Ghosts and Goblins

I’ve always been a fan of card-based game mechanics. I much prefer cards over dice for the simple reason that a deck of cards has “memory”.

While most games rely on a degree of randomness, making everything the result of a dice roll – for me – feels like a degree of control is taken away. Cards allow for more strategy; for every “bad” draw in your turn now, you know that’s one fewer bad draw to come in the future. It’s very difficult to mitigate against bad dice rolls, if all you’ve got is more dice to roll.

But if you have a run of “bad luck” with the cards (e.g. a sequence of low values) because the deck has memory, you can be pretty confident that the deck is stacked in your favour for future draws – allowing you to change your strategy to match expected outcomes. Similarly, with each “good draw” you know that you’re depleting your supply of luck – do you keep pushing, or change strategy in anticipation of the “poor results” you know are to come?

As the player makes their way across the map, they can collect treasure tokens, which allow them to draw a card from the deck. Some cards may be played immediately and some can be retained for use later in the game.

Cards could include special actions, weapons and treasure:

• Jump (over gravestone) discard once used
• Teleport (advance up to four or five squares either vertically or horizontally) discard once used
• Double attack (after each attack, pick another target – or the same one twice – and repeat the attack just made) discard once used
• Go again (reset all action points, take your turn again) – discard once used
• Weapon – lance
• Weapon – dagger
• Weapon – torch
• Weapon – axe
• Weapon – shield
• Armour – leather
• Armour – metal
• Armour – gold
• Reset baddies – replace all spent baddie cards and shuffle the baddie pile – discard once used
• Destroy terrain – remove any one gravestone from the map – discard once used

To encourage players to explore the map and collect more treasure, instead of reducing health in combat, maybe each card held by the player could have a value and you can return a card instead of taking a hit? (reduce the hit points by the value of the card).

Armour must be used first (so if your player has gold armour, it’s immediately downgraded to metal, or if in metal armour, downgraded to leather, then finally to no armour).
Some cards might have zero value (so can’t be traded for health)