Realms Unconquered: Expanding Card Game - RuEcg

[Cyrus]

Wow, thanks for all the feedback. Really helpful stuff. You're 100% right on some things I hadn't even thought of. So now I'ma quote your whole post and respond to it

Initiative Step ? Figure Initiative...

There has to be a better way than this? Making take an idea from some other games and have an initiative card that is passed around during this phase to mark. And then if there is a tie the card stays where it is (regardless of if that person is involved in the tie or not)?

I was trying to make it so a player could almost control the initiative, so it wasn't always necessary a flowing thing. Some cards would just add 1 or 2 to your Initiative, and it wouldn't be many cards, so after a few turns it would be obvious who was going to be starting things. Going first wouldn't always be optimum though, so its hard to say if it would even be good to have players be "stuck" with the ability to go first.

Regardless, this is something I'm definitely not married to, and very willing to tamper with and change.

...General Influence Step...

This seems like a method of non combat combat if i'm not correct. and it seems like permanents in play will shield you from this drain. But it seems odd that you choose a single opposing player as the "target".  I dunno if it's a thematic thing for me but it seems weird that you are influencing your own territories. And you simply select the weakest player at the table to try and stop you. So "johny no talent" gets selected to prevent your influence attempt each time, and he always fails.

I'm just not sure I like this mechanic's structure, it seems very very abusive in a multiplayer setting. Possibly trying to rework it so that each player gets a chance to prevent your influence? Although that poses other problems.

In summation, when I read this it just felt "backwards." like why are you influencing your territory but stealing from another player. It would almost seem like you should influence the opposing territory in an attempt to gain influence from them? I dunno, just had a really hard time with this section and wanted to make mention of it. I'm honestly unsure of the solution.

You actually touched on something I was thinking of adding but didn't, but might make more sense. Anyway...
The way this actually works is that there is no 'blocking' of an influence drain. Also, you aren't "influencing your locations" flavor wise, that's just how I wrote it (). Flavor wise, you are using your hold on that location to influence the general population of all the locations combined...basically.
This is both weird and cool for a number of reasons. On the one hand, if players are ruthless in multiplayer, they can drain someone down to 0 in the first few turns. However, you don't lose for having no influence, and some diplomats works better as the under-dog, and you don't have to pay influence to attack, so it isn't that big a of a deal to go to 0 influence quickly.
On the other hand, it allows for the influence to flow and for player politics to play a big part of the game every turn. You can dish out your drains as well, so you can spread the pain evenly, or you can target the guy with the best board presence, etc.
It is actually, I think, almost a better mechanic for duels, but its a little more 'abstract.' In duels it basically just means that influence is flinging from side to side, and maintaining the same drains as your opponent is important to not lose your grasp on the influence.

Playtesting will show whether I change this to more like what you were talking about, wherein there is some sort of attack phase carried out with different stats being used during this phase in order to deal 'direct damage.' I like the mechanic possibilities of both so I'm not ruling out either.

When a Battalion with a Hero Attacks a Location with the same Hero on it (played by another player) the Heroes are both excluded from battle.

Gameplay before flavor. I know why this rule exists, and it's better than some other games, but is there really any reason not to let players just keep their uniques in action. No player wants to have their best card excluded simply because they are attacking a player who runs the same cards.

Essentially, let the players each their cake too. Unless there is some rules reason to exclude them, I would just let all cards participate

Word. I wasn't sure how people felt about this. I'm on this team for sure.

Attack Range

How is this calculate when a player with 5 locations attacks a player with 3? Is it assumed centered? Do they start left and always get added right (as such location 5 is always 3 range away from location 3?) Just not sure, would probably need a diagram. And this is compounded by the multiplayer issue. You might consider an alternate use for stamina that isn't 1:1 logistical. Perhaps some way to abstract this same feeling without having players "line up and compare" which can be tedious in a tabletop setting

This needs work. I've been considering dropping the movement stat completely since heroes don't ever really need to move, unless I change the tactics step like you mentioned later. You're right that this totally doesn't work in multiplayer, which I honestly just didn't think of. Not sure what to do here... the simple thing is to change the tactics step to a move step and allow movement of your heroes up to their movement stat along your territory. I guess it would make hero placement more important, which is good. Gotta think on this one.

When you pay Influence to Attack it must go to the player with the least Influence who is not involved in the Attack (if tied, settle the tie with a 2D6 die roll).

