Trying my hands on Round Events

[donvercetti]

As the title states, I've been trying to design what I call "Round Events". They're cards that affect the gameplay in different ways,
either establishing a subquest, a weather condition and/or a sudden change of rules.

Below is the rule page and a sample card (another is featured on the rule page).
I just wanted to run the whole idea by you all to see if it's any good before I start making any more cards.

• Rule page: http://imgur.com/FkKxN52.jpg
• Sample card #2: http://imgur.com/eo9zkiq.jpg
  

[mqstout]

ATOE and FANG (and many games) both use similar mechanics and they work well.

I would scratch that "do not count against zombie limit" phrase. It's a needless exemption to the base rules and hard to track without extra game pieces. Leave it as an optional (dot-valued) rule that the ZP can use differently-colored zombies for those spawned by round events.

Come up with a better name for round events. "Plot Development cards" maybe. "Director's Cut".

Make sure to have a good balance of cards that help zombies, help players, hurt zombies, and hurt players in all the various mixes. Some cards that even do both at once.

Clarify how "round events" interact with canceling abilities/cards (eg, Father Joseph).

[BigDumbYak]

Ah! Awesome. Like the High Noon cards from Bang!


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[slyzod]

I like this idea a lot. I have a few suggestions, if you don't mind.

I think these would be better as two different card types. One would get mixed in with the normal Hero or Zombie decks (the Mission type "Subplot" cards), and the other would be set aside in a separate deck (the "Plot Twist" type). Subplot and Plot Twists being used to go along with the B-movie flavor of the game.

The "Subplot" type cards would be Play Immediately and sit in front of the player, face down (or up if they involve placing tokens on the gameboard). When the player achieves the goal of the mission they can turn the card face up and get the prize. The card is then removed from the game to prevent abuse.

The "Plot Twists" would only show up 1 or 2 times per game, my fear is that any more any you risk having the game degenerate into bonkerness. Lowering the frequency of these Plot Twists allows for more severe, game changing things occur on them. i.e. The "Downpour" card that you mocked up could completely arrest movement on a roll of 1 or 2/ prevent the use of explosives/ jam guns/ get the truck stuck in the mud/ flood the middle of the board making it impassable/ or whatever other evil thing you can think of. These Plot Twists would have finite durations (1 round, 3 rounds, until a condition is met) which would appear on the card, and they could be marked with a token on the sun tracker (like the one used to keep track of fallen zombies).

The Plot Twist cards could be drawn and activated in a number of ways: A Play Immediately card mixed in to either deck, a modified Free Search token, as a penalty for respawning a Hero, at predetermined intervals according to the scenario rules, etc...

Again, I like this idea a lot! Just trying to homebrew along with you.

[aprillo]

I think it's a really cool idea, and it is highly effective. Many games use this kind of mechanic to spice things up and add a little more to the randomness of the game, which in the real world lets face it things come up like this all the time! There's actually another fan who had a similar Idea, maybe you can take some inspiration from theirs, Love your card design by the way, and side quests are always a really cool idea.

See the bottom for the "sun track deck":

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/503939/3...-for-input

[donvercetti]

Thanks for the great advice all of you! Sorry I didn't come back earlier - work got in the way

(06-13-2014 01:07 AM)mqstout Wrote:  I would scratch that "do not count against zombie limit" phrase. It's a needless exemption to the base rules and hard to track without extra game pieces. Leave it as an optional (dot-valued) rule that the ZP can use differently-colored zombies for those spawned by round events.

I agree. The zombie count rule could be confusing, but I couldn't figure out how to get new zombies to spawn when the whole pool is on the board. I figured they could be mostly-NPC zombies, and therefore not count towards the limit (as they weren't spawned/placed by choice). Also, I'll check out the ATOE and FANG mechanics for inspiration, as you mentioned.

(06-13-2014 02:34 AM)BigDumbYak Wrote:  Ah! Awesome. Like the High Noon cards from Bang!

I have no idea what Bang! is. Will look it up!

(06-13-2014 10:46 AM)slyzod Wrote:  I like this idea a lot. I have a few suggestions, if you don't mind.
[...]
Again, I like this idea a lot! Just trying to homebrew along with you.

Thanks! I really like your ideas for this as well, especially the plot twist idea!
I will definitely think of this when trying to come up with the cards. They can get really dramatic!
Dividing the cards is great as well, as the subplot cards would become mission-esque á la Risk, and that's a good thing!

(06-14-2014 07:12 AM)aprillo Wrote:  There's actually another fan who had a similar Idea, maybe you can take some inspiration from theirs, Love your card design by the way, and side quests are always a really cool idea.

Thanks! I will check those out!

[Legolas105]

Sounds great! I really like this idea, and it adds a lot of thematic elements to the game. Good work!