[IDEA] Quick game to play with NS cards

[Authoritaria-Imperia]

In my time on NS, I’ve seen a lot of people suggest games to be played with the trading cards. The thing is, the ideas always revolve around modifying Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic, and NS cards just don’t fit those, thematically or content-wise. I’ve come up with a ten-minute game that uses NS cards for what they are: collecting! Based on the level of support I get, I might make a post in Technical to see if this could become a thing. (It sounds like it theoretically could.)

World Census Rosters: A NationStates Trading Card Game
Two players compete head-to-head to build the best rosters of nations near and far, drafting cards out of a central deck over three rounds. But they have to be careful: they mustn't contradict the World Census along the way!

Setup: Each player can enter the game with their whole deck or just a collection — in either case, their choice has to have at least 50 cards. The game secretly takes 30 at random from each player’s pick, then combines and shuffles them into a 60-card shared deck.

By taking some cards out of the game, players won't know what cards (or stat badges) are going to be up for grabs. That's important for rarity-counting and stat-badge-scoring later. The fifty-card minimum means you dont need to buy any deck-space upgrades to play.

Gameplay: The game takes three rounds. Each round goes like this:

1. You and your opponent each draw ten cards and set aside one to keep. (You have fifteen seconds to make your choice.)
2. Each of you takes the remaining nine cards and passes them to your opponent.
3. Out of the nine cards you've been passed, pick one to keep. Then, pass the remaining eight cards back to your opponent.
4. Continue until you've chosen ten cards; that marks the end of the round.

Three of those. That’s it!

The drafting system is a tried-and-true card-game mechanic that forces you to prioritise. There're lots of cards you want, but you can't wait too long to get them or your opponent may take them instead!

Scoring: Once each player has thirty cards (ten from each round), the game’s over. Cards score based on their badges, but first…
You must have more cards of each rarity than of the next highest rarity. You don’t get points for cards breaking this rule (newly-acquired cards get cancelled first).

This is a major balancing rule. Essentially, whenever you buy a Legendary, you're going to need five other cards: one of every lower rarity. This helps counter the luck of the draw — just because you manage to nab more Legendaries every round doesn't mean you've going to be a better off. This will also create interesting situations when people play with decks unbalanced in rarity — if someone plays with an "every S2 Legendary" deck, for instance, then both players will be discarding a lot of their cards!

Then…

• Stat badges:
  • Each gold badge is worth 6 points.
  • Each bronze badge is 4 points.
  • Each green badge is worth 1.
  • … but each stat only scores if there’re fewer than 2 golds, fewer than 4 bronzes, and fewer than 7 greens of that stat in play. If a limit’s exceeded, all badges of that stat are worthless. (Cards cancelled for breaking the rarity rule are counted for this purpose.)
• Issue authors score in pairs: 14 points for every two.
• WA Authors score similarly: 12 points for pairs of badges from different WA chambers.
• Commended/Condemned badges: 6 points apiece.
• Founders score 4 points each.
• Game Volunteer/Secretariat/WA SecGen: Wild badge — you get to pick what badge each of these becomes immediately after the third round.
• WA member badges are worth 1 point for each of your Delegate badges.
• The player with the most Easter Eggs gets 22 points.

After the game finishes going through scoring and declares a winner, players’ cards are restored back to their initial decks.

There's a lot to unpack here.

• The stat-badge limits correlate roughly with how the census distributes badges, so having two "Top 1%: Civil Rights" badges in 60 cards is an in-character contradiction of World-Census numbers. You get punished for crimes like these!
• Issue-writing is an inherently collaborative task, so those score in pairs.
• It makes sense for WA authors to score in pairs of different chambers. Such pairs are worth less than Issues Authors because so many single nations have both a GA-author and an SC-author badge. (Historical-resolution authors count as wild: either the GA or the SC.)
• To keep things simple, all long rectangular badges are just wild badges — game volunteers are multitalented, after all! This also affords you a small amount of choice after the drafting round — it might be easiest just to get a 6-point Commend badge, but if you've only got one Issues-author badge total, a second one of those will get you fourteen points! You could also generate a specific gold stat badge to cancel out a bunch of your opponent's points.
• A delegate's power is determined by how many WA members are at their side.
• In real life, Easter eggs are perfect for collecting in large quantities!

I’ve tried to keep this as simple as possible. The fifteen-second timer would keep gameplay strictly under seven minutes.

What are your thoughts/opinions? I'm open to all suggestions. My main thoughts:

• Does the point scheme I've suggested sound balanced?
• I think this is accessible for its simplicity. It's just a drafting game, which is a tried-and-true concept that's easy for beginners to grasp.
• There is a possible risk of analysis paralysis — players getting too caught up counting points for possible outcomes. The turn timer would help avoid this getting out of hand.
• The game would track some things (like how many cards of each rarity you've collected so far) to save your time and keep gameplay from getting too meticulous. Do you think it should actively count up your accumulated badges during the game as well?
• Bearing in mind that the game would walk you through scoring every time, are the numbers too complicated?
• For any coders — does this sound easily code-able? Would it probably be a feasible addition to the game, or not?

Many thanks for reading.

[Saarz]

This game sounds really fun. So if you have 3 legendaries and 2 epics, 2 of the legendaries don't count?

[Authoritaria-Imperia]

This game sounds really fun. So if you have 3 legendaries and 2 epics, 2 of the legendaries don't count?

Thanks for your reply! That's correct — two of those Legendaries wouldn't get counted. And keep in mind that having those two Epics would require you have quite a few Commons/Uncommons/etc. too!