[Open Design: Mercenaries #6] Designing Territory Cards

Work is progressing steadily on Mercenaries. We have a working model that should be suitable for our first playtest. We are also making considerable progress on designing the mercenary cards for the game. Let’s mix things up by jumping into the design process for the game’s deck of 15 territory cards. I don’t want to distract everyone from designing mercenaries, but working on the territories simultaneously might create opportunities for the cross pollination of ideas. Also, if you’re burning out on designing the mercenaries, trying your hand at territory cards for a while might be a nice change of pace. Territories should be much simpler to create, because each card only has a couple of substantial features. I’ll explain the format below, and then give a few examples to get us started.

The Format for a Territory Card

[Name] (Each card should have a unique name.)

[Descriptive Text] (This is simply to add some flavor.)

Tags: [specific tags that apply to this card] (Tags, or keywords, are an idea that gets used in a lot of collectable card games, and I think it could work well for this game. Tags are just single words or short phrases that have no mechanical effect in themselves, but they can be referred to by rules on other cards. It is basically a way to create loose categories for cards and assign an individual card to one or more of those categories.)

Victory Points: [value from 0-3] (Only use 0 if the card has a very good special effect.)

[Special Effect Name]: [describe the card’s special effect]

Example Territory Cards

Adamantium Mines

These incredibly deep mines yield resources vital to the construction of advanced war machines.

Tags: Resource

Victory Points: 2

Adamantium Plating: During a Conquering Phase, on your turn, you may spend 2 credits to give all Mech mercenaries in your army +1 Combat Power.

Falcon’s Aerie

This isolated base rests high in the mountains on the border of two feuding nations.

Tags: Base

Victory Points: 1

Returning to the Nest: Your bids are considered to be +5 credits higher when bidding on Falcon Force mercenaries.

Last Armies Memorial

This immense monument honors the soldiers who died in the Last War of Armies.

Tags: Landmark

Victory Points: 1

Veteran’s Honor: Veteran mercenaries in your army have +1 Combat Power.

Your Ideas

Right now, you can help by contributing your own ideas for territory cards. Feel free to submit any ideas you have in the comments to this post. You can submit just a general concept for a territory or a special effect, or you can post a full territory using the format above. Hopefully, the examples above will give you some idea of how the territory cards should work. If you have any questions about specifics, please ask. I’ll be happy to try to clear anything up for you.

One important thing to emphasize is that cards should tend to interact with each other as much as possible. Tags are a great way to make this happen. Another important thing is to avoid making any territory vastly superior to the others. If a territory has a high Victory Point score, then it should probably have a weaker special effect and vice versa. As an example of both of these principles, Last Armies Memorial is only worth 1 Victory Point, but if you already have the James Tucker and John “Grizzly” Hancock mercenary cards, then it’s suddenly a lot more valuable to you (because they’re both veterans).

I’ll look forward to reading your submissions. We’ll need a total of 15 territory cards, but extras won’t hurt, so post as many as you would like!