Here is this weird d6 in the middle of play again. I would suggest the player closet to the attacking player (aka, break ties by the player who is first in line in the active player order)

I even saw this while going through the rules (converting them from the game with hella dice) and thought it was out of place, and just left it. You're right on this one for sure.

Influence Drain Formula

Without a doubt you need either a cheat sheet for this or some other method. A lot of one off rules that seemingly serve little purpose other than to exacerbate the loss. I get the idea, and each of the points is flavorful, but it just seems like a lot of "one off" rules that seem stuck on. Possibly in action this is less of an albatross, but I suspect it would be a constant "okay, wtf happens now" at the end of battle for new players.

Cheat sheet all the way. Lots of a lcg types games come with cheat sheets and I don't think its a bad way to go at all.
A lot of the +1s were, however, discovered to be needed under an old rule set, so I'm not opposed to chopping the list down to size in play testing.

Backup Pile

A bit of a steal from other deck builder games, great rule, very interesting mechanic. Am I correct that you "backup" = to the number of draws you skip? Or is it just once if you draw through your deck?

Thanks, I'm probably the most excited about this rule, and plan to design a lot of cards, or a whole "tribe" of some sort, to using this mechanic.
I'm not sure what you mean be "you 'backup' = to the number of draws you skip"... the way I have it, you get to remove one card with each pass through the deck. Play testing will tell whether you get through your deck enough times to even use this rule, and if multiple passes aren't relatively common, then the number of cards that can be removed will be increased somehow.

Tactics Phase

Very time consuming phase again. I would consider allowing each player 1-2 "moves" instead and thus keep a limit on how easily you can rearange. Plus this gives you the ability to institute keywords like "this hero relocates for free" and other such stuff. It also gives a nice logistics restraint on the game by making players work to keep their cards ordered and adds a cost to players who streatch to thin.  Just an idea.

Like I said above I really need to work on all the movement stuff. Definitely down to discuss more possibilities!

Thanks again for all those comments, really helps me reanalyze things. I'll work on revising the rules tomorrow and re-post 'em up

[innuendo]

Been mulling over this design a little more in my head and I realized I dislike how influence works in general.

The concept of a finite VP condition is very interesting, but I don't think it works actually.  At least not as you have it implemented here.  Plus I think it does some things that will pigeonhole your card design from the onset.

There are a few issues, but the largest I see is competitive advantage. Think like the last 1/3 of any game of risk (aka: the wrap up phase). It typically becomes clear who will win because by having more countries you have larger production and you have more options and that compounds to eventually give you the win. Essentially, any influence you have is directly one less influence your opponent has.

This will do a couple of things to hurt the game I think.

First, there is no drama at the end of the game. If one player is close to winning, by default everyone else is very very far from winning. Think in MtG if life points were traded and finite like this (also assume only vp is life).  If at the end of any game was 40-0, then the last 5 turns are booooring because it's obvious who is about to win. And if you're losing, you know that at best you are 5-10 turns from even being in it. So it becomes boring for the players who are "out of the race," and the flip side is in a multiplayer setting it becomes way too easy to gang up on the leader, which is a good thing in some cases, but an annoying thing in a lot of others.

Second, I know you addressed having some cards that prefer to be low in influence, but those cards are by definition, not going to help you win. They simply make you better as you are losing, and do nothing for you when you are winning. Plus, it's a bad fix to solve the competitive advantage the other player has. Essentially you are patching the problem and not really addressing the issue: It sucks to have less morale, and the only relief is card level. And in any game I'm going to be pretty disinclined to run cards that don't help me win (it's the same reason life gain in magic is crap).

Third, think how this will limit your card design. How would you template a card "When you recruit this, lose 1 influence"? You would have to select which player it goes to? That's straaaaange. You essentially don't have any way for players to just lose, or just gain, or anything like that. It's always a trade between players, and i think as the game would age you would quickly find this limits your design space in ways you don't like.

In summary, I think you've probably had the same or similar reservations about the system, otherwise you wouldn't have designed those "less influence" cards you did. I think though you need to address this at a mechanics level and rework the system, because these issues are there regardless of card design. And you are at a luxurious spot of being able to evolve the system quickly.

Potential ideas for solutions?

I don't think you want non finite resource, which I'm inclined to agree, it's a great design space, and something only a few games have done, and even fewer done that are worth noting.

I think the first idea is to introduce a neutral pool of Influence, or "unclaimed" influence. Let me play out how I see it, briefly.

