Updated Zombie Survival CCG ideas...

[Trevor]

ZOMBIE CCG RULES

Objective: This is the zombie apocalypse, so really there is no way to "win" per se. The objective of the game is to not lose. The primary way for doing this is to have everyone else lose first. A player loses when all of his survivors are dead. Another way to lose is to have no cards in your deck.

Players take turns alternating from playing as the zombies menacing their opponent's survivors, and then defending their survivors against their opponent's zombies. While you are playing as the survivors, your zombie cards are just resources and not considered zombies. Your own survivors will not be harmed by your own zombie cards.

Card types:
Survivor: a character card representing one of the survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

Zombie: a character card representing one of the brain-eating, murderous zombies.

Item: an item representing weapons, armor, supplies, or barricades. Some items have permanent effects, and some items are discarded as soon as they are used. Some items are played to the battlefield, and some are played from your hand.

Zones of Play:

Any card not in a player's hand, deck pile, discard pile, or removed pile is considered to be "in play". Each player has 3 zones of play: the survivor zone, the resource zone, and the combat zone.
The survivor zone is the area of the table where you play your survivor cards and items.
The resource zone is where you play your zombie cards from your hand.
The combat zone is where you move your zombie cards so they can engage the opposing player's survivors.

Start up:
Determining who goes first:
At the start of the game, randomly choose a player. Starting with the chosen player, each player takes turns (in turn order) bidding for their starting food total. The player who bids the lowest starting food total decides what player takes his turn first. All other players start with the default starting food total of 10.

Initial game setup:
Each player draws 7 cards and, starting with the first player, each player plays survivor cards from their deck with a combined resource cost of no greater than 6.


Phases of turn:

Ready Phase: All players ready all spent cards. Any survivors with an infected token suffer a wound.

Draw Phase: All players draw 2 cards, then discard 1 card.

Build Phase:
Once a turn, you may play any card from your hand to your resource zone face down. (You may look at a facedown card you control, and you may do so at any time.) On your turn, these resource cards can be spent to play survivor cards and survivor abilities on cards. When it is not your turn, your resource cards are instead generic zombies with 1 strength.
There are two zones of play for your zombie resource cards. Resource cards are initially played to your resource zone (unless a card explicitly says otherwise). Later on, (in the recoup phase), you can spend any ready (unspent) zombies you have and move them to the combat zone. A players zombie cards are seperated in these two areas just to designate which are able to attack their opponent's survivors.

When spending your zombies to play cards and abilities (whether it's your turn or not), you can spend any number of ready zombie cards cards in either the resource or combat zone.

To play a survivor character or item card, you must spend X of your ready zombie cards where X is equal to the resource cost of the card. In addition to paying the resource costs of cards, some cards have additional requirements in order to be played.

Attack Phase
Begin Attack Step: All players have a chance to play cards and abilities before the survivor player declares how he will defend the attack. (The zombie player has the first priority to play a spell or ability).

Declare Defenders Step: The survivor player may assign any number of survivors to a fight with an attacking zombie. A zombie is considered attacking if it is in the combat zone and it is ready.
If there are any left over attacking zombies that aren't assigned to a fight at this point, the zombie player may assign them to fight any survivor. If this results in more than one zombie per fight, their power is totaled when determining which side wins.

Fight Step: For each fight, the survivor player determines the order the fights are resolved. When a fight begins, each side may play cards and abilities. When all players pass, the side with the greater power wins (with the zombie player winning ties). At the end of the fight, if the survivor lost, they receive a wound token. If the zombie(s) lost the fight, they are simply spent. If the power of the zombie(s) is double the power of the survivor, instead of suffering wounds, instead the survivor is overwhelmed and instantly killed.

When all assigned fights are resolved, proceed to the Recoup Phase.

Recoup Phase
Each player may play abilities that they can play during the Recoup Phase until all players pass.
During the Recoup Phase, players may play cards and abilities that say they can be played during the recoup phase. For example, the survivor player may spend a ready survivor he controls to look for food.
All survivors with the Scavenger Symbol have this text:
Recoup - Attract attention: If successful, add 1 food. (To attract attention, roll a die. On a 1, each zombie player puts the top card of his deck into his resource zone face-down.)

At the end of the Recoup phase, you lose one food point, and if you have more survivors than you have food points, you must put a wound counter (one at a time) on one of your survivors for each survivor you have in excess of your food points.

End Phase
The current player's turn ends and "until end of turn" effects wear off.

The cardback will have a generic picture of a zombie because face down cards played to the table are generic zombies with 1 power.

Zombies can be played (upgraded from face down normal generic zombies) if you meet their requirements. Some Zombies have keyworded traits, like "FAST" or "TOUGH", or other rules text. To play a powerful zombie, you might need to control 2 fast zombies and 1 tough one, for example. This mechanic makes it so you need to choose one or 2 zombie themes to be effective. If would be difficult to play a deck both with a zombie that requires 3 Fast+3 Tough zombies and also one that requires 4 Enduring + 3 Sentient zombies.

