Firefly Online CCG

POSTED BY: rklenseth
UPDATED: Thursday, June 10, 2004 02:46
VIEWED: 8252
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RKLENSETH

Thursday, January 29, 2004 4:32 PM

Well, we can make it both simple and difficult. Kinda like what they try to do for Magic. Have the simple stragety/cards for newer players but allow the option for experienced players to play harder cards and strageties. And this could also include different card typesper level of difficulty or concepts.

Oh, and play Cantr II at www.cantr.net.

KURUKAMI

Thursday, January 29, 2004 4:43 PM

Agreed. I'm actually kind of tempted to throw in "Story" cards, kind of like the Mythos game had, where if you could assemble a group of disparate cards you could put forth an overall picture of a great story, that would greatly benefit your Reputation/Prestige.

Reputation would be how powerful and/or influential you are considered to be within the business community, and could affect whether or not the Alliance would mess with you. Prestige would be how well people think of you, in general.

Example: Adlai Niska would be high in Reputation, low in Prestige. People fear him because he's a powerful presence in localized business, but nobody thinks he's a great, stand-up guy.

To expand on the whole Story idea, though -- think of how small elements combine to fuel a much greater myth than each of the small parts. (Key cards are in caps to emphasize that they would be needed for the Story card to be played.) Think of a daring THEFT, where the criminal tried to get away from a MAGISTRATE in a SHUTTLE but through circumstances beyond his control finally GAVE MONEY TO THOSE IN NEED.

Sound familiar? It should. That's the backstory to "Jaynestown" right there. The fact that Jayne didn't accomplish it on purpose does not lessen the fact that he gained a hell of a lot of Prestige among the mudders on that moon.

History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it merely shouts "Weren't you listening the first time?!?" and lets fly with a club.

KURUKAMI

Thursday, January 29, 2004 5:03 PM

Although it could be called something other than a "Story". "Epic", maybe. "Tall Tale"?

History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it merely shouts "Weren't you listening the first time?!?" and lets fly with a club.

ARIYA

Thursday, January 29, 2004 5:18 PM

Hello, just found this thread! I am actually looking to design table top games, RPGS, and CCGs for a living, so this is of some interest to me.
Having read through the ideas so far, here is my .02.

The game should have a fairly simple scope. The show's thesis was real people, in a real future, with real problems. I think the idea of having a ship card be the focus of your play area is good, and the idea of amassing credits to use to play cards is also good.
There should be a separate category of cards specifically designed to be played on your opponent's turn. These would be cards that have Reavers or the Alliance messing with your opponent's ship. That way there is some direct play vs. the players, but its not like their two ships or crews are just duking it out.
I think it would be neat to have a special "Character" card type (and of course some or all of the Serenity crew could be hireable) that represents who you have hired to be on your crew.
The idea about a reputation score is also very cool. Requiring a certain level of reputation in order to play a Job card is a great idea. I would suggest that the Job cards are only a one time gain though, and perhaps require some sort of challenge. Maybe there is a difficulty level of each Job, or the opponent has the opportunity to play cards that can mess up the job.

I have some more thoughts, but I will wait to see if anything here has been useful. I know most of it is simply addressing existing concepts, but that seemed like a good place to start. Cool idea, and I can help with the programming should this get off the ground!

KINGOFKOINS

Thursday, January 29, 2004 9:28 PM

I generally don't like ccg's, but this sounds intriguing.

--------------------------------
It's sickening how comforting the privacy of the mind can be.
"Bible's broken; contradictions, false logistics. Doesn't make sense." - River
http://stripe.filetap.com

GUNRUNNER

Friday, January 30, 2004 3:42 AM

Some ideas:
From what I gather you guys are saying that a player would only control one ship card at a time. I'm thinking that a player should be able to play a card (Effect: Shipping Firm is the name I'm thinking) where a player may "purchase" a license from the Alliance government allowing them to operate multiple ships to some limit.

I'm thinking that there may be a illegal license card that would add some negative effects, such as a penalty if your caught using it by the Feds.

