Amber CCG

[jibbajibba]

this relates to my free to air amber CCG
game design question

I have a little CCG style game based on the Amber chronicals.

players take on the role of one of the primary Princes the basica aim is to claim the throne of Amber.

Amberites have a resource pool they spend to recruit armies and allies and get hold of stuff.

In combat Allies have a number of wounds equal to their cost to recruit. This means that you just need one pool of stuff on the table and keeps bookkeeping simple.

Now I am torn with how to track Amberite wounds. The obvious way is to say that wounds to Amberites come directly out of the resource pool. This keeps it easy and again you ahve one thing to track but here's the kicker. This promotes passive play. A player who does nothing goes into a fight with 30 wounds and active player goes into a fight with maybe 5 or 6.
This is bad for play as promotes slow passive stonewalling games.

The alternative is to say Amberites have a separate wound pool. Now you could do this with another pile of counters but gets hard to administer its messy and inelegant. The alternate was to mill cards from the deck vis a vis Pokemon as Amberites are injured. Problme here is that we are working from 81 card decks (nine nines - it's an Amber thing) and so the standard wound effect woudl need to be modifeid as milling 1 or 2 cards is a minor effect.

So I need a possible solution. Any ideas ?

[boulet]

Hmmm I like the idea but I hardly understand how it's supposed to work.

First : I'm not sure how it is a collectible game if there's 81 cards once and for all.

Second : I don't see how stone walling is bringing a player anywhere : one has to invest some of his resources in order to secure the throne no ? You've got to attack in one way or another (military, assassination, legal procedures...) if you want to be recognized as king/queen.

Third : if you define the main pool as a kind of fictional presence, where wounds just reflect one of many ways how a prince loses ground in the story, I guess you don't have to be all complicated with separate pools and all.

How about some cards are played on other characters and represent those wounds/disabilities/conditions and require from the victim to pay from their pool or use counter cards etc ?

Is there a draft of the rules and examples of different types of cards somewhere ? The game is too blurry for me to wrap my mind around it for now.

[Croaker]

Well, you could have something like this: Each player has a 9-cards hand. Each wound reduces this by one.

[Lawbag]

I would imagine that each Amberite can't actually die, but the losing of wounds would put them in a torpor state.

[finarvyn]

Not quite sure if I "get" how this whole CCG will work, but perhaps you could allow the Wounds to link together with the number of cards held in the player's hand. Perhaps use Endurance to rate the "hand size" and allow cards in the hand to fit the Psyche, Strength, and Warfare conflict styles. This would mirror the mechanics of the ADRP somewhat.

Perhaps you could use a scale somewhat like this:
Shadow/Human = hand of 2.
Chaos = hand of 4
Amber = hand of 6
Ranked = hand of 7
First Rank = hand of 8.

If he starts with a hand of 6 and takes a wound he would have to discard (or have the player who inflicted the wound pick a card unseen from his hand) to reduce his hand size to 5. That way a player really feels those wounds in play....

And did you say this CCG would be availible in some manner? I'm curious about it.

EDIT: Re-reading the thread, I note that my suggestion was pretty much the same as Croaker's.  :-(

[jibbajibba]

Good comments all (particularly Lawbag's )

Okay first off the CCG is not an ADRG CCG its an Amber CCG so I have not lifted the attributes or ranks etc.
This game has gone through many interations. In the first version each ally and Amberite had 6 wounds you counted off with a dice once a card came into play but in a 4 player game you ended up with 20 + guys on the table and that was a lot of dice to track. especially when you also had a resource pool. Another problem with this method was that Amberites went down easily. 2 allies say Borrel and Merlin could take Fiona down in a round (unless she has suitable cards to escape etc). So I started looking for other options and a resource pool that became wounds and was the place stuff was paid from seemed the neatest.
The broblme with passivity is that if i am a player and i spend resources bying trrops recruiting allies etc bringinlg my pool down to 5 or 6 yes i am doing stuff , advancing my cause so to speak but then a player who does nothing can bide their time and then make a move in the end game to pick off each Amberite in combat. Yes there might be a few allies in the way etc but it becomes a valid strategy and to be honest if just 1 player doe it fine but the trend has been for 2 or 3 players to do it then the game gets quite dull.
Needless to say there are many cards in the set but each player has an 81 card deck (well a total of 81 cards split between resources and actions.)
Lawbag is right in highlighting VTES as a similarity although this was not planned and the orignal game was very different the move to a resource pool combined with the fact that we do have Pattern, logrus, Sorcery etc as skills and these have an advanced and basic version on each card do ceate strong parallels. But A large aspect of the game is recruiting troops and moving through shadow and so these things server to differentiate I think. And you do have an Amberite you play who can be killed and it forces you out of the game you don't get this in VTES as all Vamps are mere pawns.

Hand size is interesting as a wound option as it gives the correct sort of number and balance My only issue with it is that I was looking at other effect to target the hand size various logrus and sorcerous options ... and now these would equate to wounds. I will give it some thought...

Rules are making the procession from my head to paper I do have about 500 cards already but without a ruels description it is somewhat moot