Resource cards without 'colors'?

[Cyrus]

In VS it works like this:

Beginning of your turn you may lay a card from your hand face down into your resource row.
Then you get points equal to the number of cards in your resource row.
You can play characters and weapons with these points.
To play an action, you just simply have to have that many resources in play, they do not use any points. So if you have three one-cost actions and only two resources in play, you may still play all three of them.

I like the system, works pretty well.

[Revolved]

The MagiNation CCG had an interesting Resource Sytem. Your Resource's and Life were the same. Your Character card got a certain amout of life per turn (other cards could affect it/ give you more life) and creature and spell cards you play take that Life as cost. Really interesting system that copied the Videogame's mechanic and made chosing what to play all the more important considering the bigger the spall/creature you play the closer to death you'll be that turn.

[Tokimo]

Sounds like a pretty sweet system. I love paying life in magic to do cool stuff.

[HotLimit]

I thought Decipher's star wars force-cycling resource system was one of the clumsiest and worst of any CCG. If that CCG wasn't tied to the Star Wars IP, no one would have ever played it. And Decipher's massive failure of Wars proves that.

It was an interesting idea and a novel concept, but ultimately awful for actual use.

I know you obviously know how to play the game enough to hate the hell out of it, but saying that no one would have played it without the IP (and basing that on Wars) is just not right. Me and my dad started playing before I had even watched Star Wars (I was 9, the game actually got me interested enough to sit through the movies), and my dad has always hated the movies. So maybe we're the 1 in a million that only picked up the game and stuck with it because it was amazing, or maybe some people actually really enjoyed the game play a non-magic/ygo/pokemon/other super simple ccg couldn't provide.

Wars was just bad, plain and simple. It was not the port of Star Wars that everyone was hoping for, and it was rushed to release. If anything they dumbed it down too much. Plus a lot of their potential fan base (me included) just kept playing Star Wars instead since the cards are still out there and it already had a player base.

Really all it boils down to is this: I loved that game, it was the greatest time I had ever had, and I still remember it better than Magic which I still play. The Star Wars tournament scene also wasn't made up of the same ultra-nerd and 13 year olds (except for me on the age part at the time) like Magic still is. Regardless, until you played in the greatest 4 seasons of tournament play ever (imo) I don't feel you're qualified to say such straight-up, negative things about the game without at least leaving you're own imo somewhere in there.

Still; I don't think the resource system is really right for your game Tokimo. Even though it was the first I learned at a young age, I don't know that all kids that age would have the patience for it. Hell most kids that age still play all-mana-down Magic.

Yeah, I love Star Wars CCG, even though I was never a fan of the movies. I even played in tournaments back in the day, and very few players were Star Wars fans either. Everyone I know who has been serious about CCGs has played and loved it at some point, too. From a design standpoint it is a bit convoluted though. That's assuming your design standpoint is that a game should be accessible to small children straight out of the box.

I like L5R's resource system, where you have to tap lands for gold. More often than not, lands (called holdings) do more than just generate gold though, so that's a nice twist you can put on your game.