1. I was thinking about the mechanic of passing cards. For example,
LastFootNote's Wanderer.
Wanderer: Action, $3
+4 Cards. The player to your right gains this card.
One of the problems with this is that it's political. If you buy one, you most help the player on your right. Ideally, you'd pass a Wanderer to all players, but then that's just a recipe to pile out Wanderers. So the idea is you have a token to indicate who "really" has the wanderer. For example, one implementation would be
Wanderer(2): Action, $3
If you have your Wandering token, then spend it, +4 Cards, and each other player takes their Wandering token.
Otherwise, +1 card, +1 action.
When you buy this, take your Wandering token.
This card is interesting, but not that much like the original, and it loses all the flavor. So, um, maybe it wasn't a great idea.
2. Earlier, I had suggested
another self-passing card, one where you get a bonus for buying it, but otherwise it's a dead card.
Tedious Tale: Action-Victory, $6
The player on your left gains this card.
When you buy this, +3 VP chips.
So let's try to do that with tokens:
Tedious Tale(2): Action-Victory, $6
If you have the Tale token, +1 action, +1 card. Otherwise, take the Tale token.
3 VP
The idea here is that there is only one Tale token that can only be held by one player at a time. Taking the token represents "passing" the card. But still, it's rather different from the original Tedious Tale, since you can't give your opponent dead cards that they didn't buy themselves.
At this point I'm thinking, forget passing! This token idea opens up so much more design space. You could have a card that does something different depending on whether it's contested or not. For instance:
Smithing village: Action, $4
If you have the smithy token, +3 cards. Otherwise, +1 card, +2 actions, and take the smithy token.
Smithing village is probably a terrible idea. But you see how very simple effects could be combined into a complex card.
3. One more idea! I wanted to design a card (
White Elephant here) which is like Masquerade, but which incentivizes swapping more expensive cards. I was unsatisfied with it, and it didn't seem to work no matter what I changed. So I thought, why swap cards between neighbors? Just swap cards with the last person to play the card.
White Elephant: Action, $5
+1 action
Reveal a card from your hand. Have it switch places with the current Gift card.
If you received a card costing less than the one you revealed, then +$3, and you may trash a card from your hand.
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Setup: Set aside a silver as the initial Gift card. The Gift card is not in the supply.
I'm not sure that's balanced. But you get the idea.
Can you think of any well-balanced cards using these mechanics?
