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Greetings,

This is a topic I know next to nothing about, and want to learn more. I know using cards as a resolution mechanic has been growing in popularity. I have seen it in Malifaux, Longstreet, and other games. I know many games use cards for "building" lists and to store information, I also frequently see them as an initiative mechanic, but I am interested in how to use cards to resolve actions

Since I know nothing about this topic, what are games that have done it really well, games that have not done it well, and what are the advantages/disadvantages of cards over dice?

Thanks for your help! Let's discuss.

Tactical Assault's Combat Cards do this in a neat way. Each unit gets a card that you assemble into a deck. It's miniature agnostic, and generic enough that you can make an army out of all sorts of things.

Here's a link: http://www.tacticalassaultgames.com/category/combat_cards/

Have you played Magic?

Malifaux is good, about as good as it gets.
Relic Knights is not good, it's a card game with miniatures.

Cards are great for initiative/activation, random events, etc. Just not what I like for combat resolution. Yet, my sense is that cards are a often misused in place of dice for combat resolution. It's a square peg novelty to be different.

Just to clarify: What do you mean with resolution mechanic?

I can't get warm with cards used as a substitute for dice.
Cards (Deck + Hand) are a semi-randomizer, it gives the player limited control over the outcome and adds an element of surprise. So cards can be a great thing to display dirty tricks (ambushes, traps etc.) and secret planning (hidden objectives for example). So spying could used the same way, by revealing the opponent's hand or look into his deck and change the card's order.

Cards used as dice is a little bit like driving a ferrari at walking speed.

Combat Cards uses cards to resolve actions. It also uses cards to declare actions, situations, and resolve scatter (aka 'random drift'). The neat thing is that although you play actions and situations out of hand, resolving any attacks involved in those actions or situations is done by pulling the top card from the same deck as that hand is drawn. It's considerably faster than rolling dice.

Thinking about it, I would use cards to resolve combat very differently from dice.

Each card would specify an offensive and a defensive effect. Each player would have a hand of 5 cards, and combat would be resolved by players placing exactly 3 cards face down in front of the opponent: 1 selected from your hand, 1 randomly drawn from deck, and the last blindly picked from opponent's hand. Opponent then chooses your attack and their defense from the pool and reveals them, discarding the 3rd. Then resolve the attack per the cards.

Reaction cards could then be played to replace selected cards with random cards from deck or opponent's hand; draw additional cards, and so forth.

This would be a more natural card-based diceless solution, rather than placing a number on each card and treating card draws as die rolls. I think it's also better than trying to force Poker mechanics into the game.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Thinking about it, I would use cards to resolve combat very differently from dice.

Each card would specify an offensive and a defensive effect. Each player would have a hand of 5 cards, and combat would be resolved by players placing exactly 3 cards face down in front of the opponent: 1 selected from your hand, 1 randomly drawn from deck, and the last blindly picked from opponent's hand. Opponent then chooses your attack and their defense from the pool and reveals them, discarding the 3rd. Then resolve the attack per the cards.

Moonstone, a neat little skirmish game, did something similar to this with combat. Essentially an enhanced rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock but with the choices drawn from a deck. It's surprisingly fun.

Edit:

Might as well share a link. https://moonstonethegame.com/ Rules and cards are available for free downloads, too.

Thanks for the reference.

My sample card-based combat resolution system was simply illustrating the need to use the features of cards as cards.
____

Went through Moonstone - great reference!

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Thanks for the reference.

My sample card-based combat resolution system was simply illustrating the need to use the features of cards as cards.

Yup. And I agree, just using cards as an alternate RNG for dice isn't the most interesting way to use them, though that is certainly one way.

And it really is a shame about Relic Knights' implementation (and so much else about that, really...), as it could have been good.

A great game that has no dice and uses cards to determine actions is Gloomhaven. Well worth it and very interesting style of dungeon crawling.
Proving that done right, cards can be implemented sucessfully.

Some advantages of using cards over dice:
- Fit more information on a card
- Production cost is cheaper than dice
- Easier to customized when prototyping a game

You might want to look into is deck building mechanics for cards; how players can purchase more upgrade/power-up cards to put into a combat resolution deck to improve the chance of success.

Forbidden Stars, Mage Knight...

I would argue against complicated card mechanics for basic resolution, even anything that's 2 or more steps in process.

If you are going to use cards, don't hesitate to make custom cards to fit your game and make it play faster, instead of shoehorning in things like poker cards.

