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I've been knocking an idea for a game around a bit recently, and I'm wondering if it's a mechanic that anyone has any experience in.

Basically, I want to make the game play without any dice. The random element of the game will be supplied by a deck of cards, which will determine what the result of your endeavours is. There are 100 cards, with a result for each action you can perform (shoot, strike, interact, etc.), like a trivial pursuit card, with the different classes of questions all on one card. so you state that you're shooting, then pick up an action card and follow the instructions on "shoot". you might hit, you might miss, you might fumble your gun and shoot yourself in the foot, your gun might jam and not fire (noise is an element in the game so this is different to missing). the likelihood of the event happening is in %, so as you have a 2% chance of shooting yourself, 2 of the cards will have this. there's a 40% chance to hit, so 40 cards will have a hit action, etc.

Is this a mechanic what has been done before? if so, has anyone played it, and do they think it works well? It's not a tactical wargame, it's a zombie game with comedic elements, so it's not a "serious" game. I wanted it to be fun for the players to read the bad results, such as slipping on a banana peel, or shouting "yes!" when you find something, that kind of thing, which dice can't supply without lots of tables. I also wanted it to be an easy game for anyone to pick up, so if the cards contain the instructions, it will be quicker to get into.

I believe Malifaux exclusively uses a deck of cards.

IIRC a few other non war game does so as well. (some space ship game i cant remember the name of)

but without the element of choice its going to feel a little boring imho. you would need to find a way to allow people to redraw or have effects that can effect the card flop otherwise its just flipping through a deck for x amount of hours.

You will need to fully shuffle the deck every time tonmaintain your %s and 100 cards is a lot to shuffle. I would trim it down to maybe 15 cards. Make it 10 cards are successful. 5 failures. 2 successes have bonus positives. 5 generic. 3 successes but with complications. 2 failures but with fortunate circumstance. 2 generic failures. 1 failure with added complications.


Each player gets their own 15 card deck and they reshuffle every 5 draws.

Maybe equipment and or perks in the game can add a cards to the deck but always in pairs (a special success and special failure).

100 might be a lot though as i play magic so long as they are sleeved its not that big a deal to shuffle an EDH deck [100 cards]

50 might be more convenient though at that point you could probably get a custom deck of playing cards online.

i kinda like the skill aspects of counting cards in malifaux though knowing whats been used and what you can "expect" without constantly shuffling the deck back together. its another consideration though might not fit the goofy zombino nature.

Ive thought about this a little more and here is my new pitch.

15 cards still.
Same divisions.

Lets say you have your categories on the cards.

Shoot
Melee
Defend
Athletics (for climbing running whatever)
Sneaky (for being quiet or finding a hiding spot or picking a pocket)
Intelligence (hacking a computer, searching a room)

Still have 2 cards with Success + benefit.
Still have 5 cards with a simple success
Still have 3 cards with success but complication (because it's interesting when things go wrong AKA failing upwards)

Still have 1 card that fail with extra complications (maybe if a character "life" is a abstract thresh hold for failures and any 1 failure is 1 lost life and this critical fail counts as 2 failures)
Still have 2 generic fails
Still have 2 fails but with fortuitous circumstances.

Equipment and such are cards that get put in your hand. A player can have no more than 3 cards in their hand. An equipment card has an automatic success in a single category (a gun card is an automatic success in shooting/running shoes are a automatic success in athletics).

The player can choose to use a card from their hand instead of drawing from their 15 card mini deck but discards the equipment when doing so. Creating a little bit of player agency in the RNG mix instead of a pure random draw.

 Lance845 wrote:
Ive thought about this a little more and here is my new pitch.

15 cards still.
Same divisions.

Lets say you have your categories on the cards.

Shoot
Melee
Defend
Athletics (for climbing running whatever)
Sneaky (for being quiet or finding a hiding spot or picking a pocket)
Intelligence (hacking a computer, searching a room)

Still have 2 cards with Success + benefit.
Still have 5 cards with a simple success
Still have 3 cards with success but complication (because it's interesting when things go wrong AKA failing upwards)

Still have 1 card that fail with extra complications (maybe if a character "life" is a abstract thresh hold for failures and any 1 failure is 1 lost life and this critical fail counts as 2 failures)
Still have 2 generic fails
Still have 2 fails but with fortuitous circumstances.

Equipment and such are cards that get put in your hand. A player can have no more than 3 cards in their hand. An equipment card has an automatic success in a single category (a gun card is an automatic success in shooting/running shoes are a automatic success in athletics).

