Firefly CCG - how design works*
After a few months of our amazing local Firefly LARP, and seeing the fantastic pictures that came out of it, I wanted to make a CCG. Of course, life isn’t that smooth so I don’t have enough card images, not even for the simple card-matching game I came up with as a an idea for a mostly spoiler-less postgame activity. This did at least reveal that I wasn’t the only one interested, at least in theory.
With the images not available, I put the CCG on hold until I realised I could still make one for the show. My original plan was for each player to have a different “Captain” - Independent (i.e. Mal), Criminal or Alliance, who would then work through missions on different planets/moons, following a MECCG type plan. It got quite far with cards going around my head, and systems of payment and insanity ticking along nicely.
There were, unfortunately, several holes in the design: the stats were derived from our LARP but when I tried to assign them they just didn’t seem to gel; Reavers were a problem; and I really didn’t like how player-player combat would happen (even as I enjoyed the concepts for other interaction). Basically, when I actually tried to put it together, it didn’t work - so I went back to the drawing board.
Curiously, when I researched it, that was fairly close to the only practical idea someone had posted on the Internet. In 2004. I don’t think they got very far. There was another attempt in 2008, but I don’t even have a picture of what they were trying.
Other ideas I had originally imagined were: a Mythos-type game, which I thought would capture the mood brilliantly except I couldn’t imagine how conflict would work; Mythos is based on Sanity damage and external beings who are summoned at a cost, and wouldn’t translate usefully. The other one was a Lord of the Rings type game, where the characters move along a site-path. I originally discounted this one because I wanted something more flexible, but when my flexible approach proved too complicated, I went back to this idea.
My original plan was to have each player choose a different site path, but the choice of site path is a critical part of the balance in the original LotR game. That thought led to the idea that both sides played the crew of Serenity, following parallel tracks (this also solved the problem of working out enough jobs for Alliance crews). While I missed the idea of being able to play both sides, it did allow lots of room for different ‘hazard’ decks.
For those that don’t know LotR, you start with a small crew at a location chosen by the player going second. At the beginning of the turn, you can recruit Characters, Conditions (equipment/’enchantments’), Allies etc, at the cost of giving your opponent shadow points to spend later. Then you move to the next location (if new, chosen by the other player), which has a Shadow number - your opponent also gains a number of shadow points equal to that plus the number of characters. You are then considered at the new location (for the purposes of its game text), and your opponent tries to do Bad Things to you using those shadow points you built up. You can choose to run on, in which case your opponent gets more Shadow points and any hazard creatures still alive combine with new ones your opponents play. The winner is the first to get to the 9th location.
My plan is to change the stats, so instead of Prowess & Health, creatures have Threat and ?Finesse (essentially physical and social confict). When dealing with opponents, the defender can use either. I realised, for instance, that Wash and Kaylee have little of either but they will get the Pilot and Engineer abilities which will have a lot of really strong cards.
- If you lose physical combat, you are wounded (rotated 180°, as per MECCG); if already wounded you die
- If you lose social combat, you are discarded.
However, to lose you have to have your ability doubled. Firefly is full of face-offs where neither side is a clear victor, and I wanted to reflect them in conflicts. If neither doubles the other, nothing happens - but it does make running on dangerous. Also borrowed somewhat from MECCG, if you rotate in a conflict, you get +3 to the conflict stat.
Yes, there will be tapping (probably called Activating/ed vs Ready/ing). This is mainly because I want to be able to represent doing the job. This last bit is quite tricky because it’s possible to be facing all the wrong jobs that require skills you don’t have, so there will need to be some thinking about that as it comes up. You will also activate to use some Events and abilities.
Taken from LotR: there will be Browncoat, Mal and Firefly sigils to trigger abilities off.
Winning: probably the first to accomplish enough job points. I am not sure how that will work vs a fixed-length sitepath. It may be that both sides can lose, something I am not averse to.
Finally, at least at this point, I realised when I started writing this that, since we have a ‘journey’, it would be possible for the second player, rather than being a parallel crew as per LotR, could in fact be the Alliance (or some other foe). This sounds really cool, as it effectively becomes the job of the Firefly crew to get enough jobs done while staying ahead of the feds, while the feds task is to catch up with them, indeed get to the end, before that happens. It does have some drawbacks though, as the decks lose the balance of hero vs hazard cards: the ‘hero’ deck becomes all upside and countermeasures, while the ‘fed’ deck becomes a strange mixture of hazards and their own crew cards. It would lose the speed of card-flow that you get in the standard LotR system, which probably means it would move to a static card draw version. Also, you get an odd system where some cards generate or are paid for by Hazard points, some generate or are paid for by, say, Resistance points. Fun as it sounds, it feels a little too confusing.
That’s pretty much as far as I’ve got at this point. I have card ideas whirling around my head but nothing down. Frankly, I feel I want a visual reference at this point which means creating something in MSE to mock them up and while I can, I have other priorities at this point - like all the Rage updates I am meant to be doing. But if anyone wants to chip in at this point, please do.
* Or MY design process anyway.