Ok the gist of the game is heroes are trying to find a key to leave the labyrinth. It's a co-op game with a chance of someone turning into a traitor through pure evil changing them.
The games actions are all card based. There are Hero cards, and Evil cards. When drawing cards you can draw from either deck but Evil cards will give a better benefit but at the same time cripple you or your allies with status effects, manipulating movements, etc... The hero cards are same basic actions but lesser in value. Ex: Hero move cards range 2-4, & Evil move cards range 4-8.
Now at the start of the game 10 random evil cards are removed from the deck. This is important because there is a Traitor card in the evil deck and you shouldn't know if the current game has that card or not.
My problem is that as you close in towards the end of the game as in any co op game the game can sway towards the game winning fairly easily. I noticed that everyone will start to draw evil cards in the attempts to become a traitor. I need to think of some way to discourage this because this leaves the traitor to always win since so many Evil cards in players hands will always cause the heroes to lose.
I know just getting rid of the traitor would fix this problem then it is just weighing how good or bad playing an evil card is compared to a hero card. But I think most the fun of the game is you don't know if someone is a traitor and purposely making it harder to find the key to leave or not.
So any ideas on how to keep the traitor element and preferably in the evil deck but some way to discourage the mad drawing of evil cards.
Well all evil cards also have negative effects for instance an evil move card may also disease the player making them lose one life each round. Players are capped at 5 card hands so they can't always draw. Plus the deck is 100 cards after you remove 10 it is 90 cards and you don't know if the single traitor card is in the deck still or not.
Near the end game there is usually 1 piece of the key left to locate the board is fairly filled with monsters and it could swing either way.
I like the idea of separating the evil cards from the traitor, but there needs to be a negative effect that will eventually distribute the traitor to someone and a random way that it won't be in the game also.
The black jack thing is a good idea but I would need to restructure the whole game to apply that since the cards are secret in the players hands meaning a traitor could play cards that did horrible things claiming that the other cards are much worse when they really aren't.
Another option I guess I could just have only a deck where every card has negative effects as well as positives so they only have one deck to draw from and there is no choice but I like the choice aspect.
Any other Ideas on a way to balance the evil deck and hero deck so that ppl don't just jump to try and be traitor and everyone loses.