Community Game

[Tokimo]

Going off of the tower building:

Mechanically:
You could have a system as well of placing cards face down with a counter on them to represent their 'security'. Items with higher security would be harder to affect. Then you could try and reveal a piece, or destroy it, or steal it. However if you tried to destroy and steal a trap it would blow up in your face. Now as a player you can reveal your tower pieces at any time and if you have 10 revealed tower pieces you reach the floating island and claim it as yours.

Additionally revealing a tower piece would allow you to use it's abilities and effects, but it would also make it easier to steal/destroy.

Aesthetically:
There's a floating island in the sky and you and another player are trying to build a tower to reach the island so that you can lay claim to it and get all the resources/treasure/whatever. Maybe instead of a floating island you're just trying to build a dock for airships to get trade going and if you get yours up first you can get airships to sign exclusive contracts with you. Maybe the world in non-spherical and there's actually a landmass above that you're trying to get too that's not floating.

[GnKoichi]

I like the airship dock idea. It could be that an airship full of goods is coming to the city. Your character is the head of one of the two (or more) competing companies/guilds/factions. You need to build the tallest tower in a certain amount of time, or a tower of a specific height first, so that the airship will come to you. City laws prevent open aggression against your opponents, so that's where the espionage comes in. I like the idea of using traps in the towers as part of the secret mechanic. I feel I may be going ahead too far in starting to talk about this stuff, so I apologize if I have. Just wanted to talk out a way to work the tower idea cleanly into character-based espionage.

[GnKoichi]

Oh, also, the tower idea was created because someone questioned what the goal of the game was, since espionage is more of a means than an end. I had assumed that since the goal of espionage is usually information, that information would be the goal. The win condition could be to obtain certain "document" cards, or something to that effect.

Actually, now that I say that.

Mechanic: Documents
Function: These cards serve as quests & win conditions. They are not part of the player deck. One copy of each Document card is made into a goal deck, and one document is flipped of the top when the game begins. Players must fulfill the goals on that card to steal or otherwise earn it. Then a new  document is flipped. Get X documents to win the game.
Conflicts: This conflicts with the already suggested Tower mechanic, since they are both win conditions. We could choose between them or keep both as alternate win conditions.

[sneaselx]

Mechanic: Documents combined with Towers.
What if each player built an initial tower, and stocked the tower with documents, somehow. Traps or fake documents could be there to confuse thieves. You may also expand your tower, and add additional documents or traps.
     Dependent Mechanic: Levels as resource.
     Each card has a cost limit, which requires you to have a tower of a specific height.
     Pro: resources well tied into the game.
     Con: possibility of slippery slope.
The official goal would be find and steal documents, but building tower would allow you to play better cards, and make it harder to tell which is document and which is not.
    Mechanic Adjustment: In this case, documents would start in your deck, to allow you to play them onto new levels. So, in order for opponent to win, effectively the deck would have to be entirely burned through. That means that a means of replenishing your deck is necessary.
Pro: combines ideas in a compromise. Extends on idea of industrial espionage. Offers significant change for suspenseful play and mind-games.
Con: Mechanic Adjustment needs better alternative. Games could be very long.

[Tokimo]

One possibility for a split win condition here would be that you wanted to get your tower up so you could rake in the contracts with airships, but you could also win by getting an exclusive permit to build an airship dock in the city (by stealing documents they need, like signatures of mid level officials on forms) before the other player finished building their tower.

Of course, there might be space for alternate win conditions, like if you put a card in play called "Legal investigation" which would allow you to take an action to add counters to legal investigation while they could take actions to remove counters. If legal investigation got enough counters the opponent would go to jail and leave you to build your tower in peace.

[legend zero]

We know it needs to be character-focused, but what will these focused-upon characters do? Are they fighting? Are they code-cracking? Espionage is more of a means to a goal, than a goal itself.

