Bloodstone (Siege CCG) idea

[Malagar]

Hello everyone,
during the wintertime i get the best ideas for new games. maybe some of you like to contribute your thoughts to my game design. i am not native english speaking, so excuse spelling errors okay? i wont bother you with posting my rulebook, a quick summary is enough i think. more detail later:

The Idea
Bloodstone is a city-building, siege CCG set in a dark fantasy gothic gameworld. each player chooses one faction or an alliance of two or more factions and joins the struggle for world domination. players build cities, hire units and heroes and attack their enemies trying to mill all cards from their decks.

this all sounds very simple and like a CCG version of warcraft 3,  Disciples or Heroes of Might and Magic or a Wargame. I like the game to be both: simple and fun. in addition to that there are a few key features that give the game a fresh feeling. also i want the game to be expandable by the community - players can invent new factions and cards if they like.

Goal
Each player starts the game with a Keep card in play. Keeps show your faction and can be tapped (bowed) once per turn to generate some gold. whenever you attack an opponents keep, it is not destroyed - instead all damage dealt to it, mills one card from your opponents deck. you can only play cards with the same alignment as your keep and should built your deck around your keep.

The gameboard
the gameboard is divided into city sections, each city section can hold one structure and one army. in total there are 5 city sections protecting your keep. your and your opponents city sections are aligned to each other, so an army in section 1 can attack an opponents army in his section 1. if a city section is unprotected, the attack targets the keep instead.



Cards
Keep - see above and see picture below.



Structures - you can built a structure at each of your city sections. structures help to strengthen your defenses, they also provide income and special abilities.

Fortifications - small additons to your keep or structures wich increase abilities or defenses. this includes watchtowers, water pits, stone walls etc. you have to attach fortifications to your structures and when a structure is destroyed, so are the attached cards.

Unit - the meat of the game are units. this includes all kinds of soliders and monsters. you place units next to your city sections. units are for attacking and defending, but also provide special abilities.

Heroes - special kind of units that can attach items, mounts and spells. there can only be one hero per city section. heroes can also go questing and can be upgraded to more powerful versions.

Items, Mounts, Spells - attachment cards only for heroes. theese increase both combat strength and the abilities of your heroes. if a hero dies, all attachments are also removed from the game.

Resources
There are two resources in the game, there is no resource chaining. i like to keep the requirements to play a card to a minimum. the purpose of structures is not to enable a player to play certain card types!

Gold - the basic resource of the game. tap your keep to get gold (1,2 or more - printed on the card). many structures and some fortifications can also be tapped to generate gold. you keep your gold between turns, its not lost at the end of the turn. Gold is represented by a number in a circle.

Bloodstones - the second resource gives the game its name. bloodstones are gained by destroying your opponents cards. for every destroyed unit, hero or structure you get at least one bloodstone. you keep bloodstones between turns. many special abilities require bloodstones to work and many cards (like the more powerful heroes) can only be brought into play when paying bloodstones in addition to gold. Bloodstone is represented by a diamond icon.

Battles
during your turn, you can attack with one of your armies located at a city sections (currently you can not attack with all of them, just one). you attack the opposing city section, if there is a hostile army a magic the gathering like battle occurs. you assign attackers and blockers, deal damage equal to their power and if the toughness of a unit is exceeded, its destroyed. of course there are lots of special abilities to make battles more interesting. two fundamental changes make the system different to magic:

1. every unit has a initiative stat. there is no "first strike" instead the unit with the highest initative strikes first (my INI 3 knights strike before your INI 1 ogre).

2. before you battle, you add your initative totals. the side with the highest INI total may assign attackers and blockers.

Living Expansion System
As i said earlier, i like the players to be able to expand the game on their own. there will be a design document that helps you to balance new cards (like: how much gold does a power-3 unit cost?). also many abilities are keyworded and have a cost. there are also drawbacks that decrease the cost of a unit.

also, as a narrator or gamesmaster - i for myself like to introduce new rules and card types to the game. the basic game will feature no spellcasters for example - but the first expansion will add spellcasting rules to the game. this is also true for mounts, event cards and so on. this is similar to the doomtrooper CCG where they started with only a few card-types and rules and expanded the game with each expansion a lot.

The Covenant
I am working on the first faction of the game: The Covenant. I spend much time on resarch and development of the factions, progress is slow but steady. The game will feature a base set of 4 factions, with 50 cards each. thats a nice 200 card premier set with enough options for expansion.

