More changes and less sleep

Since my little son (1.5 month old) kept me pretty much the whole night awake, I had a lot of time to do some thinking about the rules so far.

I came up with a few points that needed to be changed.

First and most obvious: Discipline.

I designed the discipline keyword to let players draw extra cards for their initial hand of 5. This was because in the v1.0 rules, combat cards were still divided between Attack, Defense and switch (both attack and defense in one). This could cause some unwanted hand draws (screws), so I designed the Discipline keyword to somewhat fix that and to improve a players hand, albeit at a cost (extra cards gets discarded).

With the v1.1 rules, the combat rules got a big overhaul to make it more dynamic, which means most combat cards will have both an attack and defense value on them, and you are not limited to only play an Attack card for example (there is no longer an attacker and defender state for players). Both players will attack and defend as they see fit, namely, though the cards they play. (Combat got a lot more dynamic, and will be even more, read on!)

So Discipline is no longer needed. I will change it into another meaning, see below.

Second point is that if a player decides to ONLY play combat cards with high defense bonuses, the game would fall quickly into a stalemate, since there is (currently) no way to win while defending, and a balanced player would have a hard time to overcome the massive defense number(s). This needs to change.

There are a few ways to do this, the one most obvious would be to make defense cards a little bit weaker than attacking cards.
The problem with this is that if the “gap” between the two strengths is too big, players just would not bother with defending at all!
Another way to do this is to restrict the amount of combat cards a player may have active at a time, or at the end of a round. I think this is a more elegant way to restrict a player going nuts with defense (or attacking while I am at it).

Next to that, I will make sure that both strategies (playing defensive and playing aggressive) will be able to win, albeit more risky than not playing a more balanced deck.

This is where Discipline comes back. Certain warriors are more proficient with certain martial arts, weapons etc, and thus they will be able to maintain those longer in play. Discipline will be changed into:
At the end of the resolution phase, both players (starting with the lowest speed) must discard combat cards from their combat zone until they have reached their maximum #, as indicated by the Discipline value on the warrior card.

Thus a warrior with Discipline: 5 will be able to sustain 5 combat cards in his combat zone. Another warrior with Discipline 6, will be able to sustain 6 combat cards.

This does not mean that players cannot play more combat card in a turn. For example, the first warrior with Discipline 5, may play more cards than 5 during a single turn, but he won’t be able to sustain them all. He might play 7, but at the end of resolution, he is forced to discard 2 of them from his combat zone.

So, if you are facing a very defensive warrior, and you have already (in my example) 5 combat cards in your combat zone, you just play some new (attacking) ones, to overcome that big wall of defense, and at the end of the resolution phase, you just discard some defense ones, to slowly change your combat zone into a very aggressive one.

Pro´s:
- not restricting a player to a certain number of cards they can play
- But still punishing them a bit for playing more than their discipline (excess cards gets discarded)
- Its an elegant way to keep calculation of total attack/defense values low during the resolution phase
- A great way to make a clear difference between types of warriors.
- Playing very aggressive or very defensive is possible, but a player can slowly adapt to that strategy, by discarding the cards that are ineffective against it.

Con´s:
- It is a restriction, which a lot of players do not like.
- Dunno if this will solve the problem. Hopefully play testing will get it clear.


Last point for today: Actions.

I started out Wuxia Pian with the boring one card/player combat. In v1.1 I changed it into Actions (each player has one, which can be increased to be able to play more cards during your turn)

V1.2 will see the introduction of (with lack of proper, own name) the flow.
It’s too bad I am not able to find back the card game which had it (still looking on the net for it), but I will implement this into my game, to even further increase dynamics, and to eliminate the need of Initiative (I hope).

Here´s how the flow works. Each combat card will have either a:
O -> Meaning you keep the flow.
X -> Meaning you lose the flow.
? -> Meaning you keep or lose the flow, depending on the condition on the card.

Rule wise it will work like this:
The player with the highest speed will get the flow each turn. As long as a player has the flow, he can play all the cards he can (he still needs to pay for them). As soon as he plays a card that makes him lose the flow, the flow goes to the next player. As soon as that player loses the flow, the combat round ends and we go to the resolution phase, to see who wounds who.

Pros:
- No more need to keep track of how many action(s) you have left to take.
- Another way to implement cool game text on cards: keep or lose the flow.
- Not sure about this (depends on the card design), but this could easily fix timing issues.
- Total elimination of the Initiative rule.

Cons:
- I will need to come up with ways to increase, decrease your/opponent’s speed. To be able to play first, or last. Not too difficult to do I think.
- I cannot come up with a cool way to name it, and I lost the card game that had it.. I want to read more about it..

In the end, some rules rewriting, to get to version 1.2, and hopefully a very successful play test this weekend. And some sleep while I am at it!

Quick Edit: found the name of the ccg: Ophidian 2350