As for systems and locations I think we could make a few plausible locations up. For example the Capital City of Shadow could be a planetary location thou we haven't see it its there.

I'll have a few more prototype cards namely Jayne Cobb, Jayne's Knife (As you can guess I'm a huge Jayne fan!), Job: Salvage from Transport, Interrupt: Local Color, and Interrupt: Grand Entrance posted soon.

HAKEN

Friday, January 30, 2004 5:33 AM

I'll give programming the game a shot. Just write out the specs and I'll make it happen.

MRGREEN

Friday, January 30, 2004 5:52 AM

This is terrific. I needed a project to work on that combined Firefly, the Gimp, and some some creative collaberation.

An online version would be neat to test stuff out with, but I would MUCH rather have some real cards. I've delt with a printer that does custom playing cards. Both sides full color are like $7 per deck of 54 cards. I don't see why he'd have to do 54 card decks tho... could make 75 card 'starter' packs for around $10 each. I know I'd buy a couple!

Ok, here are a couple of things that I have identified as being, in my opion, ideas I'd want to see in the game, and also some ideas I have had while thinking about it.

1) Single Ship - As mentioned, the show was about real people, and thier lives aboard a ship. I think that it is something that should carry over.

2) Most of the card types are things that sounds good. Esp. ships with different attributes and crew/equipment modifier cards. I like the idea that you would need to use up some credits, or have a certian rep or some varying set of requirements to play certain cards.

3) My first major contribution/idea is that of different card decks. IE, planets, crew, ships, jobs, and then 'misc' have a different back-side designs so they could be easily sorted. That feeds into...

4) Layout - Each player would select a number of LOCATION/PLANET cards. (The number would be dependant on number of players). They would then shuffle them and lay them out randomly in a grid fashion, with each player on one side of a basically square shape so thier cards wouldn't get mixed up. This would create your 'verse.

5) Next you take your JOB deck and shuffle it. Each player would place a JOB under each location card they layed out. Finally, you would each pick a starting point and place your SHIP card on that LOCATION card. That would complete the setup.

6) You would then have a pile of CREW, extra JOB, and ACTION/EQUIPMENT/ETC cards. Your turn would be the act of moving up/down/left/right (not diagonal) thru the verse to new planets based on your ships, potentially modified, movement attribute.

You would have options once you landed on a planet... look for work (turn over the planets job card, and replace it with one a new one), recruit some crew members (draw a card from the crew deck), shop for gear (get a card from the MISC deck).

You could leave a planet at the beginning of your turn, or stay put and get some extra time to look for work AND recruit some crew, or some other combination.

There's ton more stuff to be worked out, but those were just some of my layout ideas. I'm going to draw something showing what I am visualizing and post it to a website shortly (*EDIT: ADDED A QUICK GRAPHIC TO ILLUSTRATE MY IDEAS http://firefly.infojunkie.net/images/layout.jpeg *), I think that with the number of people and ideas we have bouncing around that it might behoove us to move this to a yahoo group or something similar.

BTW, Haken, what kind of language/enviroment were you planning on coding the game in?

Good job on everything so far!

Rob

If you can't run, you crawl, and if you can't crawl, well, if you can't do that, you find someone to carry you.

KURUKAMI

Friday, January 30, 2004 4:57 PM

I like your enthusiasm, and I do like your ideas... but I must argue for a simpler game overall. Look at the CCG industry -- what are the most popular games around? They're the simpler ones -- Magic, and Yu Gi Oh. Both of them work off of just one deck.

If we keep the prospective CCG fairly straightforward while preserving the overall texture of the 'verse, I believe it will have a wider appeal.

For ships, just sell the starter decks and have the stats for the ship on the box itself. I think that the planets idea, while interesting, could make things overly complicated and at the same time kind of, well, not as wide-open.

For example, if you've only got a one-on-one "grudge match", either each person will have to contribute a lot of Location cards -- cards they might not possess -- or you'll have a really small 'verse. Additionally, there might be duplication in location cards. "Um... so which Londinium are we supposed to deliver this cargo to?"

