Witchlord: a custom card game

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Edgewise

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What is it?
I've come up with my own two-player competitive card game called Witchlord. I'm categorizing this as a custom card game - it's not collectible, and it's not living, so let's just call it that. Anyway, each player takes on the role of a political rival in a medieval low fantasy kingdom. These two Witchlords vie to be crowned the new Witchking, and that's what the game is about.

What's it about?
Each Witchlord marshals a wide array of assets in their struggle. Treacherous cutthroats, cursed tomes, and even lawyers are acceptable means. Each asset in the game is represented by a a card, and each player has a Witchlord card in play to represent him or herself. A player can win by eliminating his or her opponent's Witchlord card. However, it's also possible to win by depleting an opponent's resources, or even outmaneuvering them politically. The setting is fairly low-magic; although spells and enchantments play a prominent part, they are often overshadowed by base violence and crude skulduggery.

How does it play?
Both players start on a pretty even footing, since they start with no cards and both build their decks in a common auction. Players alternate turns, and after every three turns, they hold a Grand Assembly and then another auction.

A player can play up to four assets at time on the table in his or her Court either face-up or face-down, there being advantages to each. Most cards have an action they can perform any turn following the one in which it is played to the Court. Any card in Court can be used to support an allied card's action or oppose an enemy card's action. Cards in the Court can also be used to earn Honor (for politics) or Lucre (for auctions) for their owners, and a minority of cards have advantages that take effect when they are face-up.

What are the mechanics?
I tried to keep it all pretty simple. You be the judge.

Actions
Most actions target another card and specify the action trait, which is usually Arms or Influence (very rarely it's Magic). Actions include things like killing other cards, stealing Lucre, reducing an opponent's Honor, subverting enemy cards, revealing face-down cards from the opposing Court, etc.

The acting player decides on which other cards in the Court will support the action, and then the player adds up all of their ratings for the action trait. If the acting card was face-up, then the target card chooses the reaction trait. Otherwise, the reaction trait is the same as the action trait. When the reaction trait is know, the opposing player may select other cards from his Court to oppose the action, and the trait values of all of them are summed up.

For instance, if your assassin is face-up and performs an Attack (Arms) action against an opponent's lawyer, they are likely to choose Influence as the reaction trait. However, if your assassin was face-down, the lawyer can only react with Arms.

Resolution: The action succeeds if the action trait is higher than the reaction trait and the total Magic rating of acting cards is at least equal to the total Magic rating of opposing cards.

In other words, Magic is the ultimate defensive trait. Most cards have a zero Magic rating, although each player's Witchlord card has Magic 3. This makes the Witchlord cards themselves very difficult to attack, which is kind of the point. Witchlord cards have no actions or advantages, but they can oppose actions.

Income
Another important mechanic is income. If a card is face-up in the Court, the controlling player can discard it to gain resources equal to its Influence rating. The player chooses one resource per discarded card: either Lucre or Honor. Lucre is spent in the auction to buy new cards. Honor is spent in the Grand Assembly.

Auctions
They're pretty much what you'd expect. Four cards at a time are auctioned in the Bazaar, and players bid Lucre. Each bid must be higher than the last, and when a player neglects to counterbid, the higher bid wins. Each player can replenish up to two cards into the Bazaar per round of bidding from a hand of four cards, and the player draws up to a hand of four cards from the Marketplace deck of unowned cards. Once bidding stops, an auction is ended.

Politics
The Grand Assembly is fairly simple. There are three votes: one by the Convocation, one by the Council and one by the Elders. Each player secretly allocates their Honor points to one of the three votes, and allocations are all revealed at once. A vote is won by a player who has more Honor invested in it (i.e. nobody wins a tie).

Winning the Elders means that the player can toggle the Truce state; when a Truce is active, attacking opposing cards requires spending Lucre. Winning the Council means that the player has the right of first bid on all items in the next auction. Winning the Convocation once or twice does nothing, but if a player wins three Convocations, then he or she has won the game.

Ending the game
A player loses by having their Witchlord killed, having no Honor or Lucre at the end of their turn, or having their opponent win three Convocations.

Besides some details about timing, the different types of actions and advantages, and the cards themselves, that's pretty much the entirety of the rules.

Can I see the actual rules?
Here's a link to the rules, including stats for all 30 card types at the end.


All feedback is welcome! I haven't had a chance to playtest it yet, so if anyone likes it enough, I would love to figure out how to do that online.
 
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I like the idea of Machiavellian poker with deck-builder elements. From the description, I'm not sure how easy it will be to track all of the elements involved; with different piles of cards stacked up on the board, a lot of cards sitting face-down, and cycles of 1 (turn) and 3 (assembly), memory can become a real obstacle. I wonder if there's a way to streamline this without losing its theme or its intricacy. Perhaps putting more emphasis on the cards than the actions could be an idea.
That, however, is my only concern. It's thematically powerful and creatively tactical. Anyone who is into strategic boardgames should enjoy this sort of thing.
 
I like the idea of Machiavellian poker with deck-builder elements.
Thanks!
From the description, I'm not sure how easy it will be to track all of the elements involved; with different piles of cards stacked up on the board, a lot of cards sitting face-down, and cycles of 1 (turn) and 3 (assembly), memory can become a real obstacle. I wonder if there's a way to streamline this without losing its theme or its intricacy.
Well, the two types of resources (Honor and Lucre) would be represented by two separate types of counters. As for piles of cards, there are about as many as for MtG; each player has a deck, a hand, a discard pile, and up to five cards in front of them. There's a common graveyard and a common deck of unowned cards, both out of play.

The auction uses the unowned deck, and has players drawing hands from it and playing up to cards between them. But that's a different phase, so other decks and cards are set aside at this time. If anything, it's simpler than the main game mode.

The three turn rotation is a little trickier, and you wouldn't want to mess it up. A boxed game would use come kind of cardboard dial, although I'd like to avoid specialized equipment other than the cards. I'm not sure what works well for this.

I think it sounds worse than it is when it's all just described verbally with specialized terminology. But I could be wrong. I certainly think there's far less to keep track of than in a game of Netrunner, for instance.
Anyone who is into strategic boardgames should enjoy this sort of thing.
That's my hope. My main concern here is that the mechanic of laying cards down one turn and playing them the next might make it difficult to plan strategically. Only playtesting will reveal if this is a concern.
 
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