Malifaux may be an example of where a card system kind of worked, but also is an example of it over complicating the basic resolution. Think about it this way, every time you do something in the game, you're going to have to do multiple card draws and flips, interpreting those cards, then taking time for each player to choose whether they cheat in a card from their hand.

This may seem insignificant for a single interaction, but multiply that by every time you do something in a game, it adds a lot of time.

It's one of the major reasons why Malifaux, while having only a few models on the table, takes as long to play as some larger skirmish games.

Instead, try customizing your cards such that a single card flip can reveal more interesting and nuanced results than a die roll. If you can't do that, consider sticking with dice.

I would say that Malifaux was going for a higher complexity game, a "deep" skirmish that used a "standard" deck of cards as its randomizer.

Word is that M3 is seriously streamlining like everyone else is (they should!), so that'll be a good change going forward.

One of the card systems which inspired me in a game was, funnily enough, Trivial Pursuit.

My basic premise was to take each action that you can perform and put a resolution to it on every card. Then, if you shoot someone, draw a card and resolve the "shoot someone" section written there.

The aim was to add more details than dice rolling could do quickly. EG, do you hit, how much noise do you make, do you fumble the gun, is it a critical hit. The game was a non-serious zombie idea, so some of the results were things like dropping the gun, stubbing your toe and shouting a swear word, creaky floorboards, opening doors and finding zombies - it was easy to fit all the details in on the cards, where it would have taken rolling on umpteen tables to determine all the possible results. Card counting was unlikely to succeed, as there were about 8 result on each card, and they were randomly shuffled (so there aren't "good cards" and "bad cards", any card could have any results on it when I made them).

So long as the players have an idea ahead of time what they're in for...

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Thinking about it, I would use cards to resolve combat very differently from dice.

Each card would specify an offensive and a defensive effect. Each player would have a hand of 5 cards, and combat would be resolved by players placing exactly 3 cards face down in front of the opponent: 1 selected from your hand, 1 randomly drawn from deck, and the last blindly picked from opponent's hand. Opponent then chooses your attack and their defense from the pool and reveals them, discarding the 3rd. Then resolve the attack per the cards.

Reaction cards could then be played to replace selected cards with random cards from deck or opponent's hand; draw additional cards, and so forth.

This would be a more natural card-based diceless solution, rather than placing a number on each card and treating card draws as die rolls. I think it's also better than trying to force Poker mechanics into the game.

Dungeonquest and the advanced rules for original Adeptus Titanicus did something like that - each side secretly chooses one of three attack options, then the resulting pair is compared to a matrix of all possible results to tell you what happens.

Also, try to find a copy of White Dwarf 130 (October 1990). That had the card game Chivalry which was intended to be the combat engine for a 100 years war-era game that never materialised. In that, each player has a hand of cards. The attacker plays a card with a body part highlighted. The defender has to play a card with a matching body part or they swap roles and the defender potentially suffers damage.

Hm. I'm not sure I like the "blind match" mechanic in Chivalry as it feels very random, not strategic. I'm not even sure there's a Rock-Scissors-Paper guessing pattern that one can exploit over a series of rounds with a particular opponent.

The AT mechanic is better, as players know the table, and can try to steer results based on how their opponent might play.

I think Malifaux develops that RCP mechanic.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Hm. I'm not sure I like the "blind match" mechanic in Chivalry as it feels very random, not strategic. I'm not even sure there's a Rock-Scissors-Paper guessing pattern that one can exploit over a series of rounds with a particular opponent. .

Chivalry didn't have a blind match. Each player had a hand of 6 card, from which they chose their card to attack or defend (or if you didn't have an appropriate defence card, you could play off the top of the deck representing a desperate move). Several cards in both the attack and defence decks covered multiple areas (say, head, shoulders, chest for a high attack, or both legs and groin) and there was a feint attack card that covered head and lower torso, IIRC, that was tricky to defend against.

Sorry, I misunderstood. To be fair to Chivalry, the rules as presented were a fairly early playtest, not the finished game.

Anyway, I was just suggesting previous implementations of what I thought you were talking about, in case any of them offered anything of interest.

@AGP - no worries. I'm not familiar with the Chivalry system, so I was just reacting to the brief summary you had shared.

There are any number of implementations, and it's not unreasonable for what it's trying to do. It's just not something I'd necessarily want to implement in my game(s) for combat resolution.