You’re correct CWO marc, that was more or less exactly what I was suggesting. :-D But its just a suggestion.
I find that a collaborative approach is generally stronger, than trying to strike off and develop a bunch of independent competing systems that are trying to achieve similar goals. House rules likewise are more fun when you get a couple houses trying the same thing to see how it plays out. Forums communication is slow sometimes, since we have lives outside of A&A, but I’d trust YG to pull in the reigns, or excise the extraneous, if I’ve gone too far left field.
The main reason I think it’s cool to try and attach values to the standard deck, is that it’s very easy to tweak and test the advantages this way. So from a development standpoint, it is possible to test things right away before we plug in values and set the deck. Rather than drafting rules first and sending it out to the printers in China, only to find a week or two later, that it would be awesome to add something or tweak some aspect of it.
@Young:
Sorry for my absence here, I’m working on many different things at once.
My plan is to create a deck with 54 cards…
2 of each nation specific strategic advantage cards = 32
3 of each community specific strategic advantage cards = 15
1 of each nation specific progressive advantage cards = 7
If all this can be easily translated into a generic playing card deck, than all is good… However, my custom cards look much better than a regular deck.
Thanks for all the comments and interest in this idea, I will address all your post’s in detail soon.
Cheers.
Oh cool there’s the man! So with a 54 card deck planned that matches exactly a full deck including jokers! I expect also that the printers print with those numbers in mind for their boxing. This is a strong start because it means you’d have the same number of total fortunes cards as you have in a normal deck.
So picture this, to achieve a specific 1:1 card to card ratio, all you’d have to do is flag the joker… (You mark it with a felt pen on the face side.) Now you have 54 distinct cards, and you could match every card in your fortunes deck to a card in the flagged standard deck (both jokers in play.)
Now consider that all you would need at that point, to make the fortunes deck a standard deck (a deck that could function just like a real deck as well as a fortunes deck), is to include one small graphic in just one corner of the card!
It could be very small, and doesn’t need to be mirrored (not on two sides, head and foot, just at one or the other.) Tiny as you like.
Envision a small K inside a Heart, or an A inside a spade, a 10 inside a diamond, or a 2 inside a club. All small and tucked off to the lower right hand corner of the card.
These symbols would look badass anyway, like tiny war code designations! :-D The sort of thing one might paint on the side of a bomber, or draft up in a patch. It could look cool and unassuming, but provide addition functionality, while retaining the overall aesthetic cohesiveness of a WW2 era Fortunes Deck. It could even provide a shorthand reference for the individual cards.
Manhattan Project = Suicide King, K inside the Diamond
Or things of that sort. For each card
You know like code hehe
It wouldn’t dominate the card aesthetically, it only needs to be large enough that it can be read by the player holding the card. This doesn’t seem like too tall an order, considering that this one minor addition of suit/number info, would expand the potential use of the deck considerably.
Think of all the things you could do with a standard deck of cards, one that had cool art and cool R&D bonus rules. It just seems fairly easy, so I thought I would make the case. Not only could you use it for R&D, but you could do R&D and anything else you can create with a full deck of playing cards. It just seems like an easy win on all counts.
And it would make testing the fortunes pretty easy.
There are only two conditions you need to meet for this to hold up in translation.
First: Uniform backs
If the backs of the cards in the fortune deck are not uniform, then the fortunes deck could not function as a normal deck (even if they all have suits/numbers). However, a normal deck could still have the fortunes values translated onto it in that case. Going one direction fortunes translates to standard (but not the other way round unless the backs are uniform.)
Second: Each card is distinct.
No two cards in the fortunes deck are exactly alike. (Unless you want just 2, in which case you could use unflagged jokers.) This would make translation pretty simple. We could start playing with it tonight if wanted :)
Again you could translate one direction, but not the other unless all cards are distinct.
Anyhow, these are just suggestions, but I think it could be cool. I like the first edition Delta deck a lot. I’d play black jack with it or crazy 8s or poker, if I could!