The Covenant is a medieval, imperial human society like from arthurian legend. but there is a twist that adds the flair to this faction: The Covenant see themselves as direct amabassadors of their god, and therefore its their eternal task to cleanse the world from all heretics and pagan races. The Covenant is absolutely against magic and technology, they never use gunpowder and have no wizards. instead they worship their god and bring powerful clerics to the battlefield. also they rely in stone and steel, all of their structures are very robust, they also use primitive catapults to fire stone blocks into enemy ranks. their strength is their religious fanatism wich created varioius templar-knight and warrior-priest castes.

okay, enough for now - hope this was enough to wet your tastebuds.

all ideas this way please!

[Cyrus]

First off, I think your english is better than most people's on this forum, including native english speakers
Anyway, I don't have much to add, this seems like a pretty well thought out game. The only thing I wanted to point out is that the faction name doesn't fit at all. A Coven/Covenant is almost the direct opposite of what you described the faction to be. You should make the Covenant the heretics that this faction aims to destroy.
Also, do you think maybe requiring blood stones and thus victory is a good idea for powerful cards? Seems like the first player to win a battle will have a huge advantage.
I like the idea though and would like to play it, if you need to test something let me know

[Malagar]

@Cyrus:
Thank you for the feedback cyrus! I plan to put a lackey plugin together once the first 2 factions are finished - but its still a long way to go. regarding your feedback:

@Everyone

1. Please ignore the Covenant faction name for now, i made a mistake with the meaning of the name. if anyone has a good name for the faction, please let me know. btw, this is like whistling in the dark but: if someone has ideas to flesh out the faction more, let me know! I could need a background story or small text pieces wich increase the flavor.

2. I have to rework the bloodstone rule. I really want a mechanic that rewards a player for attacking his opponent. this is necessary to "fuel" the agression between players and prevent people from being "a turtle" and hide behind their castle walls. cyrus showed me an error in the concept, as rewarding the attacker leads towards one player becoming very powerful in a short amount of time. if anyone has a idea how to improve the current concept, please let me know!

[Cyrus]

Its difficult to design rules that encourage attacking but aren't "win-more" rules. Although you have to attack to win, so you may not need anything at all. As long as the cards are designed well, "turtle" style play could just be "control" style play, and not be a bad thing. I think a game should always have the option for the non-aggressive victory, and the hold-off-til-the-final-battle style as well.
For now, I would leave the Bloodstone rule out, or as a quick fix so you can still use the Heroes, have a Bloodstone cost somewhere between 3 and 5 Gold, but NOT accumulate over turns, so you have to buy and use them in the same turn. Thus, a 2-cost hero would actually cost 6 (or 10, or whatever) and you'd have to pay for it all in one shot (meaning you have to amass Gold over a couple turns). Putting a mechanic like this into the game also opens up for some sort of Bankers or Thieves faction that could punish players for holding onto Gold somehow, thus that faction could take the roll of the "weenie" deck, using small dudes and resource denial as their primary function (so, red in magic, but with a different flavor, basically).

As for faction names, they could be called something as simple as "The Light" or "Hands of Justice". Something that makes them obviously "the good guys." If you wanted to give it more of a "the good guys, but..." kind of feel they could be called something like The New Republic or New Empire. Something that doesn't explicitly say "may not be the best guys" but also hints at some corruption.

[Malagar]

@Cyrus: Thank you again for the feedback, your input is valueable and appreciated!

Update 30th December 2010:

1. The name of the Covenant faction was changed to "The Church of Hedoth". The name of the Covenant Cathredral was changed to: "Cathedral of the first prophet". The alignment of this faction was changed from true good to "lawful with a twist (and a dark secret)".

2. i removed the bloodstone rule for now. the game now only uses gold as a resource. But, I really like to have a second resource called "bloodstones" in the game. a resource that is much harder to get, as you cannot harvest it normally. a resource similar to a reward for something the player has to achieve. feedback anyone?

its late over here, so no more news. i get a few days off the next week and maybe i will be able to come up with new cards, rules and (hopefully) another template.

[teapower]

I like your CCG but i have 1 question. Do you win by milling your opponent? Please explain winning.

[Malagar]

@teapower / @all:

Yes, you win by milling the deck of your opponent ("to mill" is a term from magic the gathering).

Victory Condition

Every time one of your attacking armies is unblocked, you remove the top X cards from your opponents deck. Where X is the total power of all attacking units. Once the deck of a player is empty, that player looses the game immediately.