Keeping the location to general zones that are listed primarily on Job cards will simplify matters.

Another problem that might occur is one of ship Range. If we went with the grid model you propose, could you move a maximum of (Range) location cards in a turn? If so, isn't there the problem that a low-reward job (in either creds or Rep/Prestige) could take much longer than it would be worth, and thus certain jobs would stagnate under certain locations?

If the Job cards are simply another card to be placed in one's deck, then one can construct a deck around certain Jobs in order to achieve victory... and that's something that, in then end, people will buy more card packs to do. Particularly if certain (greatly desireable) Jobs are rarer in card commonality.

As for Crew and Gear cards, again, I think those should be in the single deck -- you come across them by happenstance as much as anything else, and you might have to sacrifice other important cards from your hand -- be they Jobs, Actions, or the like -- in order to successfully meet the requirements for a particular Crew card.

Hmmm. And I just thought of some more potential game mechanics/cards. Let's say you can only have as many Crew in play as, say, a portion of your Cargo space. You can discard Crew that you have in play to put down new Crew.

Quote:
"Hey Mal, whaddya need two mechanics for?"
"I really don't."

Following that logic, there could be an Action card that allowed you to hire Crew from someone else's discard pile.

I'd prefer to stick with the single deck idea. Multiple decks in a game seem like it would confuse the heck out of newcomers, and if the game's not relatively straightforward to learn it might lack in customer response.

History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it merely shouts "Weren't you listening the first time?!?" and lets fly with a club.

FOFFILMS

Friday, January 30, 2004 6:32 PM

Okay - I'll toss in my ideas, as I have a fully developed rules system for a firefly ccg of my own alreasdy, and I have been following this thread listening to the new ideas and I think they're pretty good.

As a 10 year ccg player - that's right, I was a Magic Alpha player!!! And later an owner of a CCG shop - this is where I stand on a firefly ccg.

Each player begins with a certain amount of credits, they then play out, one at a time their "core cards" - a boat, and crew and supplies (weapons etc..) they must use credits to purchase these core cards, the remaining credits are what they have to begin the game.

The base of a win would be to build reputation points to a certain value (say 20 - the standard ccg #). First player to reaches 20 rep points wins.

But losing is the far simpler prospect, a player loses the game if they exhaust their deck or if they have no cards in play (lose your ship and your crew and you're done)

This makes it a "simple" game with a variety of strategic options.

As for card types, I think the basics work well: Ships, Characters, Locations and Equipment.

Then more game intensive cards:

Jobs - play a job, complete all the requirements and add to your reputation (as well as any credits or bonus the card may have)

Events - Things that play on the table until their effect is used up (Ie... Shindig - the ball, Passenger Detention and Questioning (train job)

Obstacles - Play to prevent your opponent from completeing jobs etc...

Impulse - Cards with immediate effects on play, (like instants in Magic)

I think those basic card types open the entire series and keep play moving quickly but have a lot of strategy involved.

I have a full set of rules and some proto-card types already, but didn't want to post them , as I saw all these cards being posted and many rules ideas bantering around.

I was waiting to see if I might be spurred on to change my ideas, which I have a little.

Anyway, that's my thoughts.

I think the Star Trek CCG didn't work as well as it could because it was slow, had too many variables and didn;t capture the true flavor of the series (until some later expansions)

The Star Wars CCG (original Decipher release) to me really didn't at all reflect Star Wars in how it played.

I think a Firefly CCG would really need to capture the flavor of the show, rather than get bogged down in complicated rules, variables and semantics.

Anyway, I will keep an interested eye on this development.

And if you are seriously contemplating trying to put this into the market place as an ultimate goal, you will need a minimum of about $150-200k capital to aquire the rights, and produce play test sets, then go into production for a limited initial run, as well as a small amount of marketing at cons. ( I have done this homeowkr as I developed an ALIAS CCG and went through the process of looking into the first run production costs.)

Cheers all.

www.fof-films.com
Firefly Fan Film - Coming SOON

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