Thing with designing card games is, given that you can prototype with a stack of paper and a fuckin’ sharpy you get through some ideas fast.
One of the ideas I’m currently stewing with is a draft game in the vein of Sushi Go!. Jeb has suggested a rochster style draft (where all the cards are face-up on the table, and players pick them, signalling to one another things). My original idea was modelled on a booster draft – players start with a group of cards randomly gathered from a stack, take one card, then pass that whole group minus the card they took to their side.
The thing that’s ticking around in my head right now is how these two things are framed. With hands up, hidden from one another, all players (and you would need 3-4 players to add some variance) in a booster draft model are clearly working on projects that somehow inter-relate to one another, but they don’t see the thing at the same time. In a rochester model, people are clearly observing things but either time or space prevent them from acting simultaneously. Ignoring the mechanical concern, I feel like the former is a good way to represent students coming to supply stations but not being sure who has been there first, and the latter is a good way to show students who are observing resources for a class project being eaten up.
I’m not sure which of these two ideas I like more. With hidden information, there comes some concern about ensuring that the deck of cards is either guaranteed balanced (and therefore, the game does not necessarily become dull), or that imbalances can be handled by a game system (like hidden objective cards, or variable values). The end of the game hypothetically comes when the players reveal what they drafted, after all.
Draft order can be part of it, too! You could make a deck that works as a formula, working its way downward – so players want to take any ‘doubles your score’ cards early in the hopes of stacking big numbers on to it – but then, those numbers might go just as early as the doublers!
Choices, choices. Wheels within wheels.