Mechanic: General Theme Proposal:
Both players are building towers. Each player has 2-3 characters. The goal is to build your tower first. However, You characters can be used to invade opponent's towers, guard your tower, or provide building bonuses. Your deck would consist of tower pieces, equipment, training, etc. Tower pieces would be Secret. Tower pieces could provide bonuses, and act as location type things. Guards would be set up in the tower, and traps could be set up in the tower pieces, as well as pieces that are inherently dangerous. The goal would be to put say 10 tower pieces in your tower, but opponent would be able to try to sneak in and destroy pieces, steal equpiment, or assasinate your builders. Flying units could maybe be added that would be able to start at the top of the tower, and move down, instead of entering from the bottom.
Function: Provides an additional idea for the basic action for the game. Would allow espionage and traps easily, and fits the steampunk theme. Problems: May have problems adjusting it for Character-focused. Seems to mesh better with multiple characters.

I personally love this idea. It prevents the game from being too one-sided for a player with a stronger theme and also allows for nice interaction. Only thing is the movement aspect, obivously you woldn't move right into the tower at floor 3 or 4, so card placements would be a bit critical.

I would suggest three win conditions (2 are very similar)

1. Build your tower for an airship permit.
2. Obtain an airship permit through special win condition cards
3. Destory your opponent's tower totally (like have a standard foundation UNDER the tower pre-game, kill that and win)

[Ripplez]

mechanic : clan cards
each player has a card that represents their clan, guild, base, rebel undergrond location. it has values that help determine how well it builds towers, how well its spies spy, how much developmnt it performs per unit time and so on. may have space for effects depending on the tower progress or spy progress

mechanic : two decks
each player has a deck for espionage and a deck for tower defense. this is to reduce the chance of just drawing the wrong card in your hand. since tower building is so important that shoud go by smoothly so having a deck just for it would be nice

mechanic : spywork
espionage is taking the form of raiding the enemy tower. a threshold cost to spywork will make the tower building a race, since once the threshold limit is met, all resulting raiding is straightforward. a continuous paid cost will depend on the resource system. a one time paid cost per tower block unit means tat once an element is passed, it is passed forever. a combination of all three costs, could be used. there are probably more cost types. this way the raiding is a mix of preparation adn decision making

[Tokimo]

I think it actually might be kinda cool to skip factions entirely. So many card games do it, but a steampunk game feels like you should be able to hire anyone, build anything, and spy with the rest of them.

[aardvark]

*bubbles with excitement*

Great stuff! Keep the creative juices flowing.


I am curious as to how the tower building will accentuate character emphasis.

how difficult is the game supposed to be?
how important is it to be differnt from other mainstream tcgs?
how luckbased?
how fast should a game be, in terms of turn count?
why is there espionage (as in, is this a war-based thing or a personal vendetta? is it suposed to cover all these themes? are there clans?)?

Difficulty?
I would like anyone familiar with ccgs in general to be able to pick it up after a couple of games.

Different?
Personally, I would like something not easily associated with other ccgs, but at the same time some games have similar mechanics or themes, so on and so forth, which makes it hard not to draw a line between games. Really though this is up to all of all of us. It's our ideas going into this game so what we do with it, what we put into it, will be what determines just how different it is.

Luckbased?
That's mostly up to the people who are working on rules. The Mechanics we choose, however, will play a role in this as well.

Fast?
That's up for debate. If anybody prefers a quicker or lengthier game, make it known. This will have an effect on the rules and mechanics that are put into place.

Espionage?
This is up to the fluff department of the community.


If I might make a suggestion.
Mechanic: Gathering votes or favor
For whatever reason fluff decides (the death of a king/queen, a new election, what have you) The player is trying to get their "man" into a position of power. This doesn't come easy and in order to get what you want, one must resort to other, less public methods.

Function: Similar to the security counters mentioned earlier, or Netrunners agenda counters, there would be a number of character cards in the deck that a player would need to influence. An influence number on the card would show how many influence tokens a player needs before they can call that person an ally. If factions are in place this could be a way to make such characters favor certain players over others, or even make the influential person immune altogether to another person's machinations.
The main character card could be modified by political statement cards, kissing the baby cards, etc, etc. Things that would make the MC more charismatic and thus make it easier to sway that rich-heiress, who provides her ally with an extra card draw or whathaveyou, to your side.

