Dominion > Variants and Fan Cards

Fan Card Mechanics Week 45: Any Given Sunday

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emtzalex:
So, with the recent return of the NFL1 Season, I have been thinking about the game and tinkering with an NFL-inspired expansion. My idea is for there to be one card for each team, sharing a name (using singular instead of plural), except the 3 teams whose names are already official cards (Raider, Cardinal, Giant).

I wanted a custom mechanic, and came up with the idea of Roster cards, which use a Roster mat and a start-of-game draft. There had previously been a conversation about a mechanic that drafted cards, although I cannot now find it. In the spirit of this contest, I'd like to see what you can come up with. Therefore, for Week 45, you need to:

Make a card/landscape that uses the Roster mechanic.

A player's Roster consists of 6 Action cards, with one card costing each price between $1 and $6. Each player has a different set of cards, which they draft at the beginning of the game (the draft will be detailed in a subsequent post). The cards go onto a mat (this is a very initial mock-up):


The cards stay on the mat, and are played using cards with the Roster type (which will also, generally, have the Command type). The cards will, generally, have some limitation on which of the Roster cards can be played, based on their price. For example:





--- Quote ---Commander • $6 • Action - Command - Roster
Play two differently named cards, each costing up to $1 per Action card you have in play (counting this), in either order, from your Roster, leaving them there.
--- End quote ---
                                                                                                      
Commander plays 2 different cards from your Roster mat. If you play it by itself, it will only play the $1 card, then fail to play a second card. If you have 6 cards in play, you can play any 2 cards from your roster mat.

In order to have playable $1 cards, (other than use Necropolis and Poor House), the mechanic has a set of Animal cards, which are just the non-self referential Ways (all but Butterfly, Chameleon, Frog, Horse, Mouse, Rat, and Turtle). Purely by way of illustration, one of them will look like this:



A few additional notes. I gave it the Roster type, like the Looter type, to indicate that the mat should be used. If you feel strongly the cards shouldn't have the type (or if you want to use a landscape, which wouldn't), that is fine. I know this seems like a lot, but the tl;dr is that players will each get a different set of Action cards costing $2-$6 and a Way costing $1 that they can play using a Command card (or something similar).

My main judging criteria is whether I would be excited to see the design in a Kingdom. Important factors for me are:

* balance -- is the card useful, but not overpowering (both in general and in a variety of Kingdoms)
* playability -- the card is fun to play and works in more than one type of deck
* simplicity -- this doesn't always mean fewer words; a card with lots of text that, once you understand it, can be easily and intuitively be played is better than one with four lines of text that is hard to understand
* topicality -- the card (or landscape) uses the mechanic in an interesting wayThe deadline for submissions will be 10:00 p.m. Eastern/Forum time on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. Please let me know if you have any questions.




1 National Football League, a American (gridiron) football league with 32 teams, all in the United States of America.

emtzalex:
Rules for Drafting cards:

* Some cards have the Roster type.
* When you play a game with at least one card with the Roster type, each player uses a Roster mat, which they fill before the game begins with a draft.
* To begin, make a deck of different, unused Action cards costing between $2 and $6, and shuffle them together with the Animal cards.
* Deal the cards in the deck to each player, face down, starting with the player who will play last, in reverse turn order, until the deck is empty. The cards each player received are now a pack.
* Each player looks at the cards in their pack, selects one and places it face-down in front of them.
* Once all the players have selected a card, they reveal the selected card, and pass their pack to the next player in reverse-turn order.
* This process repeats until each player has drafted 10 cards.
* Players then assign one card of each price from $1 to $6 to the respective slot on their Roster mat.
* Players don't need to show their opponents which card they are assigning to which slot until all players are finished.
* If a player drafted at least one card at a price, that slot must be filled.
* The other cards the players drafted and the undrafted cards from the packs are returned to the box and not used in the game.
I am not completely married to these rules. I'd be open to suggestions about different size packs or other changes. The main point is that players draft 10 cards to fill their 6 Roster spaces.

IlstrawberrySeed:
I suggest having the player to your left choose any unused card to fill your roster mat, such that someone doesn’t strategically choose cards of only 1-2 costs when you get to play another players, or when there is a benifit for spaces not filled (due to them being set aside), both ideas I have that are problematic.

emtzalex:

--- Quote from: IlstrawberrySeed on October 06, 2022, 09:30:07 pm ---I suggest having the player to your left choose any unused card to fill your roster mat, such that someone doesn’t strategically choose cards of only 1-2 costs when you get to play another players, or when there is a benifit for spaces not filled (due to them being set aside), both ideas I have that are problematic.

--- End quote ---

All of my cards only allow a player to play cards from their own mat for exactly this reason. There may be some narrow cases when playing no card will be better than playing a card, but I think in the vast majority of cases players will be able to draft a card at each price point that will work beneficially with the Roster card(s).

That said, feel free to design a card/landscape that implements a different version of the mechanic. The key elements are (1) a separate roster mat for each player and (2) a draft at the start of the game. I'm open to adjustments to number of cards or their price points, the draft process, and the inclusion of the Animal cards.

fika monster:


Swap but for rosters: Quasi thinning or deck improvement? you decide!

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