The player can choose to use a card from their hand instead of drawing from their 15 card mini deck but discards the equipment when doing so. Creating a little bit of player agency in the RNG mix instead of a pure random draw.

I like the idea of a small hand of cards to play at certain times to bypass the action cards, so you could have a "crack shot" to auto-hit, or "feet don't fail me now" to run a bit faster, or "food-dar" to somehow find food as well when searching a room.

As for card quantity, I could reasonably reduce it to 50 cards, I think 15 would get a bit stale by the end. 50 cards with 7 actions to resolve per card, depending on what you're attempting, gives you 350 actions that can be resolved. I've also shuffled all the actions, so there's no card which has all success results.

Example card from my brainstorming:

Shoot Human 1 damage
Shoot Zombie 3 Damage
Strike Human Miss! 0 damage
Strike Zombie 3 damage
Interact(door) Unlocked - Open the Door
Interact(car) Open but Empty
Interact(Throw) Throw up to 12"

I basically wrote all the results on an excel sheet, then allocated random numbers to each column, the sorted by the random numbers, so each column is in a random order. then read each row to make a card.

It will make it nigh on impossible to count the cards, as you'll have to remember all 7 results for each card played.

As for modifying the roll, someone who's a gun nut can draw 2 cards and pick one when shooting, that sort of thing.

I've separated shooting humans and shooting zombies because it's easier to hurt a human, so zombies have a flat 0 damage or 2 - 3 damage. This kills basic zombies, but the more advanced zombies need a little more killing. as you have to hit their head, you're less likely to do damage at all.

I think I'll add a "Fate" card deck, which will allow people to bypass action cards by playing cards, either to boost their actions or hurt other peoples - making them make more noise, or trip over, etc.

Check out Tactical Assault's Combat Cards. They use the cards for both actions, situations, resolving actions, and figuring scatter.

I'll add it's useful to think about the kind of math you're doing with the cards. Something I love is Catan's card supplement replacing the dice with a set of cards. Usually you roll 2D6, and so the cards take those 36 outcomes and fit in a 'year end' card where you reshuffle the deck so you only play the first standard deviation of dice rolls. No more winning because you rolled 10 snake-eyes! There's also bonuses on the cards so that the winner doesn't pull away mid-game.

I though of making a game where each unit has a set stat for attack, defense, etc. Only the situation leads to modifiers.

So, in a 1 on 1 straight attack a model with lower attack will never defeat a unit with higher defense..... period.

The only way low attack units could beat a high defense unit would be by modifying the attack with situational bonuses such as higher ground, flank attack, combined fire, etc.....

I made a block-game like that some years ago.

See also Relic Knights for an example of this. They used "Esper" cards, which were essentially just mana that you had to use to power your attacks, defense, skills, etc. And some had an "overboost" type thing where if you paid X more you got an additional effect.

Malifaux uses a "standard" card deck for replacing random number generation. There are a few others that use it in that way, too.

 some bloke wrote:
Basically, I want to make the game play without any dice. The random element of the game will be supplied by a deck of cards,

There are 100 cards, with a result for each action you can perform (shoot, strike, interact, etc.), like a trivial pursuit card, with the different classes of questions all on one card. so you state that you're shooting, then pick up an action card and follow the instructions on "shoot". you might hit, you might miss, you might fumble your gun and shoot yourself in the foot, your gun might jam and not fire (noise is an element in the game so this is different to missing).

the likelihood of the event happening is in %, so as you have a 2% chance of shooting yourself, 2 of the cards will have this. there's a 40% chance to hit, so 40 cards will have a hit action, etc.

it's a zombie game with comedic elements, so it's not a "serious" game. I wanted it to be fun for the players to read the bad results, such as slipping on a banana peel, or shouting "yes!" when you find something, that kind of thing, which dice can't supply without lots of tables. I also wanted it to be an easy game for anyone to pick up, so if the cards contain the instructions, it will be quicker to get into.

Your game sounds like a Choose Your Own Adventure game using cards as the mechanic.

I would design it as a 54-card deck using standard 2-1/2" x 3-1/2" cards, because it's a lot easier to get printed en masse. Any card printing company can do this for you.

I would have 4 cards for the players (one each), and 50 cards for the actions (shoot, run, search, etc.) / number (10 each 1-5). Each player starts with 5 action cards in hand, and plays one on their turn. To resolve the results of the action, they flip the top card of the deck to get the number.

Shoot Zombie:
1 = fumble; Zombie does one damage to you
2 = miss; nothing happens
3-4 = hit; kill Zombie
5 = crit hit; remove Zombie, may take a 2nd action