Fantasy Europe 1815 ruleset

[Peter]

OK, it's just an idea:

I had the idea of a TCG ruleset similar to a battle strategy game. The deck would contain troops, mines, Generals/Heroes, weapons and more.

The genre/time could be 1815 with Fantasy elements.
Troops types would be infantry, cavalry, artillery and heavy war machinery. No navy.

There would be no colour, nation or similar limitations of which cards to use. The player would rather specialize by choosing what kind of troops, weapons, General he/she wants to play. He/She can mix freely. Like Napoleon with light cavalry, heavy artillery and trolls. Or Bluecher with heavy infantry, special sabres and gnomes. Etc.

Unfortunately I don't know an information source about 19th century warfare.

There would be very limited rules, because most is done via the cards.
Ressource from mines/factories/farms would be given en-bloc, which means there aren't any tokens or counters needed. Ressources could be food, gold and ammo.

There would probably be no need for tapping cards.

[ngoeminne]

Hi Peter,

That sound's like a good idea. I've even had a similar suggestion when discussing the VSR rule set.
However, I feel such a game should focus on a fixed and limited set of cards. And possibly the players start with the same decks as well.

Such a game would be all about gameplay & strategy, with no deck building at all. You'd start with a couple of basic units (infantry, cavalery, artillery) and some special ones (specialized in one kind of operation, but weak in orhers), e.g. balloon lookout (single view over the battlefield), spy/informant (look in other player's hand), and some kind of actions (reinforcements).

You'd also could have some little fantasy elements in there: e.g. in the Eragon saga, the wizards on the battlefield are there to protect the nearby soldiers from enemy wizards attacks. If a wizard dies, his/her surrounding soldiers are in great risk.

Combat could be done by dice roll (e.g. the Ikusa kind of dice roll is nice), to make it a bit more luck dependent.

You'd also need to think about resource handling, as in any game, this should/could be variable, e.g. risk => the more territory the more money,

or fixed, each turn a given set or resources, but then it should chip over to next turns (so you can build up). you should also think about the damage to units, if its permanent, you'll have to keep track of it.

Anyway, good luck with creating such a game.
I'll stick to WTactics ccg for now.

Kind regards,
Nico

[Peter]

I'll stick to WTactics ccg for now.

As WTactics has come so far by now, I would be surprised and maybe even upset if you would NOT focus on WT! I mean, you have a database, 2 decks (1 ready, 1 nearly), graphics, goodlooking printouts, a raw playing interface and what not else...! BTW don't forget to make a little bit of advertising for WT on the web. Maybe sell printed version on kickstarter as a form of donation?

[snowdrop]

Maybe the theme of https://www.google.se/search?q=steampun ... ad+tactics] could be something for you?

I agree with ng on such a game being being "limited" instead of a ccg. It's of course doable, but what I don't get from your first post is the reason or point with it. You mentioned a theme and two things you'd (not) want to see in a ruleset for it. However, you need more clearly defined goals for you to get in a good direction.

Some examples of questions you'd need to answer for yourself are:

• Target group (family game, party game, strategy etc)
• Genre (board, card, combo)
• Playtime on average
• Components
• Players
• Why create it - what makes it different from nearest "competitors"?
• Mechanics (as you already mentioned, resource handling, bluffing, how much interaction and how etc)

If you're mainly just interested in the theme there are many games out there that could give you a lot. If you're interested in developing I think you should give it a spin =) Before doing so though, I'd advise finding the resources first for it. What I'd do instead is actually go with another time period, more historic, and just use public domain photos of artworks that are not copyrighted any longer - there a thousands such works ready to be harvested for a game ; )

[Peter]

disclaimer

I magically frakked up and pressed the "edit" instead of reply button to Peters post. Sorry, Peter, don't know how to recreate it. Instead I managed to re-write the whole thing with my reply, as follows.

/snowdrop

*

Well, I somehow are fascinated by the idea to create a card strategy game without the typical
strategy board game elements. No square/hex battlefield, no dice, no figurines, no movement, no distance measuring.

Ah.. that's a goal, and pretty clear

It's doable, and there are some card based strategy games around where they have indeed swapped out everything, the figurines, the board, the measurement et.c for just cards (and in most cases also some dice).

I'd recommend you to try a couple of those games, or at least read their rules on boardgamegeek and see what's there. Will make life easier, no need to re-invent what's good - just borrow and refine or re-theme.

The Munchkins" card game: It's a roleplaying game reduced to a card game. That comes very close to my idea.

Munchkin is what I would call a "party game" or a pretty casual comical praise of the role playing games. It's easy, casual, and fun, all it sets out to be.

Code: Select all

Unfortunately I have no idea if the world [b][i]needs[/i][/b] this game. As it is a game, I guess no one [b][i]needs[/i][/b] it.

World needs nothing What I meant was that you need to see what's out there and ask yourself if what you want to create is already there and good, or if it hasn't been created yet. Id there is some variant out there, how would yours differ and so on. It's not a necessary question to answer, but a good one as it forces you to push the quality of what you create.

[Peter]

About your editting mistake: No problem, but I first was very puzzled, because I saw my forum avatar but text not from myself XD

Yeah, good idea. I will look on boardgamegeek. And maybe some google research.

I will try to implement it as a program when I'm ready with designing. I already have most of the overall design, now I need to design the actual cards. (No graphics yet.) I first thought I would use Tjger, but I dropped that idea. I will use C++ on Linux (probably Qt for the GUI stuff, so it should be portable to Windows.)

And I found a pretty cool website documenting 19th century warfare.

[snowdrop]

I suggest you don't put time in coding unless you enjoy it or want to make it an AI and single player et.c: There are already engines out there, some of which run on Linux also, like VASSAL for example, that will let you easily create and mulitplay with anyone.

[Peter]

I suggest you don't put time in coding unless you enjoy it or want to make it an AI and single player et.c: There are already engines out there, some of which run on Linux also, like VASSAL for example, that will let you easily create and mulitplay with anyone.

I want to code it myself. If that fails, I will try Vassel.