Original Concept: War, but it’s played in teams where they decide as a team what card to play.
Authors: Joe Ngo, Ore Popoola, Anthony Xie, Tristan Peng
Questions To Ask
- Is war even a game? Players don’t make decisions. How might we add a decision making process to war?
- How do we add complexity to the team-based decision making process outside of “pick the highest card”?
- Gambling version of war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_War
- The mechanic of “going to war” after a tie is the primary point of interest – how might we keep this part intact?The player picks one card on the opposing team to swap with when all cards are placed face down. Two Joker cards will cancel each other out.
- How can we best bring out social fun?
Hypothesis to Test with Prototypes
- Will teams try to cheat? What does cheating look like?
- Will games actually finish?
- How does the mechanic of removing communication influence teamplay? Especially for a party-esque social game?
- Should this even be a mechanic?
- How often will hands be purely number hands (I think this can be calculated)? Does this reduce the enjoyment of some rounds?
Game Concept #1
- 54 card deck – 52 regular cards w/ 2 Jokers
- At the start of each round, the deck is shuffled and each player on the team draws 3 cards from their deck that they cannot show or tell to their teammates.
- For each round, each player plays one of the 3 cards they drew (they can place it face down, and then reveal it all at the same time)
- If one team wins, they take the cards from the enemy. All cards are reshuffled back into the deck and the next round begins.
- If a WAR occurs, the next round begins but players do not draw new cards, instead, they must play from the cards remaining in their hands. Only when players run out of cards in hand will they draw 3 more.
- The game ends when either team has no cards remaining in their deck.
- If there are less than < 9 (or < 6, if teams are composed of 2 people) cards in a team’s deck, the cards are split as evenly as possible.
- If a player does not have a card in hand as a result of the previous rule, it is if they did not play any card (functionally equivalent to a 0)
- Cards 2-10 retain their normal value as number cards. If more than one player plays a number card, the numbers are summed.
- Aces and Jacks now make it so that the lower numbered card wins
- If multiple Aces/Jacks are played – they will stack, two Aces/Jacks means that the higher numbered card wins again. Three means that the lower numbered card will win.
- Playing a Queen will double the number value of the team.
- Playing a King will force a tie and begin a WAR.
- A Joker card will let the
Ore’s Five Mechanics :
- Cards with Werewolf Roles
- 2: Let’s you swap with a card on the enemy team
- 5: Let’s you duplicate a card on your team
- 4: Let’s you duplicate a card on the enemy team
- 7: Turn a team member into a 7
- 3: Turn an enemy player into a 3
- 6: If targeted by anyone, turn card into a 2
- 8: Draw +1 Next turn
- 9: Shuffle all of your enemy’s decks
- 10: Shuffle your teammates decks
- Jack: Remove another player’s card from their hand.
- King: Pick a number, all players with that number do not count toward the total
- Options for Players
- Pass: If all three team members pass, only 1 card is lost, all team members shuffle
Joe’s 5 mechanics:
- If you play a Jack, it negates a card the other team played
- One person on each team is a spy and will try to discreetly give info to the other team
- if they are caught, your team get some reward
- If you place an Ace, your team can swap any two cards
- A last chance mechanic, your team may wager all their cards but one. The other team may accept the wager and put up the same amount of cards. Both teams reveal their one card.
- If your team has one card left, they may try to guess the value of the card to get an additional 5 cards from the other team.
Anthony’s 5 mechanics:
- Limited information game – your team can’t directly tell each other what cards you have, but you can show your team what cards you didn’t choose to play
- Cards that can alter the state of the next round – (i.e, some card that makes it so next round, one player’s card is disabled)
- Cards that create win conditions based on the state of the next round
- Collaborative poker – combined w/ limited information, you attempt to build the best blackjack hand possible
- Actions associated in between rounds – some out-of-game punishment for losing a round that incentivizes social interaction
Tristan’s 5 mechanics:
- War + Mao: Winning side must do the action of the winning card; if not, the card belongs to the losing side/war keeps going
- War + Mao: Cannot say the rules
- War + Monsters: Draw own set of cards with ambiguous higher/lower
- War + Uno: if flipped down card is some specified card, give four cards to the opponent
- Mercenary: Teams can play a social interaction minigame with the other team to try and bribe a person from another team onto their team, and in return have to give cards to the losing team proportional to their performance in the minigame.
Concerns:
Our major concern with “team war” card games is that it isn’t a very social game. If we don’t allow teams to communicate, it definitely won’t be as much fun, but if we do let them communicate then the games are too luck based.
We are thinking of maybe adding a “werewolf” mechanic or something of the sort.
Another concern is that the base game of War is a deterministic game, where if the order of the deck is known, then the progression of the game can be calculated entirely. Thus, we want to make sure that to make this a party game, elements of randomness/unpredictability/unfairness even can help make the game more fun and mentally stimulating to play than simply trying to calculate to the end of the game.
