Hey there, Drion here!
This post got left off from yesterday, as I had to rewrite it after it got lost in a browser crashing incident (yes, I used to write posts straight into the browser before posting, but no more!). Alright, I've recently played Terraforming Mars for the first time and the design of the cards in it is phenomenal. I'm not quiet sure how balanced they exactly are, as a clear cost to power function would be hard to define, but it felt right. I liked seeing that complex cards started costing more than the sum of their parts due to the opportunity cost of being able to do more with one card. I wasn't too fond of the "draw 4 cards to draft from" mechanic, as I would often see synergistic cards that were played together in previous rounds (hats down to all of you riffle-shuffling wizards). I loved the theme of the cards as well, they seem like a laundry list of items you'd get from interviewing a dozen of experts on what life on Mars would look like, but they work together in magical ways (though this might be inherent to how all the resources are designed to interact). Nevertheless, I wanted to make some, so here we go!
Card Theme:
So, there seems to be a lack of cards relating to entertainment, even though it is something that the mechanics can support. There are cards like pets and commercial hub, which grant gold and victory points based on cities, even the zeppelin card works similarly, so there's clearly some design space for a futuristic entertainment card.
But what sort of entertainment card should it be?
Well, entertainment even nowadays is changing faster than a chameleon's colors on a pride march, so I can't fathom what entertainment would be like by the time we get to the year Terraforming Mars is set in. Still, I see two avenues, either we make it something generic that is likely true, like Entertainment Network (meaning TV, internet or anything else), or something specific that might hold up even then, like Adaptive Entertainment Systems (meaning the YouTube or Netflix algorithm that recommends you shows).
Let's go with Entertainment Network. We can use top-down design to figure out that this should be an automated (green) card that produces passively. We can optionally give it the building or maybe the electricity tag.
It should affect:
-Victory points, as those can represent people's good perception of a corporation
-Credits, as you can definitely earn money with Entertainment
-And maybe Electricity, due to the energy cost of a large system like this
These variables should interact with cities, as those represent population.
Let's put it together into an effect:
-Decrease Electricity production by 1 per each City tile on Mars
-Increase Gold production by 2 per each -City tile on Mars
-1 VP per 2 Cities
We can start figuring out the cost from here. As far as I tried deducing from the cards, there seem to be no clear cost to value ratio, but there are some approximate guidelines that we could follow:
-Each energy production increases cost by 7
-Each credit production increases cost by 4-5
-Each victory point increases cost by 5-7
-Per city cards assume 3-4 buildings
-Cards cost -3 as a baseline
-Being a building increases cost slightly
So our per city value is -1 energy (cost - 7) and +2 credits (cost +9), so a cost +2 production change multiplied 3-4 assumed cities gives us a value of 2*3.5=7
The victory point value is 6*3.5/2=10.5, we can round that to 11O
Our production and victory point cost is 7+11=18, then -3 as the baseline card cost, and let's add +2 due to the building tag, with a final cost of 17.
Let's put this card together:
Entertainment Network:
Cost 17
Automated Building Card
Decrease your Energy production 1 step per each City tile in play
Increase your MC production 2 steps per each City tile in play
1 VP for every second city in play
I like where we ended up with this card, we could take it further as a popularity method instead of an economic one by decreasing the MC production to one per city and increasing the points to one per city tile. This would change the cost to approximately 11, which is surprisingly low, but it makes sense due to its high cost but might need an oxygen minimum requirement because the energy cost downside can be mitigated by building early while there are one or Zero cities and still be worth a lot of points late game.I hope you enjoyed this one, feel free to tell me in the comments if this is imbalanced or my math is way off. Thank you for the read!
Have a great day and take care!
