Design Journal: Space Cards? Cards in Space?
- Bert
- Sep 9
- 3 min read
As you might know I love space games. So this year inspiration struck along a very long boring stretch of i65 in Indiana on my way to GenCon. I was listening to the Game Brain Podcast. I have realized that the last couple of years there have been a lot of trick taking games that have come out. So my mind was there and one thing I love to do at GenCon is play miniatures games. So I combined trick-taking, miniatures, and space into one idea for a game. Lets take a look in the design journal at my latest design.
This started as a mental exercise to see if I could get these ideas to all function together. I thought that trick-taking and miniatures would be a wild idea if I could pull it off. I also wanted to keep the game down under 30 minutes to play. This meant that the mini rules would have to be light, so I went with the idea of making it more of an introduction to minis with a fun trick-taking build..
I thought that trick-taking and miniatures would be a wild idea if I could pull it off.
The game would be divided up into two acts. The first act would be the trick taking aspect and this is where I started with the design. I am starting with a normal deck of cards to start one reason is it gets the prototype to the table faster and the second is it matched up with the suits I had in mind. So the design I have in mind has four suits. Each suit matches up to a part of the ship. There will be Command, Thrust, Crew and Armament. These cards will also build out the players space ship. In addition to the suits I want to add in some spicy stuff so there is a wild suit too, that has some fun upgrades for each section.
Act I: Trick Taking
So normal trick-trick taking rules apply, suit led has to be played by other players and Wild can be played anytime. The first wild played in a round wins. When a player wins the trick there is a small draft that happens. The winner chooses a card from the trick to keep in their ship tableau. If the player has that suit in their tableau already then it replaces the existing one and the old card gets discarded. The rest of the cards are passed to the left if the winning suit is Crew or Command and right if its Thrust or Armament, if its a wild then the winner chooses.
Players will start to get a ship constructed in front of them in their tableau. The rounds go until all seven cards are played from the players hand. At this time each player should have 4 cards in their tableau (more if there are wild cards). If they don't then they draw off the top of the deck taking the first card of any missing suit until they have one of each of the ship parts in their tableau. Now each player has built a ship.
Act 2: Defiantly Not The Thunder Dome
The second part of the game is taking your ship into battle. There is a 7 hex wide grid circle that players will place their minis on to start the second part of the game. Each of the cards have some stat or stats on them. Command cards will dictate how the ship turns left only, right only, etc. The thrust cards will have the movement of the ship( how many space the ship moves every turn). The crew is how many crew are on board (Secondary hit points). Finally the Armament cards let players know the distance and direction of the weapon.
Each turn a player will move and shoot or shoot and move. Players have to move their full movement each turn. And turning can happen at the beginning or end of the move if a player wants to turn. Ships fire at each other on their turn using the distance and direction indicators on the built ship. There will be a few special weapons like space mines and torpedoes. I want to keep it simple so if these bog down the game play they might be removed. I do want people to play a minis game in under 30 min. This is why I keep the map tight and don't give out a huge amount of hull points. Oh yea hull points every card has a hull point value on them this is how I am balancing the numbers in the trick taking with the cards worth in the ship building.
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