I've been kicking around an idea for a card game based on the Vietnam war and would like some feedback.
Essentially there would be three decks of cards; Objectives, Free World Forces and NVA. Each player starts the game with 5 cards in their hand and the board has 4 Objective cards face up in the middle. Each Objective card has a value and a resistance. Players take turns trying to take objectives with cards from their hands while trying to hinder the other players. First to 100 wins, players or NVA.
The Free World cards all have their own value and a player can put down 2 cards each turn draws back up to a full hand at the end of his turn. As long as a card is face up in front of the player it is open for attack by other players. Free World cards would be like Infantry, Helicopters, Artillery batteries, Commanders, etc. along with special cards to remove or hinder other players like R&R or Redeploy. Special cards are kept in your hand and used during an attack to help/hinder the attack.
Objective cards have a value and a resistance. The value is the base number that an attacking player needs to beat with the free world cards he has in play. The resistance is the number of NVA cards that is flipped over when the player calls an attack. Like Free World cards, each NVA card has a value so if your Objective is a 5 and it has a resistance of 2, you would flip over two random NVA cards and add their totals to the value to give an unknown element to the game. If an objective is taken another is flipped up to take the place of the taken objective.
NVA cards are like Free World cards in that they all have a value and some specials that negate attacker cards, like RPG salvo would remove one Armored card from the attack and put it in the discard pile.
Players attack objectives to control them. A player declares what objective he will try and take and then moves forward all the cards he will use in the attack. Another player then flips over NVA cards equal to the resistance of the objective. NVA specials take effect first and then the attacking player uses any specials he may have. Once that is done the attacking player can then add cards from his reserve (that were not added to the battle but are face up in front of him) to the attack. Now the other players can thrown down special cards to help or hinder the player going clockwise around the table. The attacker can then add special cards from his hand and the process of other players helping/hindering. If the attacking player throws no more cards or no cards at all, the other players only get one round of help/hinder. Once that phase is done the totals are compared. If the player beat the total he takes the objective and gets the points. If he fails, the NVA take the objective and get the points.
Thoughts?
I've never really cared for cooperative games, just competitive and "screw your neighbor" games. I was looking at this more along the lines of Illuminati where it is every man for himself and you can help or hurt the other players. I do like the "War Weariness" and could easily add that as a factor. Cards could cancel out and infantry cards canceled could get totaled for that. I'm making up some generic cards to do some initial playtesting this week so I'll see how it goes. Thanks for the response though!