I'm making up a card game.

The Game Room
1

I haven’t even playtested the thing yet.

But that fact notwithstanding, I’ve drafted up some rules. Please at your leisure review them and comment! (A list of “things I’m not sure about” is at the bottom, which could serve as discussion starters, though of course no one should feel constrained to talk only about those points.)

It’s a solitaire game. I’m thinking about making it for two or more players but right now this is what I’ve got.

Idea of the game:
You are an advanced entity—maybe a god—playing with the fate of the two civilizations that inhabit the world currently holding your attention. You may choose to lead them to destruction, to lead them to harmony, or to lead one to be wholly absorbed by the other. The beings inhabiting these civilizations have a certain kind of freedom, however, and your actions are sometimes constrained by this fact. Moreover, you have condescended on occasion to allow them to call on your protection and blessings, assuming they make the correct movements with their bodies and so on.

Game components
Twenty Geist cards, numbered 1-10 twice over
Ten Land cards
Two Civilization cards
Two dice, described below.

At the start you:
Shuffle the land and geist cards together. Lay down the two civ cards in the middle of the table. Take the top three cards from the land/geist pile. The three cards are your hand.

On a turn you:

  1. Roll the dice.

The first die has the following faces: Void, Void, Void, Destruction, Civ A, and Civ B. The second die has the following faces: Protection, Protection, Protection, Aggression, Development, Acquisition. During this phase, here is how to interpret the roll of the dice:

If Void or Destruction appears, no action is taken.
If Civ A or Civ B appears, then:

If protection appears, the civ appearing on the other die cannot be attacked on that turn.
If aggression appears, the civ appearing on the other die must attack on that turn.
If development appears, the civ appearing on the other die must receive a Geist card on that turn.
If Acquisition appears, the civ appearing on the other die must receive a Land card on that turn.

  1. Play a card from your hand, either adding to a civ’s land pile or adding to a civ’s Geist line. (The geist cards are laid down in a line, much as in the classic Solitaire card game.) You can only add geist cards with a value greater than the greatest in a civ’s Geist line.

(If no card can be played, then discard one card from your hand.)

  1. Choose whether the two civs will engage in conflict on that turn. (See below for Conflict mechanic.)

  2. Take a card from the land/geist pile.

Conflict:

When one civ attacks the other, the one with the lowest maximum geist card is designated the loser, and loses that card. The winner loses the lowest card higher than the one the loser lost.

The winning civ takes one land card away from the losing civ. However, if the winning civ has (after the conflict) a highest geist card of six or greater, the player rolls the void/destruction/civilization die. If the result is “destruction,” the player must discard one of the loser’s land cards instead. On any other result of the roll, the player may optionally discard the land card, or else simply transfer it from the loser to the winner.

One more rule:

When a civ receives a geist card of six or higher, the player rolls the void/destruction/civilization die. If the result is the destruction face, the player must remove one land card from that civ, discarding it. Otherwise, the player may choose to either remove a land card or not.

Game Ending:

Game is over when all cards have been played or discarded, or when a victory condition obtains.

Score is zero unless one of the victory conditions obtains.

Victory conditions:

Unity: Only one civ has any land cards. Score is the total of both civ’s geist card lines plus the number of land cards.

Harmony: Both civs have exactly the same geist lines and number of land cards. Score is total of both civs’ geist card lines plus total of their land cards. Would it be easier if the conflict mechanic were changed to allow geist cards other than the loser’s highest to be discarded?

Destruction: All land is discarded. Score is total of both civ’s geist card lines.

Things I am definitely not sure about (aside from just everything of course):

Does the conflict mechanic make the Harmony condition too difficult to attain?

Will the Destruction condition tend to result in a lower score? (Does it matter?)

Should there be a scoring mechanic even for situations where none of the three “victory conditions” occurred?

Should the game indeed end when all cards have been played or discarded, or should the discarded cards be reshuffled and re-entered into play, meaning the game only ends when a victory condition is obtained, and there’s no way to “lose?” (i.e. no way to score zero).

