Game Prototyping: 9-4-3-2
Okay, let’s talk about this idea.
You are hiding your One card. Fortunately, you have eight other cards, and you have arranged a line to defend them. They’re all more powerful than your One, each one counting up from Two all the way to the immense Nine. You can’t hold all the cards, though, so you have to get rid of one card, chosen at random (not your One, don’t worry about it). You put a card in reserve. This is a card you’ll be able to quickly deploy later. Then you pick of your remaining seven cards, four cards to put down in a defensive line in front of you.
And now, you can use a face down card to attack an enemy’s card. But cards can attack the cards on the table, or sometimes cards in the hand or sometimes even attacking the card in reserve. Sometimes there’s cards that care about the burned card under the reserve. You have nine cards, and they all do different things, and you’re trying to find a way that your cards can find my One without presenting vulnerabilities to my cards, and I’m trying to do the same.
It’s got a spatial element. If a card is destroyed in your line, it can be reinforced from the reserve, or your hand. If it’s not, enemies can move into that space and suddenly that card can attack your hand directly. Combat is simple – you reveal the cards, and the higher number wins, the lower number is destroyed and ditched. There are ways to return the ditched cards to your hand, too, so you can even resupply!
The game is eighteen cards in total. Cards have their own abilities, and the game has room to put a lot of cool art on these cards.
Now I have a problem: What fiction am I going to put on this game?
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