CCG boardgame without the C

Reiner Knizia made a non collectible customizable card game called Scarab Lords. It's a two player card game however, probably doesn't fit in exactly with what your envisioning. I personally have played several magic variants that where played within a 'sealed' system and played OK, but they didn't really reach the full potential of such a system.

I would love to see such a system suceed. How are you thinking you would implement the customization? Would everyone have access to the same stuff or would there be a drafting or bidding system for the 'stuff' (I assume it would be cards)? I think this would be a very neat idea, especially in the multiplayer realm. It would work with 2 players also, but I think then it's just more simple strategy. With multiplayers, you can take it to the next level and introduce things like diplomacy.

Good luck with your idea!
-Darke

I like the hand management and planification of the deck in a CCG. And the idea to take away all the money involve in this kind of game is great.

Maybe you can create an ordinary card game with event card, at the beginning of the game the deck is splitted in two and players have 4 minutes to build a deck half the size of the splitted deck.

This would really need some fast thinking and knowledge of the cards.

Scarab Lords is a sort of mid-way point between Battle Line (Schotten-Totten) and Blue Moon.

I like Blue Moon a lot even with just the initial four card sets. I'm looking forward to the new ones (due at Essen) to see what they do to the mix.

Hmmm ...

Could even consider things like have a 30 card deck of event cards ... each player chooses 5 to make up the playing deck ... (based on promoting certain playing styles or the like)

Scurra wrote:

A standard way to implement this is to have a "cost" attached to each card, and then specificy how many points may be spent to construct a deck. So you can have lots of cheap stuff of a few of the more powerful cards instead. However, this doesn't really work in a shared deck environment, since one player is unlikely to want to run the risk of the other player drawing the perceived "better" cards. (OTOH there are plenty of ways around that situation, including choosing one card from a selection drawn, or allowing extra card draws at the cost of other actions etc.)

My idea was actually that the event track causes an event that impacts on everyone, but the nature of the impact would depend on their strategy.

For example, in Peurta Rico you can go for VPs from buildings and/or shipping. Some event cards might benefit one of those strategies over the other (e.g. all buildings built this 'round' cost one less coin). Thus, the events ipact on everyone, but favour certain strategies ....

But imagine how horrifying that would be if in one game I went for a building strategy and the Earthquake card turned up and destroyed my buildings, so next game I go for a shipping strategy and the Tidal Wave card turned up and sunk all my ships... (I know you're not talking about such extremities, but it's a good way to evaluate the mechanic.)

(In one design of mine that has Event cards, I get round this problem by basically ensuring that pretty well all of the Events will occur during the game, so the players know to plan for them. Sometimes they will get lucky but frankly that's better than having it so that sometimes they get unlucky instead.)