The ratio of geist to land cards, the number of cards, and the chance of forced land destruction for high-geist civilizations. (The forced land destruction tends to either erode the player’s score or pressure the player to go for a Destruction victory. It should happen often enough to create real pressure, but not so often as to simply force the player’s hand every game.)

Could a game like this be fun?

Have I somehow ruined any chances, however slim they may have been in the first place, of ever publishing the thing by posting this very rough preliminary draft on a public discussion forum?

2

Below is the ruleset again, but using bolded headings for ease of reading:

3

It’s going to be difficult to answer questions A-E without playtesting. Make up some cards and play a few dozen games. The problems should manifest themselves pretty quickly.

However, there are a couple of things that leap out at me about the current design:

1. There’s a lot of randomness. Each turn you have both a die roll and a random draw. In general, randomness in games serves two purposes. The first is to prevent the player from planning out a long chain of moves that would then be tedious to step through. Some uncertainty keeps the immediate challenges fresh. The second reason is that it counterbalances differences in player skill which is important if you’re designing a more social casual game. That probably doesn’t apply in your case since this game is a solitaire game.

But the combination of die roll AND random draw is going to make it hard for a player to make strategic choices. You can’t plan ahead very easily. Inhibiting strategic play is dangerous because often the most interesting gameplay choices involve balancing small short-term gains against large long-term gains. If the randomness interferes with planning for a long-term gain, the gameplay will tend to feel simplistic.

2. There aren’t a lot of moment-to-moment choices. On each turn you pick from one of three cards and decide if there’s conflict or not. That’s a pretty small range of options. And depending on the die roll, these options can be even more limited. More choices increases the likelihood that you’ll have to weigh two different appealing plays against each other. As I said above, that’s where a lot of the meat of the gameplay will emerge.

I suspect that in its current form it will feel less like you’re playing the game and more like it’s playing you. On many turns you’ll feel forced along a particular course of action, or forced to bide your time while you wait for the right card/dice combination to come up to advance you toward victory. That’s not much fun.

In general, I’d suggest dropping the die roll, giving the player a larger hand, and expanding the types of cards to give the player more variety in the sorts of plays he can make. I’d also suggest limiting the game to one victory condition (multiple conditions work better in multiplayer games where hiding your intentions is part of the challenge).

Finally, I’d suggest making the cards a bit more vivid. Instead of just numbering them one to ten, make them be real cultural or technological advances. That will feed the overall fantasy of the experience, which right now feels very dry and “game-y”. More vivid cards could also be used to create some interesting non-linearity (“You can’t play a tech improvement over 5 if you’ve played the fundamentalist card.”) that would make for more interesting tactical/strategic trade-offs.

4

I like The Hamster King’s comments quite a bit. Personally, I really dislike rolling dice in a one-person game. I am not sure why; maybe because it feels too much like playing a slot machine.

If you get to the point of making your game, there is a company that will print your cards, etc. Although now that I check, the company’s link doesn’t work. Here are the links just in case.

Article about it:

Actual site:
http://www.thegamecrafter.com/

5

Yes, I like his comments too. Unfortunately, I just got really busy with IRL concerns, but I hope to return to this idea sometime.

6

Thanks, guys. Critiquing games is what I do for a living.

BTW, Frylock, I hope you didn’t think I didn’t like your concept based on my feedback. There’s sometime really cool about the idea of pitting two different cultures against each other like that. I hope you keep working on it.

7

Woa! Then thanks all the more for your advice!

I appreciate that. I didn’t think you were harsh at all or anything like that. Actually, my last post originally had several more comments about how I plan to figure out how to improve on the game, but I missed an edit window and failed to copy what I’d typed before foolishly hitting some “cancel” or “back” button or other.

Briefly put: I’m going to work on a pared down version that concentrates just on the “harmony” victory condition, so as to really focus on making the conflict mechanic effectively into a puzzle-like experience: “how can I use the cards I happened to draw to maximize my score?”

I think I really want to keep the multiple victory conditions thing–it’s thematically really appropriate to my idea of the game at least, and I currently think it can work as a way to give the player interesting and important decisions in the early stages of the game. I could well end up changing my mind though.