Zombie "Factions"
The zombie factions are: Rage, Horde, Contagion, and Weird.

Rage:
These zombies are filled with rage and ferocious energy. As soon as they see survivors, they will run towards them with horrifying speed, and they will pursue them with recklessness and savage intensity.
Gameplay mechanics include being able to attack immediately, surprise attacks, self destruction for temporary or instant effects.
Faction color: Red

Horde:
The true power of these zombies comes in their numbers. Horde zombies swarm and overwhelm survivors. They may not be the fastest zombies, but what's the point of running away from them, only to find out you are running toward more of them and you've been surrounded?
Gameplay mechanics include abilities to play a lot of zombies, zombies are more powerful when you have a lot of them, ways to draw lots of cards, and return discarded zombies back into play.
Faction color: Orange

Contagion:
All zombies are able to infect a survivor and thus turn them into a zombie, but Contagion zombies are blood-spitting, ichor-spewing, infection machines. Instead of killing survivors, why not just "recruit" them to fight for your side? There is no greater horror than to have a survivor have to face what used to be a family member or friend.
Gameplay mechanics include turning survivors into zombies, special abilities to use on ex-survivors who are now zombies, and damage over time effects.
Faction color: Green

Weird:
This group includes zombies that have been altered by science, and non-human zombie creations (such as zombie dogs), and everything else the survivors couldn't possibly expect.
Gameplay mechanics include being able to use some (crude) items, being able to able to counter survivor strategies, and a lot of other weird effects.
Faction color: Purple


Basic Keyworded Zombie Abilities
Infectious: When this zombie wins a combat, you may put an Infected Token on one of the defending uninfected survivors. When that survivor dies, you gain control of it. Remove all tokens and cards on it and place it in your zombie zone. It's game text is ignored.

Fast: When this zombie is moved to the combat zone, ready it.

Fierce: When this zombie wins a combat, it deals an extra wound to the defending survivors. This ability is cumulative.

Basic Keyworded Survivor Abilities:
Medic Symbol means
Recoup - Spend this survivor: Remove a wound counter from target survivor.

Scavenger symbol means
Recoup - Attract attention: If successful, add 1 food. (To attract attention, roll a die. On a 1, each zombie player puts the top card of his deck into his resource zone face-down.)


Here are some sample cards: http://lackeyccg.com/zombie/zombie.txt

[Dragoon]

Holy gods! A Trevor thread! 

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but your deck doesn't contain any zombies, only support cards/attachments that make your generic zombies better? Also, If you move a resource to the zombie zone, can that resource return to the resource zone?

[Trevor]

Holy gods! A Trevor thread! 

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but your deck doesn't contain any zombies, only support cards/attachments that make your generic zombies better? Also, If you move a resource to the zombie zone, can that resource return to the resource zone?

I intend for the deck to contain both survivor cards and zombie cards. An example of a zombie card would be something like:

Name: Grasping Zombie
Power:3
Cost:4 (You may pay 4 resources to turn this card face up)
Text: When this card is turned face up, discard target item.

Remember that any kind of card can be played face down, BUT you don't know if one of your opponent's zombies is actually a proper zombie card that may have a special effect when you turn it face up, or have a larger power than the face down "generic zombie" which has a default power of 1.
As a matter of fact, I think all zombie player effects should be attached to zombies rather than have additional kinds of cards to complicate things, either with one-shot effects, static effects, or reusable activated abilities.

You are going to need to play a lot of cards face down for resource points. So you might as well have those cards be zombie cards that will allow you to get extra effect (both in terms of power and useful abilities). It's kind of like how in the WoW CCG, you can play any card as a face-down resource, but if you play a Quest card as a face down resource, you can get a "free" extra effect.

All zombie cards, whether they be face down generic cards or face up special zombies, whether they be in the resource zone or the combat zone, they can ALL be spent(tapped) to be used to pay for things. The only difference with the zombie cards in the combat zone is the ones in the combat zone can ALSO participate in combat. There will be a cost to move a zombie from the resource zone to the combat zone, like 1 or 2 resource points. The intent of the design is for the resource zone to constantly build in the number of zombies, and therefore so will the combat zone. Each player WILL get overrun if enough turns go on. It's just a matter of which player is better able to survive. There will be a few effects to send zombies from the combat zone, back to the resource zone, but these will only slow down the build up of zombies.

One of the things I think is unique about my design (which may not be apparent with the description above) is that the discard pile is a major resource, both for the survivor player and the zombie player. It is somewhat like a second deck. Every turn, you draw 2 cards and discard one of those, but that doesn't mean you aren't going to be using both of those cards. The zombie player will have effects to play zombie cards from the discard pile.

Such as:

Name: Howling Zombie
Power:2
Cost:2 (You may pay 2 resources to turn this card face up)
Text: When this card is turn face up, you pay pay the twice the cost of a zombie in your discard pile. If you do, put that card in the combat zone and it is turned face up.

