Card game where your actions can lose you the game

This makes me think of maybe a space station, at the mercy of a limited pool of oxygen, or fuel, or something like that. I wonder what your game would be like if the duelists had to share a pool of 100 energy, and had to do more than just battle one another.

In other games you've posted here, you've provided various mechanics for moving across a card arena and claiming territory. Might you want to implement this sort of mechanic as well? Providing different reasons to battle one another can provide for more strategies and tactics to claiming victory, in many cases.

Players can deplete this shared pool of energy by summoning units to the arena, but also by moving the units, attacking (either with units or from cards in hand), and perhaps holding territory. There might also be ways to replenish the pool of resources: a tactic employed by the player who is trailing in victory points, so that they might be able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Maybe there are features at certain locations in the arena, like a gun emplacement, or an energy deposit or something like that, which allow units standing on them to receive some kind of bonus or temporary ability.

Best of success on your design, jedite. :)

If you have actions or effects that replace health, or get one per turn or something, you could have fewer to start with, and still have a good length of game. Just make sure on the whole player's health is going down.

Of course you could use a percentile dice (2d10) and save on the components side of things.

I also love the idea that there is something else going on that would force some co-op elements. The players would be competing to defeat a shared enemy, and whoever damaged it more wins, but both players can loose if they run out of resources before the shared enemy is defeated.

If everything costs some HP, equipping cards and battle cards will just take up all your HP and you will die quicker. Unless you defeat your opponent.

But my gut is telling me that once you've built up your army to battle, you'll run out of HP anyways and lose just as you were about to get into a more interesting phase of the game.

Maybe you should start with 100 HP and not have any tokens or pieces. Just a NUMBER you write on a piece of paper or a blank card (using a Dry Erase Marker). 100 ... And then subtract from that amount.

Mind you a Dry Erase Marker will cost you about $1.00+ and one additional Poker card is $0.09 (so +$0.18) ... So the price of your game might be the SAME... But it'll be more flexible to accommodate a a higher score and could make for "custom" experiences like maybe a 200 point game... (for longer play sessions).

The idea is that you are OFFERING up an "experience" which need not be fixed, it can be unique. Players can tailor a game based on the time they have available. So longer times = more points. Shorter times = less points... etc.

Note #1: On the component size, using a marker and a card make for less components. And sort of streamlines the amount of parts used by your game and makes it more compact too. You can also use Jumbo cards ... Because it means that players have more SPACE to compute and track the score too. That's another alternative...

For you to determine a win condition, the players should need to do something else other than just wait for the timer to be emptied. In other words, you need additional mechanics. There needs to be a reason for players to pay attention to the timer, otherwise this is like playing with a jack-in-the-box toy.