Hello, being new to designing games, I don't have much knowledge
I have recently started to design a card game called "VAULT"(may be changed) and its basically about the player hiring criminals to break into your opponent's banks and to protect your own bank.
So far, I have CHARACTER cards, ITEM cards, EVENT cards and LOCATION cards.
I also have 4 different categories criminals (Killer, hacker, Escape Artist and Illusionist/magician).
There is also a fighting system which I am working on...
Does anyone have any ideas of what else should be in the game?
New Card Game needs help
Fri, 05/21/2004 - 01:35
Fri, 05/21/2004 - 05:33
#1
New Card Game needs help
Money?
Fri, 05/21/2004 - 06:08
#2
New Card Game needs help
Are you still fleshing out your idea or have you started writing the rules yet. How do you break into the vaults? Is it just a matter on dynamiting them or do you need to figure out the combination in Master Mind sort of guessing game. Personally i would start to write the rules and only add more to it if there seems to be holes in the game.
P.S. Good Idea for a game.
Fri, 05/21/2004 - 13:08
#4
New Card Game needs help
Here's the first thought I had when pondering your fun idea.
How tdo you go about turning this into more than an accumulation and random attack game? ... how about adding a little deduction to the game?
What if the players also had armored cars which they could use to move money between banks? You might know for sure at the beginning of the game where your opponent's money is, but then you would have to pay attention to the movement of their armored trucks to deduce where they have moved the money... or even heist a truck. hmm... Heist might make a good name too.
fun thoughts! good luck and welcome to bgdf :-)
peace,
Tom
Fri, 05/21/2004 - 13:49
#5
New Card Game needs help
My biggest concern as to my enjoyment of the game from the brief description is that it will be a chip taking game. I'd almost rather see players going after non-player safes.
Games on the theme worth having a look at: Die Safeknacker (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/3349) and Gold Connection (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/401)
Joe
Fri, 05/21/2004 - 18:10
#7
New Card Game needs help
Wow - between SiskNY and nosissies' ideas, I'm ready to play this game!
On a similar theme - a cooperative game of casino hits (Ocean's Eleven) would be interesting as well!
Sat, 05/22/2004 - 01:06
#9
New Card Game needs help
here's an example of the crad...a very rough example of a character card modeled after an anime character from TRIGUN. This card will not be in the first set. It was just a test to see whether it would look nice.
So far, all character cards will have a gunmetal colour background, items will have a darkish grey colour, Events will Imperial Blue and Locations still needs a colour. Any suggestions?
Sat, 05/22/2004 - 18:55
#10
New Card Game needs help
In keeping with the theme of the game, how about gold (don't know how easy that is to get printed) or maybe dollar green (just watch those custom ink inquiries at the fed reserve)?
Sun, 05/23/2004 - 01:35
#11
New Card Game needs help
I had a similar idea about 2 years ago or so- a little fter the LOTR CCG came out. I thought maybe I could make a better CCG, combining the things I liked about Magic and the things I liked about LotR.
Here's a link to what I ended up with (which I never really finished - click on Rules, cards, and irc log for more info.)
Basically like your game, except the point was not to break into a vault but simply steal your opponent's money- which is to say the cards in his deck. Sort of like a cross between combat in Magic and a Force Drain in Star Wars CCG. Your deck is your life total, and you mill yourself to play cards (put cards from your drawe deck into your discard pile). The more cards you draw and play, the less 'life' you have. When your 'creatures' steal cards from the opponent, they hold onto them, and if they're caught they return the money they've stolen.
That's the way I want with it.
- Seth
Sun, 05/23/2004 - 19:20
#12
New Card Game needs help
Sundog wrote:
On a similar theme - a cooperative game of casino hits (Ocean's Eleven) would be interesting as well!
Well I'm well into playtesting my game called "Heist" at the moment, which is, of course, exactly this (but with some Hidden Goals to spice things up a bit.) There are some notes in my journal entry here...
It's currently in the "balancing" phase, where I'm trying to get the numbers right for different numbers of players; the actual format of the game seems to be working pretty well.
(incidentally, I agree that "Heist" is a good name for a game; I actually think I started with that name and built the game from there :))
Mon, 05/24/2004 - 09:14
#13
New Card Game needs help
scurra wrote:
Well I'm well into playtesting my game called "Heist" at the moment, which is, of course, exactly this
Quote:
(incidentally, I agree that "Heist" is a good name for a game; I actually think I started with that name and built the game from there :))
Great minds think alike .... or is this just a case of too many monkeys banging away at their keyboards?
peace,
Tom
Mon, 05/24/2004 - 11:58
#15
New Card Game needs help
bitraven wrote:
Darnit! I remember before my long hiatus from this board, I avoided reading your journal/thread about Heist because the summary I saw looked so darn close to an idea I was developing with my gaming group. Now I just accidentally read it. It's amazing how similar our ideas are. Scary amazing, lol. Oh well, just another project to put on my shelf of abandonment.
