Cactus Game Design Message Boards

I had an idea before for a card game battle-phase, so to speak. I'm too lazy to generate an entire card game, though, so I'll never use it. It's pretty simple if you wanna hear it: To start, each player has a character with health points. Once a battle is established between two characters, both players begin rolling sets of dice - one attack dice and one defense dice for each. If any player's attack dice shows higher numbers than the other player's defense dice, that player does damage to the opposing character equal to the total of his attack dice minus the total of his opponent's defense dice. Obviously, once one character reaches 0 health or less, XP.

I played around with this a little, and there's a lot of flexibility to it. For example, perhaps a player could choose to play an "enhancement" card instead of rolling certain dice - either attack, defense, or both, as would be indicated on the card.

The existence of dice doesn't negate the existence of strategy.

Have you played Heroscape or Risk...those are very heavily dependent on good rolling yet strategy is still very key to success!

Have you played Heroscape or Risk...those are very heavily dependent on good rolling yet strategy is still very key to success!

Precisely. Games should have a balance of luck and strategy, as almost all do.

Those are board games.

So?

If a card's attack/defense is based entirely on the luck of a roll, there can't necessarily be any rare value to it.

It's not like that's the only part of the game. Cards would have different stats and different abilities, just like in almost every other card game (including Redemption). And it's not that imbalanced either. You would need a lot of luck for it to make a big difference in the outcome.

There are many games that use dice that depens upon the decision making so much as to make dice inconsiquential.  One of my favorite games, Axis and allies, is very dependant upon dice, but the luck factor is so minimized by the choices you make in development that dice merely become a formality after a while.  The real strategy is the decisions made on when and where to attack and what to develop when you get there.