Looking for competitive non-combat CCGs

[Tokimo]

I'm currently looking for card games that are competitive for non-combat interactions.

Neopets comes to mind as one with it's contest system. Any others that allow players to compete without dealing damage?

(Exposition: I'm working on Mahoujo, the magical Girl CCG. It initially suffered some solitaire problems as predicted by Trevor, which I was able to rectify by making villain cards more proactive. I still haven't been able to make non-combat decks interesting to play against each other however, and it's an important part of the concept, so I'd prefer not to give it up.)

[Dragoon]

There aren't many of these.. I know only Netrunner and Mythos. Call of Cuthulu has some sort of combat phase and combat in A game of Thrones can result in different penalties (loss of cards, characters or power.)

EDIT: [Link] list of 274 ccg's!

[innuendo]

You can do a lot of interesting stuff if it's player vs player vs board or vs a communal villain deck.  While not a published CCG a group of mine played a homebrewed zombie infestation game were players worked as a team (or solo if they chose) in a serries of rooms trying to survive an ever increasing horde of zombies.  So there were at times incentives to keep the team alive, and at times to throw them under a bus, but never could you outright attack another player.

Not sure if that's what your looking for, but that's what this post reminded me of.

[Trevor]

Are you opposed to violence? Violence is not a mechanic in cogs, but rather flavor. Instead of killing a unit, you can say they are knocked out, or captured.

In order to avoid solitaire games, you need interaction. Without violence, you can still have sabotage, theft, influence, and things of that nature. If your ccg is about magical girls, they can compete with spells, or by summoning "creatures" who can fight on their behalf.

[Turonik]

The games that don't have "fights" that I can think of are kids next door, shaolin show down (if I recall correctly), looney toons,beyblade, and Simpson.

Spycraft a little bit two since there are different mission types and each mission type has a different thing you can do, like chase missions you send enemy agents home, intrigue missions you baffle them, but combat missions you can very well shoot them.

I do somewhat agree with trevor, you'd need to be careful in having interaction in your game. however that doesn't always mean just having a combat phase. I can name a few games where the combat is pretty boring, at least when compared to other games. The games I meantioned save for spycraft where what I'd call dull and more targeted towards kids.

[Tokimo]

I'm not opposed to violence at all. There is violence that plays very nicely currently (IMHO at least). However, the non-violence half of the game is still kinda boring.

Think of how in Civ you win with conquest or by winning the space race. I'm going for a similar effect where players can win through non-combat objects (having a lot of friends for example is a condition that give you a few points). My problem is that combat is now interesting, but social play is boring as heck.

Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

[Turonik]

Think of how in Civ you win with conquest or by winning the space race. I'm going for a similar effect where players can win through non-combat objects (having a lot of friends for example is a condition that give you a few points). My problem is that combat is now interesting, but social play is boring as heck.

sorta like in L5R where you can win by one of 4 win conditions? The main one is military where you destroy all of your opponent's provinces but there's also honor where you win by starting a turn with 40 or more honor, putting all 5 elemental rings into play by thier own text, or by dropping an opponent's honor to below -19. Attacking is the most common way to win but there's plenty of actions players can take that are not. Is this something you're talking about?

[Tokimo]

Very Similar.

My system uses a victory point threshold to win, with two ways to get victory points (which means you can actually do a hybrid between kicking butt and making friends, and I strongly want to encourage hybrid decks that do both).

1) Completing a narrative card gives points equal to it's worth. (These conditions can be related to combat, but will not always be)
2) Defeating a villain gives villain points equal to it's worth.

[Turonik]

Very Similar.

My system uses a victory point threshold to win, with two ways to get victory points (which means you can actually do a hybrid between kicking butt and making friends, and I strongly want to encourage hybrid decks that do both).

1) Completing a narrative card gives points equal to it's worth. (These conditions can be related to combat, but will not always be)
2) Defeating a villain gives villain points equal to it's worth.

ah sounds intriguing. I do like it when a game has it where you can do things other than attack to win. However a big  problem that comes with this is  making it very inactive where the player is just doing his own thing until he wins. It sounds like you plan on doing something to prevent this, but just making sure.  Going back to l5r, it used to have the honor decks that just sat back for the most part doing it's own thing to get honor. Now the game is set up so you're pretty much have to do battle, at least defend against attacks and such,  much the same as how the rings are put into play (most by doing certain things usually in battle)

[Tokimo]

I'm certainly striving towards conflict driven non-combat play. I hope I can achieve the desired result.

[Turonik]

I'm certainly striving towards conflict driven non-combat play. I hope I can achieve the desired result.

You did mention neopets, are you thinking of having different stats on the characters? in case closed the characters have 3 different stats and in the game there are challenges. A challenge would be in one of the 3 stats and the goal of one was to have the higher stat. Challenges could only be issued with a card effect like duels in L5r and LBS.

That might be something to think about, the villain battling would have it's own phase but the narrative cards could be in the main phase from a card effect and certain deck types could be flat out  better at completing them than others. But it all depends on what you had in mind and if you're still just fishing for ideas. hope any of my ramblings are of any use

[Monox D. I-Fly]

Match Attax is a competitive football (soccer)-themed CCG, though its too simple/boring as a CCG to me.