Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Goal of the game: Use your unique deck of cards to successfully acquire and hold 10 Land Cards for 2 turns. You will use characters, events, artifacts, and buildings from history to achieve your goal.

Deck building Rules: Your deck can be anywhere between 50 to 100 cards, but may not contain any more or less than 5 Land cards.
Cultures CAN be intermingled (subject to change).


Types of Cards:

Characters: Characters are your fighters. They might be famous people (i.e. George Washington), a generic person (i.e. Russian Serf), or a specific group ( i.e. Army of Alexander, Philosophes, etc). Characters are divided by culture (i.e. American, Greek, Russian, etc).

Equipment: Equipment is placed on characters to enhance their abilities. Each character can hold up to two pieces of equipment of different kinds (i.e. characters can not hold two swords)

Events: Events are played at various times (specified on the individual event card). They cause various effects to occur.

Land Cards: These cards represent Terrain that you own. Land can be desert, forest, sea, etc. If you own 10 Land cards for 2 turns, you win the game. Each type of land has various effects, etc.

Buildings: Buildings are linked to an owned Land card. Each building (i.e. Bank) can only be built on certain types of Land (i.e. Bank can not be build on Sea, Lake, or Desert). Buildings have special effects that aid you or harm the opponent. Buildings can be destroyed by either being demolished by the owner or the Land Card which the building is linked to is raided or captured by the opponent.



Battling: The battle system is currently under development. Here is what I know:

There are two types of battles, pillaging and capturing. If you win a pillaging attempt, you can either discard a building or discard the top two cards of the opponent's deck. If you win a capturing attempt, you take an opponent's Land Card and place it in your territory. It is now considered owned by you, and any buildings linked with it are discarded.





I think that's all I have for now. Post feedback and suggestions. I'd especially appreciate help on the battle system. I was thinking maybe a Lord of the Rings type without the twilight pool mechanic, but I don't have much expirience with that.

NEED TO DECIDE:

-Battle mechanics (See next post)
-Cultures to be made (See next post)
-Order of Operations for the Turn
-Drawing Mechanic
-whether or not to have additional card types geared to support, similar artifacts in Redemption



Here's a raw character card. Colors subject to change. The color of the ability box is meant to represent visually which culture the character is form, in addition to the tag in it. Commander is special ability that will be described in later rules posts.




I didn't feel like custom making icons right now, so the sword (attack), staff (defense), and heart (health) are just ugly googles.

Interesting. I would be happy to assist creating cards if you need any help.

~Rrulez

I might suggest pillaging be a different battle style. Similar, but different, as a capture is required to win where as pillaging is simply trying to make it easier to capture. For instance, pillaging might give the aggressor initiative. Just an idea, not sure if it's a particularly good one

Okay... I want to help with this if I can.


Perhaps the cultures can be temporal? Or at least, equipment from a certain time period is exclusive to that time period?


Does anyone remember a game called Illuminati: New World Order? I never played it, but the historicity of this game reminds me of it.


EDIT: Wait! What if this was RISK in the version of a card game?

You'll be happy to know that I'm hoping if this ever works out it will be a good tool to get people interested in history.

Hmm. Interesting thought, that makes sense, but I'm not sure hwo to enforce it without ridiculou amounts of text on a card or long lists.

Never heard of it.

Well, you couldn't have George Washington using an Uzi, right?

I agree, but it'd be hard to specify what goes where without a lot of text, which I'd like to avoid.

Oh, and it'd amke balancing eras challenging, but that could easily be overcome.

Maybe have the eras divide by centuries?

I'm not really concerned with how to divide them, that's easy. I know plenty enough history to be able to do that.

Wait, nevermind, figured it out.

I'll divide everything by levels for equipment.

GW can use level 3 equipment and lower.

Level=era basically. That should fix it wihtout having too much text.



Oh and there probably already is a risk the card game. Not the direction I want to go. Also, I'm working on developing a cost element to equipment. Everything costs money after all.

No, I'm speaking of the board game "Risk".