Reality show the card game

It develops an inch further. All of my designs seem to inch along and then stop as I inevitably get stuck.

Skills - There are base skills, like intellegence, charisma etc. There are more specialized skills, like home economics, construction or super taster. Each contestant has a set of starting skills, both base and specialized.

Challenge cards - Each turn a challenge comes up. Some challenges will split the contestants up into teams first, some are individual. The challenge will rank the contestants/teams according to a certain attributes.

Example: The *Team Cooking* challenge will split contestants randomly into teams of two, and rank them according to which team collectively has the highest 'home economics' skill. Every 1 'creativity' and 1 'intelligence' also add to the 'home economics' value for this challenge. The winning team gets a judge bonus, the losing team gets a judge detractor.

Skill/Action cards - during a turn, players play skill cards on contestants. (I'm still unsure if each player is controlling a single contestant or multiples, and if this knowledge is public or secret). Skill cards are something in that contestants past that demonstrates a set of skills and modifies those values permanently. Action cards may affect multiple contestants, and alter skill values generally for the current turn only(though they may have some additional effect as well).

Example: The skill card *Won a Pie Eating Contest* subtracts from intelligence but adds to creativity, fortitude, and home economics. In the above example of the cooking challenge, when paired with a contestant who also has at least 2 intelligence, that contestant is now worth 2 points for that challenge. It's helpful but also somewhat hobbled. In another challenge about, say, eating insects, it might be more useful.

Points: So my contestant won the challenge and got 1 judge bonus. What does that mean? There are three kinds of elimination that will sometimes come up instead of a challenge. Judge elimination, Council elimination, and Audience elimination. As they win challenges (and sometimes as a result of skill or action cards) contestants will curry favor with judges, with each other, and with the audience. A contestant being annoying may make the audience like them more, but will probably anger the other contestants. Typically, the elimination will then vote out the contestant who is lowest on one of these axis.

So it doesn't model one reality show, but all of them at once. You try to affect the values to be beneficial for the challenge that will come up next. A bit of push your luck. There may be some take that as you make some contestants behave badly to lose some points. Hopefully your contestant(s) are not eliminated. There is a lot of room to have interesting thematic cards as you build the contestants backstory through the skill cards. (Maybe I should call them background instead?)

It should be a fairly fast paced, very simple card game. Too short? Too simple?

Remembering your characters is simple, the characters are color coded and you will have a color card. (The colors help in other ways, such as in making it simple to randomize putting the characters into pairs or teams).

Sadly I've run into the problem I always seem to run into. I have a lot to learn about building interesting decisions into my games. Right now there are none. Always play the card that gives you the most points for the challenge. Since the backstories persist, there's no real reason to hold onto a good card for a later challenge. The game plays itself like Uno, although watching the silly backstories come out and what happens is kind of funny. Even if the characters are secret, there isn't a lot of reason to avoid letting the other players know which characters are yours. You still want to play your best cards on them so they can win the challenge.

I know that adding the temporary bonuses as well as more negative backstories that can be used to add junk to other characters will change things a little; along with building the friendships and enemy relationships between players. But I'm not sure that will offset the drab backstory mechanic, as much as I like it and had fun coming up with some of the cards.