Card Game overview

This is an attempted description of the card game idea.  The inspiration is one part Game of Thrones Ascent, one part Magic: the Gathering, and one part Joshua AC Newman.  The idea here is to create a paper prototype card game and start giving it away.  Just to put something out in the world.  Just for fun,  knowledge, and my own sense of accomplishment.  Here is the beginning.

At the moment the game consists of 309 cards for a game played by two players.  The players take turns drawing from the Resource Deck, the Worker Deck, the Building Deck and the Military Deck and attempt to build their own castle and siege their opponent.  At the moment the theme of the game is very classical medieval warfare. Eventually that will change.  The Clockwork Fairytale Setting will most likely bleed in over time.  It would be nice to skew the game towards less confrontational topics.  There are enough war themed games out there.  

The Resources are kept simple.  Stone, Wood, Iron, Salt.  The basics of a bygone military age.  Wood and Stone are more common in the deck.  Iron and Salt mostly pay for military units.  Currently they are slightly rarer.  Ultimately this is most likely a digital card game do to the card count and all the different draw decks.

The  draw phase in Magic the Gathering is always so stagnant.  You just grab the card.  Wouldn't it be interesting if the players had to agonize of the decision of the where to draw from?  The other player gets to watch them tensely attempting to anticipate their strategy.  You can probably learn to tell the first moves of the game just from which deck the opponent draws cards.  This seemed like a great way to make drawing cards much more interesting.  Whereas the resolution of combat has sort of normal usual trappings of card games hopefully the draw mechanics are more interesting.

Townsfolk card are all about creating a draw engine that feeds the military machine or builds the defense.  So the Worker deck might be much more important early game.  Unless your opponent gets a good draw and can play a military unit quickly...

After drawing out the basic concepts of the game on a single sheet of white paper, I created a card list.  Then it was time for a trip to Staples.  With supplies in hand and the paper prototype complete it was time to play a couple rounds alone to work out the rules.  Which are recorded in rough draft format.  The game is ready to be play tested.  Would you like to play test it?

If you download the Rules and the Card List, you can make your own.  The prototype version cost about $5.60 worth of index cards.  It took maybe three or four hours of time to construct the decks.  Buying the right kind of index cards helped speed up the process a lot.  Get the half index cards, because cutting lots of 3x5 index cards in half is tedious.