Event cards proposal

(I promised Darke I'd post this, after the chat last night.)

When this game was originally proposed, I was very keen on the idea that it should be possible to “customize” it in some way – to find a way to meld the Tourist Trap and Relic Rush games whilst still allowing players to choose which sort of game they wanted to play.
More recently I suggested an entire category of cards that would be appropriate for a “beer ‘n’ pretzels” game, but not for a tactical or strategic game.
So here’s how I envisage the “search” or "event" cards working.

Every card would have a coloured border to indicate the general category it comes under. The idea would be that different colours of cards would be removed depending upon the sort of game you want to play. For example:

RED – sabotage cards
YELLOW – spectacular event / relic cards
BLUE – minor event / artefact cards
GREEN – equipment cards
WHITE – exits cards
BLACK – “null” card (“You find nothing of interest”) These would mostly be used as fillers.

So if you wanted to play the lighter Relic Rush game, you would use the Red and Yellow cards, but remove the Green cards (I’ll cover this below) and maybe the Blue ones too, but if you wanted to play a tactical Spelunking game you would use the Blue and Green cards instead. And if you just wanted to play an exploring game, you might only include the Green and Black cards. Obviously all versions would need the White Exit cards!

Here's a slightly more detailed explanation of the card types.

RED. This category of cards would include things like “make an opponent redraw chits until they find an obstacle”; “cause a removable obstacle to remain after passing”; “rotate a passageway (keeping it legal)”; “steal a VP from an opponent” and so on. Basically, these would be the random effect cards that let players stitch their opponents up or make their own life easier. They would cost APs to use however.

YELLOW. This category of cards is what makes the “Relic Rush” game work. Thus they would be things like “Find a Temple to Cthulu”; “The Holy Grail”; “Mysterious Amulet” etc. I would imagine these cards having instructions that need to be followed: “Give up some VPs to appease the lost tribe” or so on.)

BLUE. This category of cards would be the “Spelunking” cards: “Flock of Bats – retreat to nearest cave”; “Shards of Pottery, 1VP”; “Equipment – draw from Green deck” etc. These cards would work in most versions of the game, but players may choose to only use the Yellow ones if they want a more “cinematic” style game.

GREEN. This category of cards would be the Equipment cards. I could see this working in a variety of ways, but the best seems to be to keep them separate. Depending upon the sort of game, players may have one item to begin with, may acquire some through other cards (see Blue example above) or perhaps buy some when they return to the start cave. These would be used to pass obstacles. Note that it would be perfectly possible to have an Equipment rule that could be omitted if the players decide they don’t want equipment (for instance, rule that any obstacle could be passed by spending one whole turn in a cave with an obstacle, rather than using the AP number on the obstacle chit. This makes for a faster game which may be appropriate for the “beer ‘n’ pretzels” version.

WHITE. The White cards are the ones that are needed to find an Exit. Depending upon the length of game required, different numbers of White cards could be required. I could see there being an interesting interaction with, say, a Yellow or Red card that restricted the number of exits that could be found.

BLACK. These would be used to replace any coloured cards that were removed. So one group might decide to play a major action game and use all the Red, Yellow, Blue and Green cards, which means that they wouldn’t have any “You find nothing of interest” cards at all. Another game might only have Blue cards, in which case there would be lots of Black ones to make up the numbers.

Anyway, that’s how I imagined a variety of “Search” cards providing a different selection of game types to suit the players.
As for how this could be implemented, well that may be tricky, although I'm in favour of the "pay more APs, draw more cards but only choose one" mechanic myself. I don't see any problem in allowing players to keep the cards face-down in front of them until used, although this may be a minor issue with the Yellow cards.

Comments?