Yes, I know. You are a small studio. But your game is of immense radness. And really should be done in the real world (video games are so yesterday!). And heck, the art is all done already! Some cardboard dungeon tiles, some cardboard standees, gobs and gobs of your best cards, a runaway success of a kickstarter campaign... Et viola. You folks really ought to pitch this to a boardgame studio with experience in card games (Fantasy Flight Games...?) or experience running kickstarter campaigns (Cool Mini or Not just ran their first non-minis game kickstarter - and CardHunter does have potential for little plastic dudes, does it not?), this seems like a home run! I mean, besides being more work than you guys have time for. But aside from that, everyone wins!
OOOooO, thank you neoncat. Good stuff... Even if it's still just pipe dream territory. If the game does well, we may yet get there!
I have thought about this Pancakeonins and there are at least 5 issues changing this into a paper game. First, it would take sooooooo much longer to play and would probably be more campaign focused, not major but noticable. Second and a significant issue is how to package items. for MtG and the like every card is independant, in Card Hunter everything is item based so booster packs whould be harder to do, but again minor. The third would be how do be Game Masters need to be strict in reviewing decks to ensure people are sticking to items and not excluding lame cards (like unreliable blocks) or adding in extra oblits, 3 decks, up to 36 cards each might be a bit unwieldy, but still doable. However the first tricky issue is... LOOT! How would loot work? One of the primary factors in play CH is loot. Would you need to buy enough booster packs to get loot after each adventure and the related issue cost. Do you think there is a market for people to spend $100+ dollars just to get started playing a game? I know people spend that and more on CCGs, but CCGs are pretty compact, portable and can be played with a minimal investment ($30 and I was good in MtG for months). All you need are 2 decks and a flat surface. The last issue is that for CH the board game you would need a large surface (for maps) dice well 1 die at least for rolling, charater sheets, player figures, monster figures special tiles for terrain attachments and pen a paper to keep track of health for everyone on the map and of course moduals for each campaign. So it is doable, but I am not sure if this is what I would call highly marketable idea as it is taking a game that takes advantage of having virtual real estate and computer driven calculations, and putting all of that into the real world with human control and governance.
I've been playing a 'real life' Card Hunter RPG campaign with some friends for a few months now. We use D&D minis and a playmat to track our positions, and a web tool I made to manage our decks. Everything is equipment-based, just like the browser game, but alllll that is handled digitally. Our GM looks at the wiki and rolls dice to determine our loot drops. Gameplay is agonizingly slow because we're constantly asking each other "what cards do you have this turn? what's your HP at?" ... it's still fun though.
Excellent points, doog37! I too have wasted far too much time thinking about how best to translate this into a boardgame (as I like 'em better than videogames!). I think the game Myth is a better comparison than MtG (though I much prefer the latter to the former... But we don't need to get into that, I just think the comparison is useful). Briefly, Myth is a game that has dudes on a map, and your turn (as the dudes) is driven by the cards in your hand. Myth is very well produced; I think CardHunter could do with some nice cardboard boards and cardboard standees - that is an important part of the charm of this neat little game! A base set of CH could include six heroes (i.e., the base set would just be PvP - expansions could include PvE where "E" stands for the EVIL player who gets to play all the dungeon minions!) some board choices, 6 36-card decks and several sets of upgrade/loot cards. That does put the base set card count in at 216 + whatever loot cards are included, but this is not out of the realm of doable (e.g., Doomtown Reloaded has 286 cards in the base set, Android Netrunner has 252. These both retail for reasonable amounts - about $40 at a brick and mortar store, and much cheaper online). Following the "Living" card game expansion model would be much kinder for gamers: you buy a ~50-ish card deck knowing what loot (and associated equipment cards) it includes rather than buying a single foil pack with a small number of random loot items and the associated cards. The former strategy makes "leveling" much easier for players. Just getting started? Find the expansions with lower level loot for your dudes. Each expansion deck could be themed around a character (or Evil monster type) type and target level(s), with maybe a few other things sprinkled in... Gotta have something to lure in the buyers, I reckon? And as you note above, the table-top real estate requirement is higher than MtG - but I also think comparing to other card games, CardHunter isn't too extreme. You'll have a dungeon set out in front of you, and some system to track wounds and other ongoing effects for your three dudes (so cardboard counters would be needed), but again here the comparison to various other living card games is OK. Most of what Fantasy Flight Games puts out these days comes with lots of cardboard counters to help you track your game play. And this could actually be seen as a feature: a nifty crossover of a boardgame with MtG-like cardplay. The former does limit how portable and easy it would be to play, but since Myth failed so badly to bring this to reality, I think CH has a good opportunity here! And since it's had well over a year's worth of extensive online playtesting and the art is done, choosing which cards to start with wouldn't be too hard. Anyway, I do realize this is all very theoretical and not likely to happen anytime (soon...?), but it's fun to talk about. And who knows, some folks are working on print n play versions so with some labor, we might be able to give it a try!
