggests not very; you might try making up quirky diseases for player to be, which would a) allow you to have fun markers to show who shut down an organ rather than just coloured counters if you want, and b) avoid alienating anyone who has lost friends/family to particular diseases.

Good luck with this, it sounds a very interesting idea!

parvez
parvez's picture
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Joined: 05/21/2012
We can help you design & produce the game...

Hi there,

Just came across your post on your idea for Diseases - card game.
I would like to introduce myself as a branding-publishing Design Studio, based in Mumbai (INDIA). We are working on a few projects connected with Medical-oriented games, which involves diseases and patient education.

I wish to know if you would be interested to avail of our services to design and/or print-produce such a board game. We have inhouse designing, illustration, artwork creation facilities and we print with our own network printers - assuring us of great production values, lasting finish and amazingly low rates. We also print short run orders (starting 1000 copies) and can also offer lot of special effects in printing like screenprinting, gold foiling, UV etc.

Let me know what is your interest area, we can surely help you from concept to finish as far as Diseases game is concerned. Also, we can secure content for you, in case you are looking for medically authenticated content, as we work with leading medical content providers in India (who are our cllents, by the way).

Do drop me a mail on eternitimedia@gmail.com, if this sounds interesting.

Thanks

Parvez
www.eternitimedia.com

jwmjwm02
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Joined: 07/25/2011
A few ideas

Flavorwise, it would make most sense if you had to get the correct diseases to the correct organs in order for them to be effective and score points. So, maybe the gameplay would work where you're dealt random diseases which enter the blood stream, and you had to successfully get them to the correct organ while avoiding white blood cells.

Perhaps the game mechanic could include having each disease card having a dormant and active side. The dormant side would be more difficult to get killed by the immune system but are more difficult to move and can't score points, while the active side moves easier and score points but are at greater risk of being killed by the immune system.

As for how to make the disease kill, maybe make it so you would have to get multiple cards of the same disease to the correct organ in order to make it fail. The diseases that are worth less points would have more cards and would be easier to reach the threshold, while those that are worth more points have fewer cards and are more difficult to achieve. Then, whoever reaches a certain number of points first wins.

Sorry that this is not very coherent, but just a few ideas to help you get it started

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