Synd-Cats : The cardboardgame

Note the cunning substitution of a symbol for a single letter that serves the dual purpose of avoiding getting me sued for IP theft and making this relevant to catnews.

Once upon a time synd-cats was an idea for a CCG. It was a horrible ripoff of M:tG and it died a well deserved death, although I should still have some of the art lying around somewhere. Hope I never get a scanner, I truly cannot draw (although the minigun was pretty spiffy)

Now, in the light of day; I have come up with a new old idea. Make it as a non-collectible game.

Stack Your Decks

You still build decks, much in the manner of a CCG. I haven't decided how big they should be, it should probably be allowed to vary depending upon such factors as the number of players. However, it will be small compared to most games of this type. Somewhere between ten and thirty cards, I think. This is because I have rethought how the game should be played completely.

Build Your World

The first phase of the game is deployment. Shuffle your decks, and take it in turns to draw a card. You then have a few choices of what to do with it.

1. Trash it. Cards you discard here may be brought back in to play later, but in general htis is a worst option.
2. Replace it. Put it back into your deck at any point you choose. Either on the bottom, or somewhere in the middle. Just not back on top.
3. Put it in play. This is what you'll normally want to do, the other options are really only there to deal with situations when you cannot. Countries (and other locations) can always go into play, most other cards have to be associated with a location. Cards can also only be played if you meet any requirements they may have. Most cards go into play face up, some have the option of being face-down. They will state which they are.

Alternate play in this manner. You build up your world map, and place your starting resources much in the manner of decipher-starwars or (ick) the trek ccg. This allows you to make a sensible starting state for two megacorps.

This way of putting your entire deck into play from the very start struck me as a revelation - and hidden resources give you something for your agent teams to do (go find out what this is!) without actually having to start a war right away.

Then I got stuck wondering where play would progress from there.

Something RISK-like I guess

I wanted something strategic. That was the whole basis for this thought. No luck involved, just pure out-maneuvering your opponent. I couldn't resist a small element of psychology (the hidden resources make for bluffs) but I want to keep it small (there should only be a small number of possible choices, allowing you to make reasonable guesses)

But how exactly should play work? I had no idea, so I got on my bike and headed in to work.

Lesson hammerred well and truly into my brain now. I only make ideas concious when I change my setting. Or, to put it in ork: "Hib moove make Hib thunk good"

The idea was simple. Move counters about and try to put more counters onto a location than the opponent has in order to win that location. Can't get much more generic than that. But I came up with the details too.

The realms of combat

Much like top-trumps, everything should have multiple ways in which it can fight. For synd-cats the choices seemed obvious.

Mind

Public Relations. Consumer goods. Stuff to make the people like you. If you are more liked than the opponent, then people will buy your products, and the sector is yours.

Body

Martial Law. Hit squads. Open fire - all weapons! Dispatch war rocket... you get the idea. Buy our stuff, or die.

Soul

Cash. Moolahbucks. Mega-zilla-dollars. Nu-Yen. Bits. Whatever. You've got it, you can bribe people. Here, have fifty bucks to buy our stuff with.

Now, not every resource can be contested in every arena. A corporate datastore, for example, isn't going to be very susceptible to PR. And a hit squad may have more to worry about than cash. But locations, in general, should be possible to take in any arena.

Now, I thought, to make it interesting I would have each type of combat fuction in a slightly different way.

Body - My army of.. snakemen!

This should work in the most straightforward fashion. Whoever has the most troops, wins. The other side sensibly tells their troops to co-operate, or removes them. No one fires a shot, it's all very peaceful (in a bristling sort of way) Of course, most combat cards will have other uses, such as blowing up van-loads of enemy troops, which makes things a bit more bloody BEFORE the actual takeover. But the basic takeover is simple - you both put in your troops and whoever has more takes the sector and all the troops survive.

Soul - My army of.. accountants!

Money is half like Energy. It can be changed, but never be destroyed. In this world of horrible inflation, it can be created though. Again, pretty simple - whoever has the most money, wins the sector. But the money stays in the sector. You can't move money out of a sector unless you control it. And a sector that does something once it has enough money, doesn't care whose money it is - it will add up both sides to try and make its total. (I envisage some sectors doing good things, like making pr, and some doing bad things, like blowing themselves up in riots)

Mind - My army of.. cats!

Time for a change. Public relations is a fleeting thing. If you move in more PR than the defender has, then ALL PR in that sector is destroyed. If (for some reason) you move in less, then all of yours is destroyed, and half as much as you lost is removed from the defenders stack. I then realised that this would leave the sector easy to recapture. So I decided you should get a free move. If you win by PR, you can move in as many counters as you like, up to the excess you won by, after the battle. Or, in other words (if you prefer maths) If you have x and the enemy has y, and x is greater than y, then afterwards, you end up with (x-y)/2 If y was greater than or equal to x (defenders win ties), then the enemy ends up with y - x/2

Humm. The PR thing is perhaps a bit arsey. May need to rethink that.

So, how does it play out?

After you've deployed everything, run all the text on cards that say "at start of play" - this will mostly mean getting free counters of various sorts.

Then take it in turns to choose an action. You can either perform any action granted by any card you control. (Again, most of these will be producing new armies, though some will be more offensive or do strange things to the battlefield)

Your other choice is to move armies about. Take as much as you like from one sector to an adjacent sector. If that starts a battle, good! Attacker gets to choose which type of battle to start (it'd be pretty dumb to start one that they didn't just move in a big honking stack of counters for though)

After a battle (assuming you won) an enemy controlled sector becomes contested (neutral) - this is to allow the enemy time to get some defenders there. While a sector is neutral, it isn't theirs though - so they can't use any abilities on it. (Which represents it being kinda hard for, eg, your PR office to churn out feel-good news while gunbattles are going on in the coridoors) Of course, if the enemy doesn't counter-attack the sector, then your next turn is gonna be pretty obvious.

After a won-battle, a neutral sector becomes yours. Told you it was pretty obvious. Although you could do some kind of blitzkreig strategy instead...

So, how does it end?

... in fire ... Uh, actually, I've not thought this part out. I expect you'll have multiple victory conditions, and probably hidden resources that give more. Basic victory should just be "The enemy controls no sectors, and you control at least one" - although the enemy should resign long before that, when it becomes obvious that they cannot win. Perhaps a more sensible victory would be "you control 3/4s of all sectors" or something like that?

Problems

Well, I need to think out what 'other' actions are common - like stealth missions to find out what a hidden resource is. I need to clarify what happens if, for example, both players play finland in the starting phase (I think it goes contested)

A bigger problem is the sheer number of counters involved. Although being a boxed game rather than a ccg alleviates this. Perhaps this would work better as a computer game (but I suck at game theory)

I've just realised how many of these ideas are similar to those used in the illuminati game. Moving counters slowly and allowing counter-attacks gives a similar effect to 'power pyramid defence' OTOP, I can already see strategies for attacking on one side to draw the defenders away from the other side.

The Next Step

Well, I hope to generate some interest with this, despite that it's another of my "Hi, we're in the middle of a conversational train wreck, but sit down and join in" pieces (I've really got to learn to start at the beginning) and hopefully clarify a few of the problems. Then I'm going to put it through the 'how to design a game' process I outlined in earlier columns.

But to sum it up: RISK meets Illuminati meets Syndicates