Hello all, I have a very rough draft of a card game and would like some feedback. Each player has a small deck of gladiator cards to use to fight in the arena, which will contain 3 decks of varying difficulty. A player can choose to fight from any one of the decks, the harder the difficulty the more gold and prestige the gladiator will get. The goal is to have the most prestige by the end of the game, which will end once a player has retired 5 gladiators. The only way to bank your prestige points is to retire your gladiators. Retiring your gladiators puts them out of the game, but is the only way to collect your prestige. Once a gladiator has been sent to the arena they only have 4 options, fight, die, buy, or retire. You can keep your gladiator out longer to press your luck and gain more gold and prestige, but if your gladiator is defeated you lose all prestige attached to him. (gold is collected immediately after each opponent the gladiator kills and can be used for purchasing weapons and armor) Like i said, this is a very rough draft and would like some help fleshing out the game. I'm thinking for the actual combat between cards to be dice which can be enhanced with weapons or armor purchased from the market. Each card will have an attack and defense score that the player will need to beat in order to win the match. Another thought i was entertaining was some sort of PVP, or any way for the players to interact with each other instead of just interacting with the game. This is still a scattered idea so any thoughts or opinions would be welcome.
Gladiator Card Game
I like the press your luck versus bank the gold idea. How are gladiators sent to the arena? Is it random from your deck, or do you get to pick? Are they all equal to begin with, or have special abilities? Seems like you'd upgrade (buy armor) or retire before they went to the arena, so that once in the arena, the only option is to fight: live or die. So maybe a phase system? Also, there might be some gold in actually just showing up, but more if you win. Of course, if you lose, no more gladiator to send in for show money.
The Banking idea is great. Makes sense thematically, offers a good PYL element, and could make for some interesting strategies.
Have you played Thunderstone Advance? It has a similar aspect of going against monsters of differing difficulties, although in that game they are randomly dispersed through a single deck of level 1, 2, and 3 monsters.
How many gladiators do you have going in at a time? Is there an option to send in multiple gladiators to take on multiple enemies at once?
A problem I see coming up: If a gladiator goes in and defeats 9 or 10 enemies before retiring, what happens to his weapons and armor? Would a rookie gladiator be able to take control of that over-powering equipment and go in with an advantage, or start from scratch? Either way would work as long as the game is set up to support it.
This may be a good opportunity to for what's called a Rogue-Like Game. There's a video game called Rogue Legacy where each time you die you restart with a new character (the offspring of the last character) but you keep all of your equipment and money. This would be good incentive to make the level 2 and 3 enemies considerably harder since you'll have lots of time to ramp up to them.
Another recommendation, have a large supply of possible monsters (with or without duplicates) but limit the number actually put into a deck each game. This prevents characters from constantly going after the low-level monsters to play it safe and get easy money/prestige.
This is a cool idea! Excited to see how this turns out!
The cards will be chosen from your deck to the arena, and they're going to have varying stats for attack and defense. Great feedback, I like the idea of getting gold just for showing up. Thanks for taking time to post yout thoughts!