Please help me flesh out mechanics in my exploration-themed card game.

I think you need to develop a reason why you want to use a map at all.

You can develop a game where two factions compete, have different locations to visit, can compete over the control of those locations (or the right to loot them), etc. but all of this can be done - for example - with a simple deck of cards. The dungeon itself and exploration of it can be abstracted.

Think of the reasons why you want to have a map. I personally don't think the map is useful for a game simply because it's "nice to look at." There ought to be reasons why players/avatars/characters/units have to travel from one location to another.

- Resource collection
- Buffs, Healing
- Control/Command points to earn points/victory
- Create a pattern
- Create units
- ???

Why else would you want players to move to different map locations? If none of these reasons apply, or if you can't think of any, then skip the map and consider a card game (or some different mechanic).

Another idea could be to abstract the idea of a map. Based on what you've written, i'm visualizing an ever-expanding grid of cards on a table that may or may not knit together cohesively. That sounds messy. I could be missing something!

But

Here's another idea. When players explore new terrain by drawing 3 cards, the two cards they do not select go to a new deck. This deck of discovered but not explored terrain represents the "map". on future turns, players could choose to draw from this deck instead of finding new terrain, representing going to look for something they or their opponent turned up.

I like the area control idea. That could be implemented by having non-dungeon cards like roads, villages, ets. in the exploration deck. If a player chooses to claim one of those cards, they provide resources for when players choose a dungeon. For example, roads provide movement, farms provide food, wilderness provides herbs or meat, villages provide squires.

When a player decides to explore a dungeon they total their resources. or perhaps dungeons have requirements for entry. Like a difficult dangerous dungeon requires players to have more movement, indicating it is further from the town. Perhaps you could have a mechanism where players can try to take control of map cards from other players.

This way the "map" becomes an important part of the game, but it is abstracted so you don't have to deal with the complexity of an actual map.

I am working on a dungeon crawler board game & it will have rooms. The way I am going about it right now is to have maybe 6 rooms that can be placed & each has a number 1-6 on them. Then there are creature cards with 1-6 on back & when someone goes into room 2, a creature card with 2 on back is turned over to reveal the creature in the room. I need to figure out how many cards per room to have. I want the rooms to be able to be used multiple times but with limited use as well. So if I make 6 cards for each room, then each room could be used up to 6 times revealing a different creature each time. It would also force players to move 'up' rooms as the used rooms become closed after that level room's cards are depleted.

IDK if something like this would work for you, but maybe give you something to think about.

Are the players represented by pawns? If they are, then they can be moved around the map to various locations.

Each location can then have individual quests or opportunities to gather resources. Those resources can then be used to have a better chance of exploring a dungeon and winning its' treasures.

The locations can also have requirements of resources to enter, for example, water in a desert location.

From there you can grow a living world.

--DarkDream