I'm making a card/dice game. Got tips?

[Man_Over_Game]

Hey, guys.

My best friend and I are refining some elements of a card/dice game we're making, and I wanted to see if any of you guys had any particular insights, whether that's bringing up games with similar mechanics, seeing a particular theme that suits well, or just something you'd think would be interesting to see come from a system like this, like how certain effects resolve.

The basic idea is that you have a universal currency that also serves as your life. You get 5 dice to allocate to stuff, playing a card costs a minimum investment of a single die, and you gain another die each time you're hit, until taking damage after you have 10 dice means you lose.

Unit cards treat combat fairly similarly to MtG, except you can choose your targets, and each time a creature is in combat, it rolls any of its dice on it to add to either its attack or defense.

The player is actually a unit with a base attack of 0 and a defense of 10. So a creature with a base attack of 5, and 2 dice on it, could attack a player and have a reasonable chance of hitting (as they'd need a total of 10 to hit, and rolling a 12 on average).

Cards also have Threshold Triggers, with a Threshold value, where any time the Trigger occurs, they roll all of the dice on that card to see if you meet the Threshold value for the effect to resolve.

As a result, you have incentive to stack your dice on a single card to get that Threshold bonus consistently (which could be things like "When you are attacked, Threshold 5 to gain +10 attack"), while also wanting to play more cards (which each cost a minimum of 1 die).

Dice unused during your turn can be spent on specific powers/spells that allow you to interrupt the enemy's turn, or for amplifying your own player stats (so you can counterattack an enemy that attacks you).

Any allocated dice are returned to your pool at the start of your turn. So you might put a single die on a unit you're playing, which comes into play with the equivalent of "summoning sickness", but you can choose to remove that die for it to act on just its base stats (good for trading efficiently against enemy targets), or you could allocate more dice into it (which it would benefit from both attack and defense) at the cost of being able to play fewer cards.

Combat itself is functionally identical to MtG, with a lot of powers changed and most effects that take effect during your opponent's turn being defensive benefits.


The overall design goal was to create something that had the same level of epic-ness and combat emphasis as MtG, but focusing more on effects like Monarch over Hexproof. Where, as the game gets harder for one player, the game becomes less stale. Where a large board state means having more decisions, rather than few. As well as being able to create your own solutions to a specific problem, rather than relying on niche solutions to niche problems.



We haven't decided on a theme yet, and we're only now starting to create card effects (like how an attacking Ranged unit doesn't get attacked by the Defender, unless the Defender also has Ranged), so if you guys have ideas, let us know!

[Dienekes]

Wouldn't these rules make the optimal way to play be to not attack at all. Let your opponent hit you a few times so you get more dice. And then wait until you have overwhelming superiority and can wipe them out in one big attack?

[Man_Over_Game]

Wouldn't these rules make the optimal way to play be to not attack at all. Let your opponent hit you a few times so you get more dice. And then wait until you have overwhelming superiority and can wipe them out in one big attack?

Thing is, attacks are targeted. So if you try to develop a board state, there's nothing stopping your opponent with trying to trade with you. The more dice you spend on playing cards, the less you have on keeping your stuff alive.

There is also one other mechanic that we're debating on, but we're planning on having every played card to be immediately replaced with one from your deck, and having no cards left to draw means you take a hit and pick a card from your discard.

Additionally, a unit only has about 6 or so attack. Players are naturally tanky, and require additional dice to be hit. Even if you spend 2 dice on a unit to hit that player, they only have about a 50% chance of actually hitting. Assuming you have the max amount of dice (10), and you have 5 units on the board, you're only likely to deal 2-3 hits in that turn. And if you fail to finish the fight, you're basically defenseless (unless something can take a hit for you).


It's a valid concern, and honestly not one that we considered quite yet, but it does seem to be naturally balanced. The ideal solution is to put everything into one consistent aggressor, while saving just enough of your resources to defend yourself, to slowly peck away at your opponent while they gain power and tools to remove your obvious win condition. What the aggressor should do afterwords is come up with backup win conditions should the first fail, which are inherently weak to counter-attacks due to the lack of dice investment, creating a system where you're spread too thin and can't keep everything alive.

Does your trump card get removed in one big counterattack, do you lose all of your other minions that you were planning to use to trade against his board, or does your opponent just go straight for the throat and try to outdamage you? So many options.

One of the design goals we had in mind was to keep threats obvious, and sacrifices inevitable, while the game gets more and more interesting the closer you get to the end.

It's...comforting to see a well-planned strategy, like yours, has obvious faults that an opponent could leverage. There are a number of things that do support that strategy (the hero items in the game, which focus on improving the player or board state, reduce your defense, give passive benefits, and are instead destroyed the next time you would take a hit), but thank you very much for bringing it to our attention!

[Dienekes]

Glad to help. And as always I find trying to figure out mechanics and what they mean for gameplay interesting.

But I'm not sure what more I can help with without seeing some cards and perhaps observing a game.

Since that sounds like a lot of work, I'd instead suggest next time you and your friend play, try and purposely play weird and see how far you can stretch the system until it breaks.

But it certainly sounds interesting.

[Man_Over_Game]

Glad to help. And as always I find trying to figure out mechanics and what they mean for gameplay interesting.

But I'm not sure what more I can help with without seeing some cards and perhaps observing a game.

