I've been knocking around this idea in my head for a couple of months now. The basic idea is a 4x-style card game in the style of Escape Velocity, Privateer or Freelancer - you fly your spaceship around the galaxy, finding planets, doing trade runs and missions and upgrading your ship. The interesting bit is that you play with a standard deck of cards. So it's basically just a solitaire variation.
I've been thinking of ways to draw as much information out of a set of cards as possible, so things may be a bit complex. Here are my initial thoughts:
Ships have four categories - Life, Money, Fight and Tech. They correspond to the four suits - Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades respectively. Life covers things like life support, crew and sick bay facilities. Money represents things like cargo, upgrades and raw cash. Fight is the ship's weapons, armour, shields, tactical skill, etc. And Tech covers things like engines, sensors, and repairs.
The player draws five cards as his ship. He allocates one card each to four categories and the fifth becomes a bonus card. The number of each card is that categories score (picture cards are 10). The card's suit determines any special abilities or bonuses the ship has. And the number of pips of each suit across the ship are like consumable points. So a ship with a 4 of Clubs allocated to Fight will be different from a ship with the 4 of Clubs allocated to Life.
Once the player's starting ship has been built, the rest of the deck is shuffled and drawn for various things - planets, systems, other ships, cargo, upgrades, whatever. When the deck runs out, the discards are reshuffled.
I'm thinking to upgrade your ship you do something like in Poker. Pick the cards you want to discard, then draw some replacements. All cards can then be reallocated to different slots.
I'm also thinking that maybe Poker hands should have extra bonuses. So a ship that has lower scores across the board but is made up of a full house would have something else going for it.
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