Then my second game is ready for test. I think I've found a way to make it work, but please help me if this sound wrong. The game is a card game. You only need the two decks that came with the game. One action deck and one info deck. The game rules are easy. The first player that gets 7 cards of the same info group wins. With a max hand of 10 that can be a little hard. Every round a player can do one of 3 things. Take an info card, take an action card or use an action card. I have created over 50 different action cards and 60 different info cards. The action cards can make conflicts between players or help you get more cards. You pay with the cards you have in hand. I hope this sound like a good game, but I need to know what you all think about it.
Deadline - Tell me what you think
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Hard to say
It’s really quite hard to tell from what you described so far. Like they say “The Devil is in the details.”
I would first run solo testing. Play the game by yourself to determine if there any glaring mechanical problems with it like overpowered cards etc… Making changes as needed. After you’re certain that it’s working ok get some live testers. I do first round testing with friends, usually other game designers. I don’t test with strangers until a know I have a solid core.
Parsimony
Without knowing what the action cards do, it is very difficult to assess the game. But, I can imagine that they will allow you to draw more action cards or info cards, steal cards, trade cards, protect cards, discard cards, etc... So, I have a few suggestions.
First, the game reminds me of Fluxx meets Gin. Like any set matching game, Gin, Rummy, Phase10, you're trying to collect a critical number of matching cards to 'go out'. However, unlike the common domain games, Fluxx differentiates between rules (cards that let you perform actions, sort of) and keepers (the equivalent of your info cards). But, instead of getting 3 specific matching cards out of the large Fluxx deck, you need to acquire 7 out of presumably 10, 12 or 15 cards of the same type in your info deck.
My suggestion to you would be to consolidate the two decks. Assign every action card to one of five or six different factions/territories/colors. And then use the collection of 7 matching factions/territories/colors in your hand as the victory condition. Right off the bat, players will be challenged by the trade off of using their cards for the actions and keeping them for victory. And, ultimately, they will have to pick which set they want to collect, with an eye on the future of which cards are likely to be the most or least useful. You might even consider structuring the types of actions according to either a vertical or horizontal configuration of the cards according to factions/territories/colors. (which is to say, every card in one faction has the same power, or every card in the same faction has a different power).
Keep in mind that all the public domain games use a standard deck of playing cards and integrate number matching into their set collecting. This allows players to work in orthogonal dimensions, runs vs. sets, as they race to win. You also might think about how you could introduce numbers into the game and integrate it into the driving mechanic.
So far, you do not have a driving mechanic other than card draw. In Gin, it is draw from the deck or the pile, then put one back into the pile. The pile becomes the essential mechanic of the game that drives the strategy - otherwise players would simply draw until one person won (by chance). In Fluxx, the ability to change the rules that affect all players is the essential driving mechanic. So, it very much matters what cards are in the rule pile on the table.
Your game needs a play area and to define how that effects the play of the game. Do the action cards get discarded when they are played? Or do they enter the play area and constrain or open up future choices? Is your goal to collect 7 matching factions/territories/colors in play or in your hand? If they must be in play, can they be attacked, stolen, discarded? Or do you only accumulate? And how might a number on each card play into this dynamic? And are all actions automatically effective when you play them or do they have a cost or set of limitations to be activated?
Ultimately, each of these questions spawns an idea for how the game might look like an existing card game... so the challenge will be to come up with a dynamic that does not look like thing else. And, is fun!
Instead of numbers...
What the previous poster (Richard James, is that you?) is saying about numbers on the cards is true - most games of that type (rummy variants) have 2 aspects to each card (suit and rank) such that each card could fit into either of 2 types of sets.
First off, giving each card 1 attribute (suit) and 1 ability (the action involved) might be interesting enough - that's sort of like 2 attributes (rank and suit) in a way.
However, what I was going to suggest was this: Give each card a Rank, only rather than simply printing a number on the card, hide it in a geographic component of the game.
Imagine you have a game board, with a series of locations on it. For now name the locations generically: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc - through 13. In each location pretend there are 4 spots, labeled Red, Green, Yellow, and Blue.
Ok, now let's say that Red, Green, Yellow and Blue are the colors (suits) of cards in your game. Each card could have a location - which, generically as we've labeled them, would be the same as the Rank number!
Now replace the generic numbers with more thematic names and you've got a well disguised Rummy set collection mechanism!