Event Cards: A disappointing feature

Event cards that suddenly change the nature of the game certainly reduce the level of stategy one can employ. Even if you try to keep your options open, the player who guesses the next event card (gets lucky) will come out ahead.

A game with multiple event options would be interesting particularly if the players power to effect the choice was proportional to how balanced their position is (or maybe their accumulated event points which slow them down in other aspects of the game).

I agree with Kreitler; I don't think you can paint Event Cards with too broad a brush. It depends entirely on the implementation.

I've had decent success using Event cards in a couple of games I've worked on. In my GDW game "Disciples", I used events to allow for small situations that I wanted to include for thematic reasons, but that would have been burdensome to expand into full-scale, game-long mechanics. Simple things like "If all players agree to do X, then each receives Y" that don't add much in the way of rules, but they allow for some flavor in the game, which I've felt to be important.

In my GDW game Sands of Time, I originally had events that fell under the nuisance category; things like "Good harvest, everyone receives +1 crops during production" or "Plague; everyone loses a peasant from each territory". They didn't end up adding anything interesting to the game, though, because you couldn't harness them to make interesting decisions. And the game was difficult enough that it didn't need the random setbacks for balancing. It was this game that led my friend to coin one of the most important design maxims I've ever heard -- "A good designer doesn't rely on random factors to balance his game". I completely reworked the Event scheme to be a deck of only 3 types of cards, one of which triggers a scoring round and the other two are "bad events". But because there are only three types, you know what possible events you're going to face and can plan accordingly.

This is kind of like the event structure in Game of Thrones, which I think works really well. In that game, the event cards indicate what actions players will be able to take: mustering more troops, reevaluating their troop capabilities, jockeying for political power, etc. It's nice because you know what events are possible but not the order they will come out in.

I agree with you that event cards that amount to nothing more than a random monkey wrench can be less than exciting, but I do think there are ways to utilize event cards in a way that doesn't feel to the players like a random monkey wrench has just been tossed into the game to annoy everyone.

Could you give some examples of the games that inspired this thread?

-Jeff

When you make event cards, there is many factors you must consider to change the balance of the cards :

Occurence : how many times in the game does an event occurs. If a different event occur each turn, it will have more influence on the game.

Power : Does the event have a minor effect on the game, or does it completly change the position of the players in the game.

Area of Effect : Does it affect only one player or everybody. A bad event for a player could become good for another player.

Nature : Are they all bad event event or is there an equal proportion of bad and good events.

Target : Are the target of the event selected randomly or does the players decide who get targetted by the event. When the player select their target, it means that the leader of the game will be the first target since they don't want him to win.

Planification : Is it possible to know in advance what event will occur. In dune, it was possible to view the few top cards on the event pile so that you can plan you moves in consequence.

As you can see, there is many elements that define an event card, rebalancing these can make your events better. So you cannot say that event cards in general are bad, there can be a really good implementation of these, and personally, it is a mechanic that I like a lot.

I have experience something similar in battle master. There is 2 armies which has all their card shuffled in the same deck. The cards are flip one after another and the card fliped determine which army can move which unit.

After 30 cards, the imperial army opened 6 cards, and the chaos army opened 24 cards. So you can guess who won the battle.

I'm going to go with shellhead here and say some randomness is good. It does add to the variability of a game. The key is in having exactly the right balance in the event cards. Too powerful and they wreck the game.

One example of a randomizer from a party game that absolutely destroys a game is Odds'R. There is a lottery in the game. If you win the lottery when it is at its largest, regardless of anything else you have done to that point, you'll win the game. The comments about this game all come back to the same thing: The lottery is bad, and it ruins the game. Of course, in this example, the lottery is easily fixed with a house rule.

I've been working on a game this past week (that I'm trying to get ready for Protospiel and doubting my ability to have it done by then) where you draw event cards from the deck or from either of 2 face-up cards. This is one of several options on your turn. You can see what 2 of the event cards are, and so can your opponents. Do you pick one up that doesn't help you, knowing how much it would help the next player if he got it? Do you draw from the deck so no one knows what event you could thrust on them later? Do you skip the event cards and draw resource cards or one of the other turn options? I like games where you despearately want to do 3 things but can only do 2 of them.

Anyway, by having a couple event cards exposed at one time, it allows for more tactical playing. My current problem is I don't have the balance right, making the whole issue moot.

Steve Bennett