As each deck has to have exactly 60 cards, you can imagine the deck being the "keep" or "fortress" of a player with 60 lifepoints. the players draw one card every turn from their decks, wich means that they drain their own deck while playing. this represents the limited resources of your people hiding in your keep, slowly running out of supplies until they begin to starve.

[teapower]

Okay, thank you for clarifying that. I'd like to help if at all possible with Siege. I like the idea of the living expansion system but seems a little inelegant and not organized. I might suggest some sort of wiki where we can discuss the direction of the game and have player submit back cards and have a unified storyline and not just a jumble of mini plots, some contradicting each other.

[Malagar]

@teapower:

Thank you, any help is apprecciated.

@teapower/all:

I plan to install a blog/forum/wiki to provide a platform for the game to be discussed. and i plan to put both the rules and the background story at least into some kind of "framework" to prevent things becoming completely chaotic. I am still in very early design stages, so the overall look and feel of the game is still very blurry. once i get a few days off, i install blog/forum/wiki and post the stuff i already have to give you guys more insight.

Here is a mockup of unit cards, icons are explained and the rules text shows you some game concepts. this is clearly moving into the "card based wargame" direction (ignore the races for now, these are just test cards).

[Cyrus]

your layouts are really cool! I'm sure I'll have more to add when I'm less tired haha, but those are really great

[Dragoon]

Even if a stat is 0, show the it's symbol on all cards that have it.

Card design looks nice overall.

[xchokeholdx]

Bloodstones could be implemented like this:

I guess that your city-sections on your map will be filled in by cards right? like a "west-side tunnel complex", or a "Main gate" one?

if so, you could have players SACRIFICE their own city sections (thus losing some defense there), to gain bloodstones. Those bloodstones can be used to buy special heroes and items.

cards look awesome, but I would change the "life" icon into another form. Maybe just a circle will do.

[Malagar]

@Cyrus @Dragoon @xchokeholdx

As always, thank you for your kind words and feedback!

@Dragoon / @Everyone

Okay, I am open for everything. But what do the others say? shall i show any attribute icon even if its 0?

@xchokeholdx / @Everyone

yes, you can fill all city sections with cards. your idea is good - i will use it as part of my new bloodstone system (see more below)

I will rework the icons soon to get more suitable ones. i was not satisfied with the life icon myself and the sword looks to much like a claw, spear, razor-spiky-thing-whatever

@ Everyone

I dont have much to post, you just have to wait a bit until there is more content to be released. Some quick updates include:

1. Changed the name from LCG (living card game) to OCG (open card game). because that is what the game will be. an open-source card game. release will only be through lackey, never printed.

2. working on the final version of the card templates. this includes updating the icons (theese are from world of warcraft, but i dont care - as my game will be free and blizzard is just such a multi-million-dollar corporation ;-) new version will include a few icon changes, a few more decorations and different backgrounds for different card types. nothing fancy! from then on i will stick to the design called "Version 1.0".

3. setup a blog with comment options, a twitter account, a facebook account and a simple card database. i will link them all toghether in the blog and make it the central-station of further development. will take me a while though.

4. bloodstones (thanks to@xchokeholdx and @cyrus for the input): added a few more rules how a player can gain bloodstones. this was done to provide more and different ways to get bloodstones. this is also done to prevent the "runaway leader" syndrome. examples:

- generating bloodstones now is possible via various ways instead of just one
- a new card type ("quests") is used to control the ways of gaining blood stones. every expansion will feature new quests. quests are permanent on the table and can only be fulfilled by the player who brought them into play, once accomplished, quests are discarded and the player gains X bloodstones (or some other/additional reward). ways to gain bloodstones could be:
* destroy your opponents cards
* sacrifice your own cards
* accumulate a certain ammount of gold
* trade gold for bloodstones
* bring a certain combination of cards into play
* etc.

thats it for today. it will take a few weeks until i have the website up and running. then - there will be more content.

[Malagar]

The project website went live today, currently its more like a placeholder. Stay tuned for more content!

http://bloodstoneocg.wordpress.com/

Also on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bloodstoneOCG
And on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/BloodstoneOCG/178141255540191

I need a bunch of facebook followers to get a vanity url for the project. If you have a facebook account, please be a fan. Thank you!

PS: We now have a official cardback (fondly named "alpha")!

>>> Sorry this, post is just a shameless plug
>>> Sorry #2, i posted twice in a row, next time I edit it into the previous post, promised!

[xchokeholdx]

I really never use facebook, but I became a fan, just to give you a heads up!

The card templates look good, can you give me some raw card details so I can do some testing of the rules, as given?