Hey, guys. After lots of discussion on BGDF and other gaming forums, I have decided my game Overlords is too similar to a few products already on the market. What I thought was a unique idea with fairly unique mechanics turned out to no longer be a good use of my time.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and I've began working on a different project. I am still very much in love with deck building mechanic, so naturally my new game consists of this style of gaming. The general theme of the game is as follows:
Players are each assigned one "character card" that represents a Supreme Being or God. I would like for this game to be able to support four players, so we will go with four as the number of Gods presently in the game. The Gods of *insert universe here* have shared control, responsibility, and authority over this universe for as long as it has existed. The Gods, knowing that they will forever remain equally as omnipotent, decide there must be some way they are able to determine who among them is superior. Waging a divine war is not feasible, as it would prove to be disastrous to the life of planets and creatures they are responsible for. Instead, they each agree to play a game to satisfy their interest in determining who is the greater God. For this game they create a plane of existence to use as a "game board". *This next part is a little iffy* The object of their game will be to score a certain amount of points by essentially commanding life as chess pieces and challenging each other in a game of war. The first God to score a certain amount of points will be declared the victor and crowned "The Omnipotent" (or something like that).
Card Types:
Gods (the cards players will be dealt, each with their own in-game abilities)
Creatures (since Gods have the ability to create life, they will use their power to will creatures into existence to be used as pawns for their game)
Tactics (strategies and abilities that will come from the Gods to better command their game pieces)
Locations (divine structures erected for the use of their benefits and effects)
Now the biggest problem I'm having is trying to group card types into four or five categories. I would like to classify cards according to what kind of strategy or tactics they would lend to the game rather than a tribe name, faction, legion, color, etc. What I'm thinking is grouping then according to traits or characteristics of the Gods or of what strategies the Gods would employ. Currently the only term I like is Deception and it's proving to be fairly difficult to find words that are similar to this (what I mean is words that would fit in a strategy card game).
Does anyone have any suggestions? Please let me know if I'm being unclear.
It's fairly difficult for me to explain what I'm looking for. Take the game of chess for example. While the number or types of pieces are always the same, a player could use a different strategy each time they sit down at the game table. For the sake of simplicity, let's just say the three strategies are titled Aggressive, Defensive, and Deceptive (just as an example). These are classified according to many dictionaries, thesauruses, etc. as "traits" or "characteristics".
What I'm trying to achieve is something similar. There could be card types such as Deception, Aggression, etc. that basically hint at what the card is going to do. Take Magic: the Gathering, for example Magic uses colors to describe what a card is going to do. Red is generally offensive and Blue is normally defensive. Each color can contain the same number of card types (Sorcery, Instant, Enchantment, etc.), but the effects of each of those cards will be different due to the characteristic or trait of its color. A Red Human might be super aggressive with attacking while a Blue Human may take his time and allow you to draw cards slowly. Their game is infinitely "open" because they allowed very vague types to share sub-types of cards.
I believe that is critical to expanding on core sets and ensuring game design will not be limited by having to put a card in a very narrow category.
Does any of that make sense? I'm not the greatest and explaining myself sometimes.