Starting player influence (PI): 10
Starting unclaimed influence (UI): 10

Now you can do a couple different things. I would set the Victory threshold to total number of PI in the game. This means a player doesn't have to have a total victory, and it also means 2 players can be close to winning at the same time. And it also means all players could be far from winning. Much more tension, more drama, and more players actively interested in the game at any one time. If it isn't clear, this comes out to 20 out of 30 influence in a 2 player game, 30 out of 40 in a 3 player game, 40 out of 50 in a 4 player game.

Now this does some things mechanically for you as well.  To begin with, when you do your influence phase you are attempting to use your influence in your territory to gain control of UI. This means no more "selecting players" or any of that weirdness (my opinion). What interesting, is if you do this simultaneously, you indirectly introduce some competition, where ties break to whomever has more influence generation. So UI becomes this very important resource that isn't claimed via combat, it's claimed via politics, something I think you wanted in this game, and something I'll personally say is very cool.

Now when you have effects that say lose PI it goes to the UI pool, so the UI pool could theoretically hold all the influence in the game. When you pay influence for attacking you pay it to the UI (as you said, no one likes war, so if the people see you as a warlord, you'll have less influence on them).  Essentially your setting up UI to represent the undecided voters, the people who haven't aligned with one player or another. Seems very thematic, seems like a great thing you could leverage in the game at large and card level.

Now play this out to deck strategies. Are you as a deck going to try and directly steal PI via combat, it's more efficient since you are directly taking from another player, you don't have to worry much about investing in UI, you'll let that happen naturally and take it by force. Or, you could run a non combat strategy, focus on claiming neutral UI, which is easier to get, but more fickle.

Then you have cards that create global PI drain, or specific PI drain, and instead of stealing it it simply returns to UI.

This system seems to have a lot more layers, but I'll stop espousing for it, I just hit me this morning and I become quickly fond of it. Do with it as you will.

And no problem about the feedback, card game theory is quite the passion of mine. Some day soon I'm going to make an effort to push my card game to a public space again (it's receded into close alpha for as of late), and I'll want you as a player then It all comes around!

[Cyrus]

So I started writing out a huge post on the pros and cons of both systems, but I'm almost sure yours is better, in all the ways you said it was. It also lead me to writing out a new way for the influence step to work that I'm much happier with. I was trying to keep tapping out of the game and instead use "once per turn" effects and wording, but that's dumb, so now I have to think of what synonym for tap I'm going to use for this game. Any suggestions?

So, here's something else I've been thinking on, perhaps you can tell me where you weigh in on it?
I've been thinking of cutting one of the stats to make room for an Influence stat on the hero cards, so that instead of having any dude on a location counting as "1" basically (towards your influence total) they would add different amounts. The only problem here is that I want to keep the mechanic of expanding your region closely tied to your ability to gain higher amounts of influence (since having more locations makes you automatically an easier target for battles, it seems inherently balanced... and awesome!)

[I'd probably be dropping the movement stat, and allow a set amount of moves per turn to keep that quick and clean, and of course other cards would grant extra moves]

Would it be too much to keep track of or in some other way bad to have each location have a set Influence Cap? So, if you control a Farm with an Influence Cap of 2 with 14 Influence worth of Heroes, it's still only worth 2 during the influence step. This would allow more politically inclined heroes to "fully influence" (have influence matching the influence cap of the location they're on) locations of lesser importance on their own, and allow for a lot more design space with locations.

I've also thought of a whole other way that the influence step can work...

Influence Step:
During the Influence Step players can make Influence Attempts on the Unclaimed Influence Pool or against another player directly. Both types of Attempts work almost the same, but slightly different.

Unclaimed Influence Attempt
1) The active player may tap a location they control to add their total Influence on their heroes at that location to their Claim (up to the Influence Cap of the tapped location). A player may repeat this action for any number of locations in their territory. If other players choose to rebuttal this attempt, you may not tap more locations later.
2) Starting with the next player in turn order, any player may tap a location they control in the same way to make a Rebuttal. Players cannot band together to make a higher Rebuttal.
3a) If the Rebuttal is higher than the Claim, the attempting player gains no influence from the unclaimed influence pool.
3b) If the Claim is higher than the Rebuttal or no Rebuttal is made, the attempting player gains 1 influence from the unclaimed influence pool.
4) Once the active player has made an attempt or passed, the next player in turn order may make an influence attempt of their own, and so forth until all players have made any attempts they'd like to.

