There is a digital trading card game Kickstarter called SolForge. It is made by the people who make Ascension, which is awesome, but they won’t make an Android client for SolForge unless they get half a million dollars, which is twice what they are asking for. That, and the fact that I don’t play trading card games means I am probably gonna pass on this one.
However! There was something really interesting about the rules of the game that caught my attention.
We wanted to make the gameplay of SolForge fast and easy to play on mobile devices, so the core of the engine is very simple. Each turn, a player plays two cards out of their five card hand, and then discards all of the unplayed cards and draws five more for their next turn. That’s it – no casting costs, no resources – just pick and play. Every few turns, each player re-shuffles their deck and discard pile together, giving them a chance to draw their higher level cards.
That is fascinating! I have already started working that into a card game I am working on, and on thinking about it more, I came up with an entirely different game that is based on an entirely different premise. I hope to put up some notes about these soon.