Hey, you should never abandon an idea because someone else is doing it! How else would Hollywood ever survive?! The real trick is to rush your version to market first, so that it doesn't matter how good the second one is, no-one will be interested :)
Mon, 05/24/2004 - 23:32
#17
New Card Game needs help
bitraven wrote:
Darnit! I remember before my long hiatus from this board, I avoided reading your journal/thread about Heist because the summary I saw looked so darn close to an idea I was developing with my gaming group. Now I just accidentally read it. It's amazing how similar our ideas are. Scary amazing, lol. Oh well, just another project to put on my shelf of abandonment.
Luckily, as usually happens to me, I've had another idea for a game take over my mind and have been working on that lately ...
Hey Bitraven, you're not going to just stop working on the idea altogether, are you? If you work on your game now and take it to where it wants to go, you'll probably wind up with an altogether different game than Scurra's. Games with similar themes are released all the time... I mean, if I told you that I just played this pretty good game that was about colonizing land using available resources, you'd probably have a tricky time pinning it down. There are even games that share themes and mechanisms.
For example, Fantasy Flight just released Mutiny!, which is awfully close to Marcel-André Casasola Merkle's Meuterer. Both games are about a mutiny on an old-time sailing vessel, both games feature a role-selection mechanic in which the players can gain limited control over the ship, and both games let the players pick up cutlasses that help with the acutal mutiny.
There's also Ursuppe, in which players are amoebas that can "evolve" different abilities in the game. Compare this with Evo, in which players are dinosaurs that can "evolve" different abilities in the game.
TransAmerica is a light game set in 19th century America, where players lay railroad track across the country to reach their secret destinations. Ticket to Ride is a light game set in 19th century America, where players lay railroad cars across the country to reach their secret destinations. The mechanics are slightly different - TtR is j-u-u-u-u-st a bit heavier than TA - but both games share similar characteristics.
It's funny, I was working on one of my own games that was too dry and difficult to teach without a theme. I introduced a theme of mad scientists stealing body parts, with help from various Igors. I knew Cheapass had a game with a similar theme (Parts Unknown), but its mechanics were much different than mine.
Of course, then Mike Young from Interactivities Ink had to come out with his card game called Igor, in which players are mad scientists... well, I'll hum a few bars, and you can wing it. Except that they're not stealing body parts, but still, it's awful close.
My point being, I'm not too disturbed by it. You can come out with a game with exactly the same theme as another game; but if the mechanics are completely different, or even slightly different, the games will have a completely different feel.
So go ahead and take the game where it will lead you. Don't worry about Scurra's game. If it makes you feel better, tweak the theme slightly. Put it in the 19th century, or the 21st century. Maybe they're stealing jewels instead of going into a bank vault; maybe they're going after top-secret government papers. Focus on the mechanics. If you make a fun game, you can always find a new theme on it. I'll bet that by the time you get it into playtesting, it will play differently than Scurra's.
And hey, if it doesn't, then combine both games and share the credit! 8)
Tue, 05/25/2004 - 10:20
#19
New Card Game needs help
bitraven wrote:
Still, as you will see below, I really hate it when I come up with an idea only to find out something similar has been done and I didn't know about it. Makes me think I have a second life where I read about or play games while sleeping. Maybe I'm a sleep-game-player.
Ah well, I've had games in which I could swear I would have done better sleeping... :)
bitraven wrote:
I once read something about how an "idea" "floats around, waiting for the right time to be born" and then multiple people have it at the same or nearly the same time. I think this happened with the atom bomb, the jet engine, the telephone, if I recall correctly. It's an interesting phenomenon.
I know it happened with the "discovery" of autism. Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, working without knowledge of each other and on different continents, both published papers on the subject in the early forties.
A former colleague of mine once raved at me about how Picasso embraced Cubism and Einstein came up with his theories on relativity at the same time. It sure sounded great at the time, but I don't have the foggiest idea about what they actually have in common. :roll:
Anyway, it's about time I stopped hijacking this thread... :)
Very cool idea and a great theme! I take it you have a system where every player runs a bank and has X amount of security on their vaults. Players then recruit characters (presumably in an advisory role) to make their vaults more secure. Certain characters add to the security level of the vault in certain areas (a computer hacker would make the bank more secure against someone hacking into their account information, but not much more secure against someone who will tunnel in and steal the money), etc.
Maybe the criminals would even contemplate (randomly) breaking into the bank that hired them! Have a pool of criminals from which players could get advice, then determine who in that pool will break into what bank...
Perhaps a balance between resources and security. Like having a fixed budget, hiring a specialist in one area would mean less $$ to other areas, some other areas would falter. Can only afford so many specialists, etc. Players could gain income to afford better security and more specialists.
Just a stream of thought, hope it helps!