Or a survivor may look like this:

Name: John Smith, Tunnel Rat
Power:4
Stamina:3
Cost:4
Text: Regroup ? Spend John: Return an item from your discard pile to your hand.

Here are some examples of items:

Name: Crossbow
Type: Item - Weapon Ranged Crossbow
Cost:1
Equip cost:3
Text: This item comes into play with 2 ammo tokens on it.
Combat - Remove an ammo token: Spend target zombie.
Regroup - Pay 3 and spend a survivor: Add an ammo token.
Flavor Text:Silent but deadly

Name: .44 Magnum
Type: Item - Weapon Ranged Gun
Cost:2
Equip cost:1
Text: This item comes into play with 3 ammo tokens on it.
Combat - Remove an ammo token: Spend target zombie.
At end of turn, if this item was fired, attract attention. (To attract attention, roll a die. On 1, each zombie player puts the top card of his deck into his resource zone face-down.)
Flavor Text:Not the most subtle of weapons

Name: Ammo Case
Type: Item - Ammo
Cost:2
Text: Discard this item: Add 3 ammo counters onto any number of items with an [ammo symbol].
Flavor Text:"Ah, my favorite kind of magazine!"

Name: Kitana
Type: Item - Weapon Melee Sword
Cost:2
Equip cost:1
Text: Equipped character gets +3 power.
Flavor Text:It slices! It dices! It can cut a tin can in half!

Name: Makeshift Barricade
Type: Item - Barricade
Cost:5
Power:0
Stamina:3
Text:Stationary

The last card is kind of item that functions like a survivor in combat in that it can block zombies. The Stationary keyword is a passive keyword, meaning it doesn't mean anything in and of itself, but other cards will reference it.

Name: Rusty Volkswagon
Type: Item - transportation car
Cost:5
Text: This card comes into play spent.
Build or Combat - 5, spend, remove this card from the game: Move all zombies to the resource zone and spend them. Discard all but 4 of your survivors and discard all stationary items.

Note all the numbers are not finalized and will only be finalized once testing has been done.

[Typherion]

It's been a month since this thread was active, but I just wanted to let you know about a similar upcoming zombie survival game that you might be interested in.

It's called Z. and you can check it out here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/downwardviral/z-2

The main difference is that players choose to play either as the survivors or the zombies rather than both at the same time. The most interesting element for me was that they made the survivors and zombies use different resource systems.

Zombies have "Aggro" which keeps increasing by 1 each turn like land drops or resources in other games, reflecting the zombies relentlessness.

Survivors have "Supplies" which must be generated each turn - you get 1 point for each survivor on your board, and you can get more by discarding cards or having your survivors go scavenging. This also seems to capture the flavour of the genre, because it makes you care about survivors dying.

But probably the coolest aspect for me is that the big guns you can equip to your survivors have a noise score which is added to the zombie player's Aggro - they do big damage but the noise they make also attracts more zombies to the area.

Edit: And the fact that one of the weapons you can use is a garden gnome lol!

Hope you find this useful.

[Trevor]

It's been a month since this thread was active, but I just wanted to let you know about a similar upcoming zombie survival game that you might be interested in.

It's called Z. and you can check it out here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/downwardviral/z-2

The main difference is that players choose to play either as the survivors or the zombies rather than both at the same time. The most interesting element for me was that they made the survivors and zombies use different resource systems.

Zombies have "Aggro" which keeps increasing by 1 each turn like land drops or resources in other games, reflecting the zombies relentlessness.

Survivors have "Supplies" which must be generated each turn - you get 1 point for each survivor on your board, and you can get more by discarding cards or having your survivors go scavenging. This also seems to capture the flavour of the genre, because it makes you care about survivors dying.

But probably the coolest aspect for me is that the big guns you can equip to your survivors have a noise score which is added to the zombie player's Aggro - they do big damage but the noise they make also attracts more zombies to the area.

Edit: And the fact that one of the weapons you can use is a garden gnome lol!

Hope you find this useful.

Interesting. Some good things and some bad things. One thing I didn't like is the unnecessarily large numbers, like 100. Seems like they should have used the lowest common denominator.

I don't like the idea of a zombie deck OR a survivor deck. I would think it would make things impossible to balance. It also seems to be a lot harder to do multiplayer, but they may have special rules for that. I don't like the idea that the humans can win.
I think there template is decent. I like how they are getting images. Come to think of it, it would be pretty easy to just take pictures of folks with zombie make up. I was going to just try to find copyright-free images that looked decent and were suitable.

I think a noise score on items makes things a bit mathy. I was going to handle that flavor with a mechanic like "attract attention: X".

A gun would say something like:

Remove an ammo token: Spend a zombie and attract attention 2. (To attract attention, roll 2 dice. For each 1 rolled, each opponent puts the top card of their deck into their build zone face-down.)