Thursday, March 19, 2009

Winds of Fate: backburner thoughts

I've been avoiding thinking about this game in order to think about Terra Prime, but I really can't do any more with that until I play it some more - so I guess I'm out of excuses. Here's how I think I'd like to see the cards work in Winds of Fate:

As I've mentioned, I think there ought to be 5 'suits' for the cards, each associated with a different deity. Athena/Poseidon would be sort of wild, Helping/Hindering in any Adventure. The other three deities would each be assigned to a different adventures, and they would Help in 'their' Adventure while in other Adventures they might Hinder, or just do nothing.

The deck of cards which players draw from will consist of cards that will either be Athena or Poseidon cards, which will work as they always have, or they will have some effect listed for each of the other three deities. That effect will be like a Help value or a Hinder value, and could be nothing.

So depending on which Adventure you are in, you could play either an Athena card or a card for the 'local' deity for that Adventure (identified by the current location) in order to Help Odysseus, or play a Poseidon card or any card that says "Hinder" in order to hinder Odysseus.

As for drawing cards, I had an idea tonight about that. I thought it might be neat if there was some kind of dichotomy between drawing lots of cards and drawing high valued cards. So the idea I had was maybe something like Alhambra has - a face up pool of cards, and instead of drawing a particular number of cards you draw up to a particular value worth of cards from the display. That would create an organic method to allow a player to choose several low valued cards in various suits or else a single higher valued card in a particular suit.

The Athena/Poseidon cards, since they are equally useful in any adventure, should be lower valued in general. Other cards could be some combination of high and low values for the different suits perhaps. Not sure how that would factor into the card drawing thing I mentioned above.

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