A Swords-based Card Game

A Swords-based Card Game

I haven't gotten to play Swords for the past few months, and have finally come round to thinking about it again. The problem is I've fallen in with a gaming group who're turned off to story games. Mostly, then, I've played a lot of board games; Manhattan Project, 7 Wonders, Colosseum, you get the idea. But I have gotten to play Jetpack Unicorn (just barely a story game, though I've seen some fantastic stories come out of it) and Aye Dark Overlord (which I don't like, but is clearly a story game).

My point being, there seems to be something very accessible about card-based games. It comes in a box, you shuffle and draw a hand, there's no character sheet - people are comfortable with that.

So I got to thinking, what if I tried to make a very Swords-inspired card game? Serendipitously I found out that ordering over a hundred custom playing cards is a good deal less expensive than it used to be, so this could easily be an actual thing.

If that sounds like something you'd be into, then I beg you to rush ahead and make a comment without reading my ideas on the topic. There are so many directions to go - and places to start - that it's probably good to broaden thinking before letting it narrow down.

In any case, here's where my thinking starts. There would be two directions to go with this: With Overplayer or without. For my own needs I think it would be good to try and go without.

My first idea is to use a mechanism from cooperative board games: each turn has what amounts to a Rogue action and an Overplayer action. Rolling the dice for tone is replaced by each card in your hand having a certain tone.

Possibly, you'd start your turn by freely choosing Glum or Jovial, then you would play cards of that tone from your hand until you were done. Then you would draw cards to refill your hand. Passing the dice would be replaced by passing a card to the person who will narrate next. From your own hand? Your whole remaining hand? A single freshly drawn card?

The cards themselves would need to be balanced between specific and vague. An easy option would be for each card to bear one word - an evocative, swords-and-sorcery sort of word of course - and you use the word in your narration. A trickier option would be instructions like "fail despite help" or "reveal secret". The cards are truly serving as a substitute for the dice, so some of them need to contain stymies, morals and mysteries.

The overplayer action required of your turn might require a card, or it might not. Some of the cards in-hand would surely suggest setbacks, so I'm not thinking a whole different card set would be needed. I do think a Thunder and Storm could be out on the table; the vague words on the cards, combined with the card's tone, should be able to inspire a thunder or a storm, and also be memorable enough that players won't forget what the card represents. So part of the Overplayer segment of any turn would be to make sure there is a Thunder and a Storm, but also to bring the storm.

Bringing the storm might involve playing cards of the same tone as the storm. I can imagine a requirement to play at least half of the storm-toned cards you have in your hand, which would allow people to deliberately attack the storm in its own tone to gain advantage.  Ah- a simple variation would be to require you to play one card on your own behalf, then one on the storm, then one for yourself, etc.

I really like the idea, actually, of cards on the table representing things in the story. I don't think anyone would have trouble remembering that "Vengeance" represents a certain character or "unnatural calm" represents the strangely passive reaction the King of Thieves has to your presence. (It follows that I wish I had more uses for this idea than just Thunder and Storm.)

For phases I have an interesting idea... Instead of there being strict divisions between different phases, someone would recognize that it's a good time for a Perilous phase, and everyone would draw (say) 4 cards from the Perilous pile and add those to their current hand. Perilous cards would enable things like slipping, struggling, losing a cherished piece of armor, discovering a weakness. (I was going to say 'discovering a foe's weakness' ... but it's so much better left open to reflection back on the player!) Rogue's cards would of course have things like "a foolhardy attempt", "something no other has done before", "just out of reach". Or maybe they need to be somehow more vague even. Discovery phase cards would have various ways of getting information.

The idea would be that you can potentially save some of these cards from one phase to the next, giving some interesting flexibility to the whole phase concept.

I keep trying to think of a way of having stymies be a surprise rather than a conscious decision ("oh, I have this card that says 'stymie', I think I'll go with the other tone for my turn..."). Since there are two tones it seems like something could be arranged using tone of drawn cards. Here are two ideas:

1) To end your turn you hand a card to another player face down. This can be from your own hand, or it can be drawn. As their first move, they must choose a card from their own hand; they play this face up and then immediately flip over the card they were given. If the tones are different, that's a stymie. Either way, the card they're given needs to be worked into the narrative by their turn's end. Players do not discuss their hands,  but may have a good idea what each other will play, so they have some opportunity to help each other by handing over the right card.
2) Players immediately add 3 drawn cards to their hand after playing their first card; if all 3 are the color of their played card, that's a stymie.

Ending the game is a big deal. It would be possible to try and stick kind of literally to the way Swords works, where there are a certain number of Motifs which must be collected and echoed. This would mean using played cards as motifs, either single cards or, if appropriate, a little stack which were collectively cool.

Copying Swords a little less literally, there might simply be a goal such as vanquishing a certain number of Storms. Perhaps each successive Storm vanquished has a higher number of required cards played "for" it by the rogue players. Or there might be certain "epic" or "heroic" cards such as Utter Defeat, and you would play until a certain number of those had been successfully played.

Another way to go would be the goal of emptying your hand of cards. This could work, but would mean changing a lot of what I've already said, focusing the rules on the balance of gaining and losing cards, whittling players' hands down over time. I like how this would mean you'd have certain cards in your hand that you are aiming to make playable by steering the narrative a bit.

So, those are my ideas so far. I'm very likely to make some sort of card-based story game and have it printed, and I think the swordsier it is the better off I'll be. (If anyone knows of other very card-based story games I'd be happy to hear of them.)