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Synergy Cards

3 replies [Last post]
Tue, 11/22/2011 - 05:09
Soulmate
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Greetings all,

When I was playtesting one of my games, it seemed the cards contradicted each other in theme and function. I do not know how common this is in boardgames, but I shall explain my problem:

In the game, the players will travel back in time to restore their civilizations, wiped out by events from the past, then going forward in time preventing those events to happen.
This is represented by a deck of event cards, which have two effects on them: one for going back in time and one for going forward in time. When time reverses, players play the played event cards in reversed order.
Recently I added a second card type: technologies (or mercenaries). These cards will be in play permanently, giving a certain action to the controlling player each turn.

The problem is this: the technology cards have one effect, that will take place in both backward time as forward time. This is contradicting on its own, because technologies should not have the same effect both ways in time. On top of that however, the event cards work completely different than technologies, taking away the synergy from the cards.

I thought of a few solutions:
- Design the technologies the same way as the event cards: two different effects
- Have different technologies for both forward and backward time
- Ignore this difference

What seems the best solutions, or did I miss a solution?

Soulmate

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Tue, 11/22/2011 - 05:43
#1
ilSilvano
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Technology affects the future

Not knowing your game, but from a player's point of view, I think that:

- technology cards may only affect the future, so you do not apply them in reverse time (="you cannot use a technology that's not been invented yet")

- to balance this, event cards may have a more useful effect when you reverse time (= "you can use events at your advantage if you already know they happened")

Will this work in your setup?

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Thu, 11/24/2011 - 15:37
#2
Soulmate
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Joined: 05/23/2011
Solution?

ilSilvano wrote:
Not knowing your game, but from a player's point of view, I think that:

- technology cards may only affect the future, so you do not apply them in reverse time (="you cannot use a technology that's not been invented yet")

- to balance this, event cards may have a more useful effect when you reverse time (= "you can use events at your advantage if you already know they happened")

Will this work in your setup?

Thanks for your input :)

If technology cards would only affect the future, half of the game would be far less exiting then the other half. But this is a good idea, and maybe I'll make the strating technologies function in backwards time as well.

I'm trying to have events have thrice the effect of a technology card, while the technology cards can be used multiple times at a cost. I think that will balance those things, but playtests will show

Any more suggestions/ideas?

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Thu, 11/24/2011 - 18:00
#3
JaffetC
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Joined: 09/19/2011
Soulmate wrote:ilSilvano

Soulmate wrote:
ilSilvano wrote:
Not knowing your game, but from a player's point of view, I think that:

- technology cards may only affect the future, so you do not apply them in reverse time (="you cannot use a technology that's not been invented yet")

- to balance this, event cards may have a more useful effect when you reverse time (= "you can use events at your advantage if you already know they happened")

Will this work in your setup?

Thanks for your input :)

If technology cards would only affect the future, half of the game would be far less exiting then the other half. But this is a good idea, and maybe I'll make the strating technologies function in backwards time as well.

I'm trying to have events have thrice the effect of a technology card, while the technology cards can be used multiple times at a cost. I think that will balance those things, but playtests will show

Any more suggestions/ideas?

The idea of taking a new technology into the past could create a far superior technology in the future.

For example the hammer, you can take a hammer to the past and in the future it wont change much, However if you took a Full Auto Shotgun to the past and show the people of that time how it worked, by the time the future comes about the Gun technology would have multiplied to some kind of super weapon. However this would only work in pasts that had the ability to get their hands on the materials that made those technologies happen.

so you can have different kinds of technologies, some that flip over to show a much better version, while others that stay the same regardless of going back or forwards.

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