If Influencing a player directly only the player you are directing the influence attempt towards can make a rebuttal, and you drain 1 Influence from that player if your Claim is higher than their Rebuttal.

What do you think? The only thing I think might need to be added is to tap any heroes you're using towards the influence cap of your tapped location along with it, so that they can't make attacks later in the same turn, but I kind of like keeping it completely separate. Just gotta make sure not to design any heavy hitters who are also great politicians, unless they cost a buuuuunch.

[innuendo]

That system is like a five thousand percent improvement from the initial version I read. Great update.

I would consider letting claims at the UI pool be rebuttaled by group efforts. Really makes those tough to get. And remember, if you rebuttal you lose that territory to make a claim of your own. So you are balancing using your influence to prevent other claims vs making your own. Should play out well, and the multiplayer politicking that will go on could be a very important part of the game.

I would say it works either way though, and is certaintly a testing issue.

But yes, I think this direction has a ton of promise, and I'm glad you liked the idea!

//edit

Should probably resopnd to your stat question on influence cap. I would be inclined to say let their be no limit, but the max you can take in on influence action (tap a territory) is 1.  So when you take that action you are making an attempt at 1 influence (either from UI or PI as you specified). Now there would be card level specials (e.g. "Politician: You may claim +1 Influence per turn from this territory"), but the rule is "1 territory = 1 influence / turn"

This should pretty easily marry the the idea of "larger realm = more potential influence" and also leaves room for special cards.

Now this owuld mean you could convert the movement stat (yay!) to influence, but no reason for a limit. It's essentially "attack" in every sense of how it plays out, so I would make it comparable to attack in size. And yes, make territory cards that add to it or have a base influence. THis means players will have capital cities with high base influence and thus are great at claiming UI, and then province territories with low that get pressured a lot.  Essentially, I love the idea of each card having essentially 2 "attack" like stats, creates a duality of purpose that you would never see in other games.  This system also gives you a lot of leeway in that some games players will have huge influence pools, and small attack pools. But is all should balance.

[Cyrus]

Thanks for the reply, glad you're excited as to where things are going.
I'm a little confused on the 1 influence per location per turn thing. In a way it makes sense, but then how would any +1s work from cards? In your example it sounds like the rule would cancel out any modifiers you might have, thus making them pointless to design in the first place.
Maybe the cap is just kinda pointless, especially if groups can rebuttal attempts at UI.
I think perhaps its time to make up some play test decks? After changing some symbols around at least...

[innuendo]

yeah, sorry it was vauge.

the idea is in the influence phase each of your territories can only claim 1 influence. so if you use it to try and take ui, you only get 1 if you win.

the idea with that keyword was it lets you Claim additional influence if you win.

the influence stat on heros (which i would rename to make the stat and the resource different) is what is counted to see who wins the influence attempt.

and yes build and test, the best feedback is first hand

[Cyrus]

Cool, I think we're on the same page then, and yeah, gotta rename the stat to make it less confusing.

Have you made "first decks" to games before? I feel like I'm not good at it, some suggestions there would be cooooool

[Dragoon]

'first'decks

- Centered around two themes that work a bit together.
- Many 'vanillia' cards (without text abilities!)
- Easy to understand (no complex combo's)

Anyway, you want to avoid over complexity. The deeper tactics can be learned later

[Cyrus]

Thanks for the tips. I'll try to post up some text spoilers of some decks for you guys to look over (time permitting, of course) before I print 'em out. I feel like I know the rules (of building test decks), but also manage to break them every time...

[Wisp]

Just saw this, I think the influence stuff is an awesome idea.

[Cyrus]

Thanks bro. I've stopped working on this entirely, of course. This time because the hard drive with the newest versions of the templates broke

[Wisp]

That really sucks. Really demotivating. However you did inspire me...

It's not the same as yours but the principle is similar.  You win by having more power than any other player has influence. Influence is determined by the locations you control. You get power by tapping a dude to get one from the shared pool, tapping a dude to steal one from an opponent or by destroying an opponents location.

[Dragoon]

Wisp, your description reminded me of that wild west CCG. Not that this is bad at all

[Wisp]

Yeah I played it a few times and really like the way the two points systems interact. The thing I liked about Cy's way was that the winning points didn't accumulate passively, you actually have to go and get them and you can be blocked while doing so.

[Cyrus]

After reading through this thread a bit I sorta wanna start working on this again... wouldn't realllly be back to square one, the new templates weren't all that amazing really.

This game could be cool dammit! Hahaha