Very cool sounding Flaxative! So you guys don't do any sort of character sheet or other tracking of HP and/or ongoing effects, that's all managed via web? That sounds rad - does that mean your web tool has all the cards in it? I'm still an old school fan of manual decks and such, but the way equipment and decks work does make your solution sound pretty durn good...
It has an older snapchat of the cards&items—before AotA. It's kind of a huge pain in the neck to update the card images. Maybe I could use neoncat's SVG generator... or finally write the card generator I had been discussing with @Jade303. This is what it looks like, by the way: Nothing fancy, just a button that gives you your racial move + 2 cards, a button that draws a card (for use if e.g. you get Inspiration'd or draw a trait), buttons to increase or decrease your HP... Click on a card to 'use' it, which just discards it. So that's a little different, because in actual Card Hunter when a card you play would be attached to a character or tile it doesn't go straight to your discard. I think Traveling Curse also wouldn't work with this system, but eh, on the whole this gets the job done. ('Edit Deck' takes me to a page where I can drag and drop items between my personal collection and my deck; 'Manage Collection' takes me to my party's Keep where we can distribute our joint loot amongst ourselves.)
Flax I must admit the fact that I saw your forums icon BEFORE I met the beloved Loot Fairy, I didn't realize how perfect of iteration it was. Of course the Loot Fairy is a tinkerbell style fairy crossed with the idea of a tooth fairy, crossed with garden gnome. The dashboard you have above does look pretty good, but I still think the digital to real is backwards in my humble opinion, even if I made a tabletop (very basic... okay barely playble) version of the seminal computer game Wasteland, which I was a big fan of, but really just an excuse to roll the cool dice I had bought to play AD&D but almost never used. I dont think I have my ol' d20 anymore it really is a shame as I am sure my 4 year old would get a kick out of it until my toddler tried to eat it... Ah toddlers the enemy of small things that are not nailed down.
Yeah, I agree. It's not a good route for Blue Manchu to go. The tool I made is just for my friends and I to play real-life CH coop with custom story. We can also insert new items and cards easily
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/09/me...een-that-wants-to-make-gaming-personal-again/ CH would be interesting in top down fashion with electronic tracking sensor tags on the miniatures and cards...the future of tabletop e-sports !
How accurate are phone GPS sensors these days? Because LACH (Live Action Card Hunting) could be all kinds of fun.
Would be awesome, if it could be accomplished. And yes, the Living Card Game format is the way to go (robust, static card sets that you can customize your decks with, with expansions being new static sets for more options). You could go with separate adventure packs for more map/monster options, or combine them with the expansions
Man, I thought that making a set for PVP would be difficult. And I have a pretty good idea about this! But making all the boards, monster decks and expansions??? That's a bit much. That is some serious development time. Would be interesting, to say the least.
