Game Mechanics

[Rmcdaniel2424]

Hello all,

     New to Forums as you can see. I had this game idea for a bit now. I have location cards in my game and now for the tricky part. I cant decide if I want to have it where players take over the locations or not and also if players should start out with the lands or have to draw them and play them. So if you cant see where the problem is yet, I'll tell ya.

Before I start rambling, let me say that I am not a fan of CCG but I do like the whole make your own deck type game. So I came up with a way "I think" that would be able to build a costume deck with all cards being able to be worth the same. For example... Say you start off with <Big Bob>.... you can only play some cards if you start off with the Big Bob card....Another thing I did was limit how many of the better cards you can have in the deck compared to the weaker cards.

Plan A

Lets just say each location represents a city block. Okay so player 1 puts down block A,B,C... Player 2 location C because its closest to him, Then player 1 plays card D and takes back his location C card....Now its A-B-D-C....It should be A-B-C-D... That wouldnt make sense.... I hope I made that easy to understand lol.

Okay plan B

All players start with say.... 5 location cards...  All players would have to have the same benefits and then you wouldn't have the customization has say Magic the Gathering "As in, how many land cards is best for my deck" Sorry if that didnt make sense....

I dunno, Thanks for listening and any input would be appreciated. 

On a side note.. Anyone know a good web site on how to balance a card game or just other tips on how to make cards... I have a decent idea but would like to see others

[Dragoon]

If you don't like ccg's, you could go with the deck building card game genre. In this kind of games, each player starts with some starting cards and can buy new cards from a central pool.

As for card design, first set up a rule sekeleton. Sort of like what you want to do, and how you are doing it. (i.e. Combat or not, what kind of setting you have, etc.)
When you have done that, you can start up making cards along with rules.

Anyway, that's how I do it.

[GnKoichi]

If the order of the location cards matter, you should look into the way the Star Wars (Decipher) game is setup. Locations go into the middle and are shared between players, so they never have to move and their order can remain the same. Control is determined by having characters on your side of the map on that location. I'm not sure if this fits with your idea though. It's a little hard to tell what you're looking for from your first post. Could give a full example of play, like two full turns for each player, to show what you meant by locations going back and forth between players and getting out of order?

[Rmcdaniel2424]

Cool Thanks for the replies so far

Dragoon- Yeah, In my card game <long term> I am going to have it so you basically buy the starter deck of the theme you want and there would be an expansion pack that you can buy that has all the cards that could go with any deck.

Gnkoichi - Yeah that is actually a good point, I think you might have solved my riddle.

Just for added info, My game is about killing your opponents boss and location cards are for resources. I don't know if this type of game is already being used, but I havn't seen it. There is a lot added to the game then just that, but that is the main part of it.