[GB] Miscellaneous Card Talk

[Mike]

Scattered thoughts on cards:

For purposes of card labeling, there should be just four types of cards:
1. Standard – play on your turn and follow directions
2. Gift—play on your turn and equip it to your hero who may then use it as indicated on the card
3. Hindrance (now renamed to Curse/Bane/Burden/Blight/Affliction… whatever)—play on your turn and apply to enemy hero
4. Reaction—may play out of turn under conditions indicated on card

We can still keep the other designations for our own reference, balancing out attack, defense, movement, etc. But the players don’t need all of that. They just need a category to tell them how this card is played.

We need to make the language on all cards consistent. Do we address the player as “You”? When we refer to lost HP, are they “spent”, “lost”, “discarded”? That sort of thing. This is me critiquing Dave’s hard work as I’m taking my first hard look at the cards. Most of it is just deciding what sort of language we want and then making the cards all match that style.

As far as the use of “You” and composing the cards in 2nd person, stylistically I’m against it, but practically, 2nd person is usually the clearest and most concise way of presenting the information, so my vote is to say to hell with my aesthetics and lets just own it.

We need to be very clear about differentiating between “Your hero” and “Target hero”. A card with a condition that affects or is triggered by “Your hero” is much narrower than “any hero” or “target hero”. We will have uses for all of those, but again it’s a matter of codifying the language.

For the Pointless Remix version of the game, my impulse is to pump up a lot of the cards. Raise the 1’s to a 1.5 or a 2 in a lot of cases. I’m not going to right away. Instead I’m going to simply fix the cards to run a GP-less game, and see how it feels. Later we can pump up the adrenaline on the cards if we want to try it out.

[Eliahad]

[Mike]

Some cards refer to God Cards, some refer to God Powers. We need to pick one and make them consistent.

We need some talk about the word "adjacent". Most of the time, it means "adjacent to hero", but on a few occasions it means "you're placing several things and they must all be adjacent to each other." Dave has noted this discrepancy in the margins. We need to find a consistent way to express these that won't be confusing or rely on context. In the former case, "adjacent to hero" seems fine. For the latter, I've used "three adjacent hexes anywhere on the board." That styling may not cover all situations. We have to remember to revisit this.

[Mike]

I'm one-and-a-half gods in, by the way. So 25%.

[Eliahad]

[Mike]

I'm now at 100 out of 180.

This does NOT get any faster. And I know I have no right to complain, because you did the work to actually write them in the first place. I can't even imagine. But still...

TODO: Make desert tokens.

[Eliahad]

Oh no, you can complain, this part sucks. Just imagine Pat making all those tokens and maps for Runelords? Have we mentioned how awesome he is?

[Mike]

I named this card The Running of the Bulls and reworded it to match.

"Place one bull token in a hex adjacent to each other God's Hero. Until the Hero pays 1 HP the barrier moves one hex in a direction of your choosing whenever that Hero moves. Once the HP cost has been paid, the barriers remain in their current hex."

TODO: Make some bull tokens.

[Mike]

I only share, because I really love that card.

[Mike]

Desert tokens
Bull tokens
Spring token
River token

[Mike]

All numbers on cards should be numerals.

So far all of them have been, but I just hit one (on card 153) that wasn't. Need to make sure we double-check for that.

[Mike]

Cards cannot track terrain. Once terrain is placed, it's all the same. Some cards say "Place X terrain. Next turn move that terrain... " We have to find a way around that. No way to know which mountain is which other than having everyone remember it. Which is no good.

Same goes for some barrier affects. Most barrier tokens are unique to a single card, so it's easy to track them from round to round. But my favorite card for example (the running of the bulls above) requires each hero to pay to get rid of "their" bull, otherwise "their" bull moves when they do. We have no good way to track which bull is which, especially if everyone was all bunched up when this was played. I've already thought of possible workarounds for this card, cuz I really like it. But we'll need to make sure all cards are traceable.

I like the idea of each God deck coming with its own set of tokens. The deck and its tokens are all color coded so you know at a glance which God they belong to. Similarly, I think the Hero figs should have removable bases, so you can snap on the color that matches your God.

[Eliahad]

The terrain thing: It could be as simple as having cards that create terrain, and having cards that move terrain, but not both. Also, with some terrain present from the beginning of the game neither of those cards will be a waste of hand space.

[Mike]