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aprillo · 06-20-2014, 04:58 AM

(06-19-2014 03:59 PM)sgiove Wrote: This is very similar to an idea I had, but have not initiated yet. I'm glad this thread was started! Great thoughts so far, Aprillo! I haven't read through this whole thread yet, but I'm sure I'll have some questions and responses in the coming days.

With that said, here is a very "basic" version of what I'm thinking. As mentioned previously, I also think the decks get too large and was thinking of ways to trim them down. I came up with the idea of an 80-card deck for each game where half of the deck is the same every game and the other half of the deck is randomly added for each new game.

I haven't gone through and decided which cards would make up the "permanent" half of the deck yet but I imagine the points system given in this thread will help greatly in deciding how to build complimentary decks for each side.

I did the research in advance and had a breakdown of how many hand weapons vs. ranged weapons vs. event cards should be included based on what kind of cards are typically included in each base game. I think it was very close to half events and half weapons with hand weapons making up a bit more than half of the weapons. I don't have my notes handy but I think it was a around 60-70% hand weapons and 30-40% ranged weapons.

Once the permanent deck is made I was mulling over two options. One method would be very basic. For zombies, just randomly insert the second half of the deck (i.e. create a standard 40-card deck used in every game and then randomly insert 40 more cards from the remainder of the zombie cards.) For the hero deck, for the remaining cards outside of the pre-made "permanent" deck, split the remaining cards into events and weapons and randomly place 20 cards from each pile into the standard 40 cards pre-made half-deck to complete your 80 card deck for the game. Or you can split the remaining cards into events, hand weapons, and ranged weapons and randomly add in 20 events, 13 hand weapons, and 7 ranged weapons.

I did consider that the themes of each scenario should be taken into effect as well. So, another idea was to let each side hand pick 10 cards (but no duplicates) from the remaining cards and then randomly insert the remaining 30. For one example, this would allow players to add an extra gas can, keys, and "Just What I Needed" for the Escape in the Truck scenario.

I'm not sure I'm completely getting my thoughts across via this post and I still need to work out the complete details, but when I saw this post created I immediately wanted to share some ideas I've had.

P.S. I should note that when my group plays we split up the Hero deck into four even piles and assign one pile to each L-board. Once a pile runs out of cards, no more searching is allowed from that L-board. This stops the heroes from "camping" in one corner of the board all game and also makes the zombies events that send hero cards to the discard pile more effective because the zombie player is allowed to choose which of the four piles the cards are removed from (or this can be a random roll if you think allowing the zombie to always choose a deck is too severe.) However, this "house rule" setup should have no effect on the overall ideas for deck building listed above. I just wanted to let people know of this house rule in case others wanted to try it out.

Hey thats cool, I handn't considered having a permanent section an non-permanent. My one suggestion though would be to lower the base, or make the zombies and heroes have different deck sizes. because i would argue 80 cards seriously slants towards heroes. with 80 cards, it's unlikely they'll run out, and pretty much impossible that the zombies will have the opportunity to cycle. When i was working out the kinks to my fully customized option, I found that 55 cards is the fairest number. with semi-conservative searching the heroes dont have much to worry about, and with that many cards, the zombies may manage to cycle once, if that. like I said, ideally zombies want less cards, 56 or more becomes disadvantageous. whereas heroes want more cards, so 54 or less becomes dangerous.

That's why in my system, i made their average deck sizes (meaning if the built the deck perfectly balanced with weak and strong cards) zombies come out to about 50 cards, and heroes come out to about 60 cards.