sablebadgerGame Designers: Any tips on designing set collection games? A new game I'm working on will be my first design attempt using this mechanic. I have some basic ideas, but any tips would be welcomed.
Grayson Page@Sablebadger what are you modeling (setting/theme) or what sort of interaction/question are you expecting players to wrestle with? That probably drives a portion of it.
@gpage Those are good questions. Theme is a based on my first dice game Dice of Crowns. The players are trying to kill the current Royal without getting caught so they can assume the throne.
Players collect sets of "schemes" to trigger an attempt on the king. some cards have a counter/nope symbol that can be used to counter the scheme and prevent it.
Kind of like Kill Dr. Lucky meets Exploding Kittens.
@Sablebadger would some schemes be countered by certain counters? E.g. a pool of 5 possible schemes, countered by 3 options in a 1=AB, 2=CD, 3=E and schemes are set recipes of items needed to pull them off (e.g. 2 rope, 1 map, 2 goons for A. B needs 1 rope, 2 maps, 3 goons) so you get some flexibility but it's telegraphed what you might be after.
@Sablebadger where I'm headed with it is, you can build layers of what those sets interact, how they are prevented (is there an overlap in cards that apply to both counters and schemes?), or apply across the types of sets (e.g. single cards could contain attributes that cause them to apply to counters 2&3 but not 1).
Players get multiple facets to think about during play and card acquisition.
@gpage Interesting, I see what you are going for here. I'll noodle on this and see how it meshes with what I'm working. Thanks!!