Hey everyone. I've been an avid reader of this forum and BGG for a while now, and I've decided to throw my lot in with the rest of you and see how I do.
The game I'm currently trying to flesh out is a drafting game based around building huge monsters and sending them out onto the battlefield to fight their opponent. The setting is a civil war in a fantasy steampunk setting. Industrialization is very new and mechanical power and magic don't mix here. A rebellion has risen, and the insurgents are leveraging technology to win their freedom, while the Empire has sent out its arcane soldiers to stop them. Magic vs Tech is nothing new, but I've always enjoyed the setting.
Players take on one of a number of characters provided, which has a little flavor text about the character themselves, as well as their health for tracking health and any special abilities that particular character has access to. Each player has two decks; a starting deck and a research deck. Like most drafting games, the starting deck has only a few cards, and the player adds to it from the research deck. If you can manage to wipe out your opponents army and knock his character down to 0 HP, you win.
There are a couple things I think are interesting mechanics for this game.
- Cards that have a "casting cost" require that the player discard from their hand to play. Each player has 7 cards at the beginning of their turn, so they have equal currency each turn. How you use the limited resources would be critical. Some cards let the player draw more cards, but they are limited. There is no maximum hand size, but at the beginning and end of their turns they must have 7 cards in their hand.
- The game puts the spotlight on building the monsters you drop on the playing space. Monsters or mechanical automatons are built over a number of turns and fielded onto the tableau. Build cards for putting a construct together are in the research deck. When one of a player's constructs has the minimum cards, he can send it out to fight, or keep building up to the maximum number it can hold to send out a juggernaut. In this case, a power supply, a card that provides a defense value and any 1 other card is the minimum, and the max is determined by the strength of the power source card in the group.
That's a quick overview of the main idea. I'm nearly done with the ruleset and final cards to go in each deck. I would love your opinions/advice/whatever you feel like contributing.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
To answer your question about build time; Yes it would be possible to run into that scenario. It's not that uncommon in card games like this. M:tG runs into that rather often, as one player can draw all the mana cards he wants, while his opponent can't seem to get more than one or two, convinced that they all sank to the bottom of the deck.
I'm hoping to avoid this in a couple ways. By changing from a standard single deck to a deck building mechanic, the deck itself is much smaller, and the player is going to burn through their entire collection of build cards in their deck several times. Secondly, I currently have no cost to play build cards. And finally I've started adding in "Minion" cards that add smaller ground units that run around beneath the titan's feet. Minions cannot attack directly, but many/all of them add something to the field, such as tap abilities, persistent but weak effects, etc.. Minions can throw themselves in the path of a colossus, by which I mean that a defending player can choose his defenders from both his constructs and his minions, though the minions are far weaker in comparison.
So even if a player can't seem to get his construct built in time, he can throw out a few minions as cannon fodder to buy him a couple turns to roll out his monster. In a more positive light, this is partly intended. During the game a player can choose the strategy that suits him; either throw out more constructs that are relatively weak, or wait for the big juggernaut while your opponent burns through your minions and weak constructs. The parts are also universal. A steam engine can power a Galvanic cannon without restrictions, but the text on the cannon might read something like : +1 damage if attached to a Galvanic coil power card. Do you wait and build a construct that maximizes their synergy bonuses, or throw out constructs as you get them?
Something I meant to mention is the health tracking mechanic I have. I wanted players to have health, but move away from M:tG as much as possible, so I took inspiration from the drinking system from Red November. A character at full health (5 HP) is shown on the front of his card (double-sized for easy viewing). The reverse is divided into four sections representing the character in increasing states of damage (4,3,2,1 HP). When a construct blasts through an opponents defenses and damages the player, they flip over the card to the first station (placing it face up), and rotates it as he takes additional damage. Any damage that overruns a players defenses in a single attack = 1 point of damage to the character. Hit the player for 5 damage= 1 damage. Having only 5 HP makes the game a lot faster and more tense, but allowing a single construct to wipe out a player in one turn became a problem, so this was the compromise I came up with.
I'm currently working on having the different stages of damage change the character's special ability in some way. They might gain a healing ability at the lowest health levels, or their ability at full health become more powerful, etc.