knolli wrote:In a two-player game the first player do call dibs on the loot is the one who previoiusly owned it, so the good cards will most likely stay with the same players most of the time.
In practice this is tough to pull off. It's all right when there's just a few cards passing back and forth to remember, but in this game there are potentially multiple scavenges every single turn. And the more players you add, the trickier it gets.
There's nothing preventing a multiple-deck version of the game where each player keeps a separate deck and a separate graveyard to scavenge from, but it means I'd have to put in a lot more work designing for deck balance, and you'd probably see a lot of single-theme decks instead of crazy contraptions.
Random other thoughts percolating:
I really wanted to be able to have minifigs inside a Structure have specific locations within that Structure, but I haven't figured out a way to do it. Putting the minifig cards on top of the Structure cards makes things too confusing, so I'll probably have to cut that out of the game unless I come up with some genius workaround.
I'm planning for four basic attack modes: Melee, Ranged, Crash (jousting, pushing, ramming, kamikazeing, etc.), and Drop (catapult fire, bomb drops, minifig drops, etc.). Melee and Crash attacks from minifigs on foot can only target the bottom-most cards on a Structure; larger units can target cards at their own height or lower. Drop attacks land on the top cards of a Structure, anywhere where there's a space wide enough for the card being dropped. Vertical cards can fit into tighter spaces than horizontal cards in a Drop attack. Minifigs that Drop onto an enemy Structure can do the usual kinds of crazy stuff like take over weapons and devices or attack whichever card they want.
Combat is limited to a simple attack vs. defense roll, no separate rolls to hit and to damage. All bonuses add to one or the other. A castle archer at the top of a tower, for instance, gets +1 to Attack for each card between himself and the ground, and +1 to Defense for each castle structure card in the Structure.
I want to be able to include forum-themed stuff. It'd be great to have cards for characters like Manly Santa (limited by Ego penalties) or sections of Sonks (subject to Assyrian set bonuses) that grant some exceptional abilities but are harder to work into sets due to rarity.
A big part of the strategy is going to depend on finding ways to control who can and can't be targeted for attacks. Tank treads can only run over minifigures, for instance, and zombies automatically RedShirt for their necromancers. That kind of thing. I'm trying to think of options for protecting Medix and Mechanix; they can stay hidden inside Structures, but they need to be out in the open to do their scavenging. I may just have to give them more devices (like the Robot Arms card) that let them perform their functions from inside a vehicle.
Including a lot of different themes makes for interesting hand-management decisions. Do you lay down a bunch of mishmash Structures to get all your cards out on the table fast, or do you save cards between turns (and draw fewer cards each turn as a result) to try and build up theme set bonuses? Alternately, do you commit minifig Actions to construction tasks, to add theme-matching cards to Structures already on the table, rather than building fresh and saving the minifigs for attacks?
It'd be fun to have modifier cards that act as bonuses or penalties on other cards, like "Made of Negablox" or "OT Powered" or something. It runs a little bit into the same problems of trying to put minifigs into specific Structure sections, but to a lesser degree since they won't be moving around as much. The ideal thing would be to make them Structure elements of their own somehow, and introduce a game mechanic for building your own cards onto an enemy Structure for sabotage. Cards like "Hidden Entrance" and "Vulnerable Exhaust Port" would cause all kinds of chaos.
Opposing themes would also be cool - a Good minifig might get bonuses from Good cards in his structure and penalties from Evil ones, while for an Evil minifig these would be reversed. The problem is that BrikWars doesn't have a lot of themes that are opposed in quite this way, and minifigs don't care about good and evil. The closest thing I can think of is penalties from having to fight alongside peach units or Jaw-Jaws or something. Dimmies can get an anti-set bonus in a Structure with non-matching parts, or a set-destroying bonus for attacking enemy Structures whose parts match.