Storyline mechanic: Need an alternative to stacked event cards

What do I mean by an event track? Imagine a scoring track, but with special squares on it. When you land on specific squares, specific events occur. When you pass over certain squares, other events trigger.

If you want to avoid always having the same events each time you play, you could make decks for specific squares. Imagine that there are wandering monster squares on the event track. When you land on a wandering monster space, you draw one wandering monster card for every monster face on the square. Early wandering monster squares have only one face on them. Later squares have three or more faces on them. Imagine that there are three critical events that you want to have happen, a crisis (red), climax (yellow), and showdown (green). You can have three decks (red, yellow, and green) and have players draw from them.

Gotta go celebrate the inauguration now. More later, perhaps?

I've been thinking about something similar. Perhaps a story track with a lookup number that references a grid. The other axis for the grid would be some condition that varies during gameplay. For instance, your track might have values from A-G, and your character will have earned points from 1-6. The grid would look like so,

1 2 3 4 5 6
A
B
C
D
E
F
G

At each intersect you'd have an index to a book that explains the story point, or the story point itself, depending on available space.

Dovetailing off the "grid" idea, but avoiding a textbook:

Perhaps you could have three different decks, with different levels of effects -- basically, good / neutral / bad (or neutral / bad / terrible, or good / great / amazing, depending on the style of your game).

Within each deck, the cards have different groupings of backs, 20 have 1 hash, perhaps, 20 have 2 hashes, 20 have 3 hashes. These hashes show early, middle, and late story events, respectively. If your game is about detectives, for instance, they might be early leads and forensics, interviews and clue-tracking, and finally arresting the suspect and getting a confession (or not). If your game is about wandering knights, you've got tavern rumor and kings hiring you, going out on the quests, and then returning to town for the reward (or not). Or whatever.

So you have, in this example, 20x3x3=180 cards.

You lay cards out, face down, in three rows, one for each of the good / neutral / bad decks. Perhaps you deal out ten. Then you arrange them by hashes, so that within each row, all the 1-hashes are first, then the 2-hashes, then the 3-hashes. So you might get a layout like this:

G: 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3
N: 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3
B: 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3

Various moments in game play will make players draw a card and resolve its effects. In general, they will start at the left and move across. The story progresses as they move across, and provides rising tension by ratcheting up the effects (good or bad) of the cards.

At this point you can tweak the mechanic a bit:

1) There are 10 card-based events in the game, one per column. Players must choose between the three rows (or their position/condition/resource-x in the game will chose for them), discarding the 2 unused cards afterwards. Perhaps they may flip over the cards before they make their choice, or perhaps they simply have to pick blind. Note that in many cases, this will have them choosing between events from two different story stages, and in extreme deals (lots of 1's in one column, lots of 3's in another) might have them choosing between events from 3 different story stages.

2) There are up to 30 events in the game. Players work their way down rows individually until all the cards are gone or the game ends in some other way (basically the same as above except without discarding). This gives you more events but has the disadvantage of having players able to pick beginning events when they've already nearly reached the end of the story, or running through all of the cards of the "good" column and having no more positive choices, only bad or less bad.

3) There are between 10 and 30 events, depending on the card layout. Players "unlock" the middle elements in all rows by completing one set of hashes within any one row, at which point you discard all remaining cards for that game-stage. In the example above, after players have selected the two neutral-beginning events, they discard the remaining beginning events and the next time select one of the middle-story events from any of the three rows. This option will be very difficult to playtest but is probably the most fun if you can balance it right.

4) You could have a separate "final column" deck, which is activated at some point to form the end-game. This ensures that your game always has a climactic showdown at the end, or some other sort of real resolution, as it's possible that you won't have any 3-hash cards in any given column. You could also just deal out four of each hash-set (beginning/middle/end), giving you twelve columns, but then you leave the specific final event to chance and is a bit fiddly for set-up. It all depends on the make-up of the cards, I suppose.

You can also increase granularity by dividing the cards into further categories (four rows: great / good / bad / terrible, or five hash-sets instead of three), keeping in mind that this means either greater cost/development/playtesting (more cards) or decreased replayability (fewer cards per type means that players are more able to memorize all the, say, terrible three-hash cards, and account for them when they play).

A lot of this depends on the cards and what they do. You can have a dozen different kinds of swords to be found, but chasing a suspect down a flight of stairs and tripping is pretty specific and memorable, and you don't want that to happen twice in a story.

Here's a nice twist on the card-driven storyline you could use. Separate the cards into several decks. You start with deck A, but certain cards in this deck can trigger a switch to deck B or C. Certain cards in deck B can switch the storyline back to A, and so forth.

Whether the switch happens or not, and to which deck, is controlled by players. You can use many mechanisms here: prerequisits (as in "switch to storyline B if certain players have done something or are at a particular location"), bidding, voting... or perhaps you can have a "master of fate" role that is contested between players?