Ximero’s House of Cards

[Ximero]

…aka the indie (amateur, free, potentially also not-for-profit but definitely open to suggestions) card game (CCG/TCG) featuring characters from the Witchworld/Lightswitch storyverse in development by yours truly, brought to illustrated life courtesy of the ever-awesome Jeff Hebert’s HeroMachine. I can’t be the only one to have tried to adapt their characters into playing cards, so, by all means, do share your thoughts, as well as any critique on my designs, posted below. Just be warned that updates may be quite sporadic.
Enjoy!

[Ximero]

The Witchworld game takes 2-4 Players and is an RPG-TCG hybrid, in that Players use cards to summon Characters to a Battlefield and move them around, have them attack, etc. according to each Character’s specific abilities and tactical advantages. It will also require a d10 dice and some good-ol’ pen and paper to keep track of things like taken damage and stats modifiers (this would be far easier in the electronic form of the game, but i trust we’ll get there too, eventually).

In this post, we’ll be discussing the Battlefield (seen below).

It is a 25 x 25 playing field (a grid made of square tiles, called… squares, of course). Players have their Characters enter the Battlefield on the row closest to them, called the Fielding Row, where their tower base (of HP=900) is also located (on 3 merged non-spawning squares). Players lead their Characters from their own tower to their opponent’s (or opponents’, in case of more than 2 players), which they try to lay siege to and to eventually win the game by reducing its HP to 0. Of course, they should expect some stiff resistance from their opponents, who will similarly send out Characters against them, but also use background cards to build defences and equip difficult terrain to slow down their progress.

While the above is fairly standard fare, one novelty found in this game are the Field Keys. At the beginning of the game, each Player chooses a certain square on the Battlefield, where they ‘bury their Field Key’ (they make a private note of it somewhere) – this is important because, without having found Player Two’s (or Three’s or Four’s) Field Key, Player One’s advancing army is forever stuck outside Player Two’s Force Field area (the second row inwards past the Fielding Row), where their attacks are wasted but they can (and will) be attacked from the defenders near the tower base. This forces Characters to leave no stone unturned, as it were, in their progress, using simple strikes or ability-based attacks to try and unearth (‘un-tile’) their foe’s Field Key – some Players will give away its presence by building massive defences around it, or equipping various field modifiers around it, so only certain types of Characters (e.g. Ghosts or Burrowers or Swimmers) may reach it, while others may bluff and hide it in plain sight in very unassuming locations. This is indeed one way of strategising ‘slowing down and smelling the roses’ into an otherwise action-filled game

Hope you’re enjoying this so far, stay tuned for more (soon there will also be more pictures, yes).

[Ximero]

Hi again, Ximero here, back for a quick word on the resource cards.

The Witchworld gameverse, just as the storyverse it is based on, runs on MIST (Mentally Interactive Subatomic Technology — acronym reads may vary depending on who you ask), a revolutionary trans-organic metalloid substance making up virtually everything across the World Federation, from infrastructure to citizens. Those opposing the Federation claim the Mist to be a most potent mind-altering dumbing-down drug, or demonic technology devouring users’ souls, or both.

Within the game, in the interest of fairness and gameplay diversity, i have chosen to have all types of Characters and items use one of four types of Mist:

As we shall see in a subsequent post, there are 8 Playable Character ‘classes’ in the game, each 2 as sub-branches of one of the 4 main ontological groups: Corpus, Animus, Spiritus and Occultus. This 4-fold structure corresponds to the 4 Mist types above (red, green, blue and gold/orange, respectively), but also to the in-story political factions (The Turner Federation, the Hidden Nation, the Floating Worlds and the Walking Shadows) and to the types of equippable background items (urban, natural, technological and mystical). As such, the Player is never confused as to which Character or item works with what type of energy (Mist), and has the strategic choice between staying loyal to a single colour to capitalise on resource-gathering speed or assembling ‘rainbow’ decks to capitalise on various synergies.

On their turn, Players draw two Mist cards from the specific pack (except for the first turn, when every Player draws three) and will proceed to invest the obtained red/green/blue/orange energy points into abilities or equipping items as they see fit. Certain items or Character abilities (and especially the habitat synergies between Characters and backgrounds) may provide bonus draws, i.e. additional energy, each turn. Thus, cultivating such synergies while disrupting those of their opponents’ will constitute a staple of any Player’s winning strategy.

[Ximero]

Just to clarify, when drawing a Mist card, the Player gains the number of points specified on the card face, in the above case 3 (from the ‘III’ scroll illustration), any from 1 to 8, according to one’s ‘luck of the draw.’ The more experienced Players will have developed the instinct of when to spend all the energy points and when to save some for a devastating attack combo the following turn.

And here’s what the back of the Mist cards looks like (as opposed to all the other cards, which are grouped in the other drawable pack), in case you were wondering.

[Author]

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