Once a player has so much influence and is able to place the main character s/he wins.

Mechanic: Mud-Slinging
Function: (Since we chose an emphasis on character I thought this would be appropriate.) By playing a card with a cost you are able to make it more difficult for your opponent to build a tower, uncover documents, place a main character, etc, etc.
Though if this happens too often there might be a penalty. That player becomes known as a gossip and so their word isn't taken as seriously in the underworld of business/politics thus making it more difficult to accomplish their goal.

Also, I came upon this and thought it interesting Steampunk List o' Themes. Just something to look at that I found interesting.

[Ripplez]

the politician idea isnt realy compatible with the tower/raid idea in its current form. it would involve alot of different cards being drawn from a similar deck with quite a number of tangents at the same time. which would be nice if it worked, it just seems really hard to get done

i had an idea to merge the two togethr

we could set up an intangible resource like the imperial favour in l5r. we could call it the populace

then we can replace the main characters in tower/raid with a political candidate(s) and/or a secret society sent to expose their wiles (depending on if you do or do not both have candidates, itd most likely be a symmetric/asymmetrc game)

then we replace the tower with a paper trail

making the raider a spy/investigator sent to expose (raid,espionage) the candidates dirty deeds amongst their attempts to block and hide their lies/truths (tower). the populace would help give a kind of balance since the candidate would thrive on it and the raider would try to reduce the candidates favour/be hated by the populace fro trying to take down someone so loved

just to clarify, this si a separate idea altogether. hopefuly it combines some of the elements and flavour of the tower/raid idea with the politics/influence idea

[sneaselx]

@Votes(dependent on tower)
A few things: Too many mechanics in one game can be complicated. If we want a complicated game, that's fine, but will be much harder to pick up. Also, it changes implicit espionage to explicit espionage. Espionage should be decided by card interactions between players, not just playing a card and changing some numbers.

@Merge
Might make all the cards into piece of paper. Not very interesting card design.

[Ripplez]

@Merge
Might make all the cards into piece of paper. Not very interesting card design.

wat does this mean?

[Zao]

I love the tower building + documents idea.

We can avoid factions, as said Tokimo, but I thought some cards that would thematically be "contacts" with other organisations. They would allow your character to use resources and equipment provided by those organisations. For example, a character who has contacts in piracy (there's gotta be some air pirates, if there are airships, right?) has access to some piratey techniques.

The character itself would not be linked to any faction, only those "contact" cards would be requirements to use more advanced and specific cards.

[sneaselx]

@Ripplez:

wat does this mean?

then we replace the tower with a paper trail

If instead of objects, we use a "paper trail", I'm afraid that the cards, instead of being things like "Barracks" which are fairly simple graphic-wise, it would be the abstract concept "Illicit Affair", much harder to make a picture for.

As a general rule, it is easier to make cards for tangible objects than intangible concepts.

[GnKoichi]

Idea!

Proposed Mechanic: Triple Win Condition

Goal: Reconcile the three proposed win conditions & ensure that all are tied to the Character emphasis.

Description: Each player has three potential win conditions (Build a Tower to height X to ensure that you earn the important Airship Merchant Contract, Obtain X Secret Documents to uncover [fluff something something], or Earn the trust of enough of the populace to become the next King). Gaining any one of these is enough to win the game. You have one character who starts in play. S/he has three stats to correspond (Engineering, Slyness, Charisma). There is a shared "Goal Deck" made up of Tower Levels, Secret Documents, and Population. At the end of each (turn? round?) a card is flipped off the Goal Deck and the players compete for it (in some way. core mechanic needed here. Skill checks?)

Pros: This creates a single mechanic (though it is to be determined) that brings three mechanics together, so that it isn't overly complicated to have multiple win conditions. It also takes the win conditions out of the Player's deck, so that they don't get in the way of drawing other fun cards. Finally, it ties all win conditions to the Player's character.

Cons: This weakens some of the flavor of each win condition, since they would not have their own mechanic for acquiring. However, they could still have their own mechanics once they are in play.