Hey everyone,
I recently had a play test session for my card game, and my players are suffering from some minor analysis paralysis. In the current iteration, I feel there is just too much to do too early. I definitely plan to scale what actions are available to the player throughout the game better, but I was also thinking about experimenting with actions points. Specifically, limiting the amount of attacks or moves a player's units can make. Has anyone had any experience with adding action points in their games? If so, what were the effects, and did you have any helpful tips or things you learned from them? Also, I just purchased Tikal, which has them in the game, any recommendations for games to research that handles this mechanic well? Thank you so much in advance.
Best,
-Jonathan Flike
Since you are talking about a card game. I don't know if my experience counts. But here it is any way.
***
The game that we played resembled your standard RTS games.
Like C&C, Red Alert, KKnD etc.
But instead of real time, we used AP and Event Cards to interrupt other players.
The field was hexagon. And terrain had a lot of influence on the units.
***
Some ground rules in my game.
Each player gets 7 AP at the start of each round.
And each round, the order of players is randomly decided.
There are actual chips with the players colour AP written on them.
Players could place them on a squad. And this squad was allowed to do something, right at that moment.
Since the turns where random.
Only the primary player that was in turn for placing the AP first.
Only this player could suffer from decision paralysis. (we got rid of the timer after a month or so, we really tried)
Immediately after deciding on the action. This player could start with the resolution.
BUT.
Any other player could now interfere if they wanted to. This in the form of doing an action themselves. Or player an Event Card.
If they didn't interfere, they would simply not loose their AP. But they could not stop the primary player either. The primary player would always loose at least one AP.
Some action costed more AP.
And playing more actions with one squad, would increase the AP cost for the next action.
***
Negative experiences
In the beginning. All those AP where rather useless.
When the game progressed, the AP actually became rare.
However, it brought balance. So the second part of the game was accepted by the players.
The game pace became slow. And many squads became fodder squads. For the hero squads to feed on.
Positive experiences
As said above, it brought balance.
It also brought more structure. There wasn't much of tracking any unit, because the AP chits took care of that. And multiple actions where possible with a squad: Thus also strategy increased for the game.
Things that where not really worked out
The list of options for AP was big.
The primary player had a choice of about 10 actions.
My next goal was to separate the choices in simpler ones. But those could be combined by the player.
I never got to it, since my group disbanded at that time. But this "choices" problem is probably not for your concern.
Thank you for the insight X3M. My card game uses RTS elements (barracks builds units, unit caps, etc), so this is actually really helpful. The choices are the problem, and why I was thinking of adding an action point system. There is just too much to do, so instead of the player doing a little bit of everything, I was hoping to use action points as a way to focus their efforts in a few manageable choices instead of all the things. I just finished playing Tikal, and I found the action points add a nice structure to the game, but I'm not sure about the static action points. Was there a reason you chose 7 AP? How do you think it would affect your game if you had some system where action points were used kind of like a resource that could be gained and spent? How much slower did it make your game when you added them versus the game without the action points?