A Card based Wargame - Initial Thoughts

The Goal - A light skirmish wargame with campaign potential where all the "pieces" are easy to drop in a backpack without worrying.

• Campaign potential - A genuine feeling that your army is unique, and is only in that position because of the games you've played previously
• Worry free pieces - At the moment I'm thinking D6's and a deck of cards that can fit in standard game store deckboxes, so ~75 or ~100 single sleeved cards.

With these goals in mind there were a few ideas, riffing on older games that have done similar things. Something top down like Battlegrounds Fantasy Warfare, Or a card based version of X-Wing or Aero Imperialis. Currently I'm aiming for a shorter session time and a pretty light rule set, so a traditional skirmish wargame seems best for now. It's also what I'm most familiar with, which is worth a lot.

The card gameplay currently is a mix of MTG style keywords and skirmish game style unit OOA's and upgrades (Burrows & Badgers, Mordheim). So D6's mark damage and units that take part in a battle change based on their performance.

I'm enamored by the energy system in the Digimon card game, where instead of having individual resource streams, both players share a zero, and you can play cards higher than the energy you have left by moving up your opponents meter. 

this seems like a great centerpiece to allow for freeform activations with some options to diversify armies a bit more that a simpler turn based action system. 

It also plays really nicely with the second centerpiece mechanic, Ante!

I'm bringing it back and no one can stop me! And as a bonus it's a fantastic mechanic to make campaign play more visible, as you play more games, your deck will naturally change as you win and lose ante cards. What kind of cards do you ante? Treasures! Which are also spells.

Each army has a list of treasures, whose cost is also their ante value. At the start of a game both players reveal an ante and - fingers crossed it works - the scenario is determined by the difference in ante value. So if one player antes a two and the other player a 4, the player with the higher ante looks at their army card for the "difference of two scenario". That means each army needs a shortlist of scenarios and a the game as a whole needs a "Zero difference" scenario. Some kind of pitched battle that's a pretty even and open field.

This means that you can use the ante as a handicap system, where a player can give or take advantages based on how their feeling in the game, but you have to risk higher value ante cards for those advantages, and risking those cards means you can't use their effects in the match.

You could also have Treasures that come with their own unique scenarios, overriding the normal gameplay for the benefit of interesting campaign play.

And scenarios I think are going to be where this system lives or dies. I'm unsure I can get enough juice out of such a simple structure and small card pool (Currently the two test factions have 3 units each and a choice of 3 commanders). Having interesting and varied play patterns that force changes in strategy is going to be crucial, and it'll also give opportunities to differentiate the factions further. 

This is just a ramble to get stuff out and on paper, as it were. Big thanks to the Dice Exploders a couple years back for chatting about this, and to Sam R for prodding me back on the horse.