Since that sounds like a lot of work, I'd instead suggest next time you and your friend play, try and purposely play weird and see how far you can stretch the system until it breaks.

But it certainly sounds interesting.

Thank you!

Sorry, I didn't mean to shut down your idea. The game is still going through its conception, so the maths and strategies aren't quite solid yet, but we're interested to see if anyone had any brainstormed ideas that simply just sounded fun.

Like MTG mechanics they always wanted to see come to fruition, or maybe add mechanics to play cards facedown for some kind of mindgame effect. If someone has anything they thought "Man, that seems like fun", let me know and I'll see if we can fit it in!



We've already tossed out a few things that don't fit (the facedown element was one, just didn't see how it'd fit as of right-now), so I don't want to give off the idea that we're jumping the gun to add whatever we think sounds cool, but we definitely want to see what people want to play at the table be a part in our game, assuming it fits.

[Man_Over_Game]

Solidifying some major mechanics.

Creature cards that are played are first played face-down. While face-down, they have Protect, a keyword that allows them to force themselves to be a target for anything that doesn't have Protect.

Attacking a face-down card flips it face-up. You can choose to flip a card face-up at the end of each turn. A face-down card cannot attack.


So here it represents Summoning Sickness, a mindgame element, and a hidden protector. You can reveal a unit before your opponent's turn, which allows it to then benefit from the Protect feature of other units (including those that are face-down).



There will also be a trend of units with the keyword Summon, which allows you to play them like a spell, but spells are always discarded at the end of the current turn. So if you create a Wall of Stone normally, it can serve as a long-term defender, or you can cast it as a spell during your opponent's turn to act as a surprise, last-ditch defense for the entire round (or at least until it's destroyed by your opponent through combat).

Some Summon cards have bounce-back effects, like the weak Illusion that allows you to return it to the top of your deck if it was destroyed, giving you a frequent mindgame tool to frustrate your opponent with. You draw each time you play a card, so it's a good way of adding bulk to your deck when spamming out cards.

Another Summon card I have in mind is the Golem, which adds a +1 to its attack and defense for each die it has on it, allowing you it play it as a powerful counterattack/defender, or be an all-in combat unit that comes with a high expense.

[Horatio@Bridge]

This puts me in mind of worker placement board games, like Agricola. Alien Frontiers does the "workers = dice" thing, so you might look at that as an inspiration. My thought is that you're going to have very small boards compared to MtG, and that a swarm strategy with low cost creatures won't really work - because you can only play so many creatures a turn.

A thought from that, then, would be to have cards and strategies that revolve around increasing the number of actions you can take, at the cost of having those actions be less effective. So, for instance, you might have a keyword that lets you play two monsters for one die, as long as both have that keyword (or are the same monster), with the issue being that the monsters are weak. You might also have some cards that give you temporary dice, or a die that regenerates each turn but doesn't count as health, or something like that.

Overall it sounds pretty neat, and I look forward to seeing more about it! If you get close to finishing it, I have a friend with a YouTube channel that teaches people how to play games. Send me a message if you'd be interested in having him try it out.

[Man_Over_Game]

We finally got around to playtesting unit cards, after solidifying some rules:

Combat works like so:

• Check Initiative for all non-exhausted, faceup cards (which is the card with the most amount of dice, roll high if there's a tie between two players)
• The card with Initiative may do one of the following:
  • Engage an enemy.
  • Exhaust itself.
  • Turn upside-down (which means that it is ignored for the sake of initiative checks, and gains Protect)
• If a defender's card can Protect, the Protect unit may Engage as the defender's role instead and Exhausted.
• With the engaged units, the initiator rolls to attack while the defender rolls to block, keeping the highest value you roll, defender wins on a tie. If you have a match to your highest roll, you add +1 (so three 6s equals a total roll of 8).
• If the defender survives, they can choose to counterattack with one less die, or choose to disengage. You can counterattack back and forth multiple times, as long as you're rolling one less die each time.
• Making any attack Exhausts you, which means you can no longer choose to Engage or Protect a unit.
• Once an engagement ends, go back to the Check Initiative step and repeat until all units are exhausted.

We realized that we could just remove unit stats altogether, and just use the results on the dice, by forcing all units to have at least one die. That way, we can still use the 5d6 to 10d6 dice through a game, and it still wouldn't be overwhelming. I think our first game ended with me having 6 units to his 3, with me having 8 dice and him dying at 10.

We also just played around with card effects. Changed Ranged to just be treated as having it's own initiative check before everyone else (so check the initiative of all Ranged units first), tried to balance each unit as having a power boost of 2 each (so +1-+2 to attack/defense rolls, with each keyword being worth 1 point, and penalties can allow up to 3 points).

It was fun. And exhausting. Fights were pretty darn intense for such a simple game.

This week, we're looking into implementing player-based equipment, so that they can defend themselves rather than having to put up a wall of Protect units. We realized that, since a unit could reasonably make an attack roll with a total of 8, players ended up being too vulnerable even if they generally had a lot of dice to roll. Prototypes are that a player can play an equipment card with as many dice as they want, and they can remove dice from them as normal, but adding dice back requires you to "repair" them by discarding one card for each die added. Any time a player is engaged, that player can exhaust an equipment to treat it as being a "unit" that uses the player's reserve dice as its own, and the player taking the hits. However, using an equipment this way removes a die from it due to durability.