Hi fellow designers!
I have been quite inactive the last 2 years on this forum, but now I finally have time to design games again!
I am currently creating a game called "Angry Gods" (although the title could still change), which is a fast-paced card game with a (I hope) pretty unique mechanism. I'll probably post it here one day if people would like to test it and give some feedback ;)
At the moment I have a question for you guys. In the game players can gain cards to 'persuade' the gods to attack the players. This happens every once in a while at fixed points in the game. It can occur though, that there are no god cards to be played, or that a player wishes not to play them. In that case, cards should be drawn from a deck of cards until a god card is revealed (and then that god will attack).
Unfortunately, quite some of the god cards are 'wild cards' containing 3 gods, but only one god can attack each turn.
In that case: is it ok to let the players use their own randomizer (coin flip, dice roll, etc.) to determine which god will atttack, or will it bogg down the game and should the game provide a solution for this itself?
And in general; are coin flips etc. in a game appropriate?
Thanks in advance!
Alexander Vanhulsel
Thanks a lot for your thoughts Questccg! (this is why I love this forum so much!)
I think by trying to be brief on the rules, I might not have explained the god card mechanic properly, since I feel it is already quite strategic (and sometimes difficult to wrap your head around). Still, what you say is interesting and next playtest I will definitely test the idea. So to bring more clarity, here is some more detail about how the game plays.
Players take turns choosing cards from the 'offer' (or the 'market', if you will), which will be face-up, so there is no hidden information there. When each player has chosen 4 cards, the next phase will start (the god phase, in which a god will attack). The cards in the offer can have 2 types. It will either be a god card of a specific type (water god, fire god or earth god), or it will be a defence card which allows players to build up enough strength to defend against the attacks.
What happens in the god phase? Player hold all the god cards they have taken from the offer in the previous phase (most often 0, 1 or 2 cards), and decide upon which god they could succesfully defend against (and their opponents cannot). They must discard the god cards they don't want to fight, and put the god cards they DO want to fight in a 'fighting pile'. That pile will be shuffled and one god card is selected at random (if it contains more than 1 card, that is), which playtesters said to be a moment of great tension. That one god will attack all the players.
So where is the strategy? Well, since the gods' strength will ramp up each turn, there is an ever-present pressure to build up defences. Players have to choose between taking a much-needed defence card from the offer, hoping to have enough strength for the attack, or taking a god card to put pressure on the other players. Because with a god card, you can determine whether that god will attack (by putting it in the fighting pile) or won't attack (by discarding it instead). You are in 'control' of that god, so to speak, which is advantageous in 2 ways. For example when holding a fire god: First, if you see you didn't manage to get enough fire defence, you can just discard the fire god so it will not attack. Second, when you hold the fire god, it means YOU make the choice to keep it or discard it, and the other players cannot use that as a means of pressure against you (which boils down to: all the other players DO need to have enough fire defence, because of fear of you playing it in the god phase).
Basically: the choice is to either have more control over the game by picking a god, or to make sure to build enough defences to defend against all the potential gods players could throw at you.
Does this all make any sense?