I'm a gamer and a little bit of a game design geek myself.
The mechanics you describe sound interesting. Without knowing what the attack and being cards do, I can't really picture how the game would work, but the card mix doesn't seem like it would work. I'm not sure how many people are supposed to be able to play, but 33 Chi cards sounds like too few to divide up among more than 5. I'm even more concerned about the other deck, though. First, the goal: if there are only 10 Affinity cards in the game, accumulating half of them to win in a 3 player game, while the other players are also busily trying to accumulate them, sounds hard but perhaps possible. Getting 6 of them in a 4 player game sounds really hard. 7 in a 5 player game sounds hopeless. Second, 27 Being cards, when each player can only have one in play at a time, seems like way too many. The mechanic that you can play them on yourself or on another player is interesting, especially if whether a particular one is good or bad depends depends on the situation. (If more than one or two of them are clearly bad, it sounds like the game descends into tit for tat of passing them around to each other.) Finally, a total of only 67 cards in the play deck sounds like too few to support very many players; if each player starts to accumulate a hand and a memory stack, you run out of cards quickly.
The other issue I have is that I get a feeling, between the name "memory stack" and the description of the Revelation phase, that part of the game might be intended to be remembering what cards you've had and what you've done with them. Purely as a matter of personal preference, I dislike making remembering anything that's at all forgettable as a game mechinic. I could live with just the Light and Dark affinities, but if there are multiple combinations, it could quickly become very annoying if I'm not allowed to look at the cards in my Memory Stack.
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zvi and
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 03:46 am (UTC)The mechanics you describe sound interesting. Without knowing what the attack and being cards do, I can't really picture how the game would work, but the card mix doesn't seem like it would work. I'm not sure how many people are supposed to be able to play, but 33 Chi cards sounds like too few to divide up among more than 5. I'm even more concerned about the other deck, though. First, the goal: if there are only 10 Affinity cards in the game, accumulating half of them to win in a 3 player game, while the other players are also busily trying to accumulate them, sounds hard but perhaps possible. Getting 6 of them in a 4 player game sounds really hard. 7 in a 5 player game sounds hopeless. Second, 27 Being cards, when each player can only have one in play at a time, seems like way too many. The mechanic that you can play them on yourself or on another player is interesting, especially if whether a particular one is good or bad depends depends on the situation. (If more than one or two of them are clearly bad, it sounds like the game descends into tit for tat of passing them around to each other.) Finally, a total of only 67 cards in the play deck sounds like too few to support very many players; if each player starts to accumulate a hand and a memory stack, you run out of cards quickly.
The other issue I have is that I get a feeling, between the name "memory stack" and the description of the Revelation phase, that part of the game might be intended to be remembering what cards you've had and what you've done with them. Purely as a matter of personal preference, I dislike making remembering anything that's at all forgettable as a game mechinic. I could live with just the Light and Dark affinities, but if there are multiple combinations, it could quickly become very annoying if I'm not allowed to look at the cards in my Memory Stack.