[House of Cards] First Playtest of My Heist Game

[Eric J. Boyd]

This last week I got to do the first playtest for House of Cards, a pick-up and play heist game intended for single session play. You can take a look at the draft we were using here.

We decided to follow the procedures as written, so I ended up playing a character rather than acting as GM. This turned out great since I got to observe play dynamics without being forced to split my focus taking on GM tasks.

Character creation is quick and spare, but I am hoping to create a sense of character investment in play. The player gives his character two traits, physical or behavioral. Then each other player states a rumor about the character within criminal circles. Providing additional guidance on creating these rumors needs to go in the next draft. Our characters were –

-Jimmy Finn, the leader – extremely fat and generous to a fault. He's rumored to actually be greedy and ruthless, frequently the sole survivor of a job, and to have a beloved brother who has pissed off the Russian mob.
-Todd, the tech guy – stunningly handsome and a terrible liar. He's rumored to be gay, to have a flush Swiss bank account, and to refuse to get his hands dirty on a job.
-Angus Throckmorton, Jr., the face man – a gum chewing womanizer. He's rumored to have a beautiful wife that's cuckolding him, to be deeply in debt, and to be too gutless to use deadly force on a job.
-Martin Steel, the wheelman/muscle of the team – a dwarf who is also a hypochondriac. He's rumored to be connected to the Russian mob, to be a former circus performer, and hypersensitive to having his work criticized.

The keys to the heist are the item, where it's at, and who owns it. These were decided cooperatively, and then each player got to add a detail to each. We had the following:

-A prototype supercar – of German/Swiss manufacture, with an AI module that will need schmoozing to permit its theft, an unstable power source, and room to seat only one.
-The car is at a European car show being held in Budapest on a riverboat casino on the Danube. The Hungarian Secret Police are providing extra security and a sophisticated security camera system protects the whole boat.
-The owner of the car is Throckmorton Heavy Industries, the company owned by Angus' father. The car's success is essential for the company to survive since it has shifted to an environmentally friendly business plan with illicit monetary support from the Russian mob.

The character sketches and situation creation went smoothly, but the GM didn't seem to have much to do since the players were creating all the content. I'd like to find a way to strengthen the GM's role during this prep phase.

Play is divided into four rounds representing the different stages of the heist: casing the joint, making preparations, getting in, and getting out. We were able to play through the first two phases during the playtest since we had multiple stops to discuss issues and propose solutions.

We set off to case the joint, with successful scenes each introducing a new player-authored detail to the situation. Jimmy led off by going on board the boat to attend the show. He evaded the attempts of security to keep track of everyone visiting the event, introducing several other NPC team members along the way, including his brother incognito as one of the casino's security staff. Jimmy discovered that the boat's bilge pumps open up every 2 hours and are big enough for a person to fit through. What he missed was that the pumps contain motion sensors.

Angus also was on the ship and managed to seduce one of the female supervisors, also swiping a key to the employee's only portions of the boat.

Martin scouted out the various moorings where the boat picks up passengers and undergoes maintenance. He befriended one of the workers there before drinking him under the table with the assistance of herbal supplements. He stole an ID badge and a copy of the boat's docking schedule.

Finally, Todd was able to scope out the boat's security system and determine it is remotely monitored via the Internet so it would easily be hackable.

After this set of scenes, we had an interlude where we stayed in character and devised our plan for the heist in light of the details we had gleaned. This was a very entertaining portion of play that wasn't a part of the existing rules, but rather emerged organically. I'll be adding it to the next draft since it makes sense in the SIS and really gave the game direction and momentum as we moved to the next round, making specific preparations to carry out our plan. We ended the playtest before embarking on execution of the heist, but we were set to steal the car while the casino was docked for maintenance by feeding the security system fake footage and driving a decoy car away from the site while the rest of the team dismantled the car and sent the components through the bilge pumps to a waiting mini-submarine. A nice plan whether it would have worked or not.

Issues that arose:

-We played with a very loose rule that let a player reincorporate one or more details from their character's rumors or the heist to draw one additional card during their scene. The resulting narration didn't really create the character investment I was hoping to see. I'm thinking of making the rumors more focused on complications in the personal lives of the characters, tying most to NPCs. Then limiting the reincorporation bonus to a player addressing a rumor may close the circle in a way that heats things up. Since the other players are providing these, the Czege Principle wouldn't truly be at work here, right? Maybe giving the GM explicit advice to frame scenes in a way that highlights these rumors will further tie things together.

-The GM clearly didn't draw enough cards since he never did better than tie a player for successes. Hopefully a tweak or two will address that and provide the tighter game I want to see emerge. Adding a reincorporation bonus for the GM, maybe tied to the details of the heist, might help. Or maybe letting the GM create some additional details of the heist elements that start out secret and then are introduced in play, with an accompanying bonus card to the GM, would work.

-This reincorporation bonus of one card per scene (by PC and/or GM) makes me concerned in light of the recent traits discussions. I think I'm looking at more of an "after" model here. Reincorporating for the card is pretty much a no-brainer so I want to devise procedures that tie it to the fiction strongly enough that it's still used often but in a way that serves the character investment goal. Any suggestions or other games you would point me to that use a single bonus but do it in a very effective story-enriching manner?

-The players all agreed that there should be additional mechanics to allow the players to assist each other and truly function as a team. I agree, but these will likely make the characters even more effective and make things harder on the GM. This is gonna take a lot of testing and my mathlete skills are pretty basic. Does anyone know of any online resources that I could use to analyze large numbers of sample card draws looking for particular results by suit and rank?

-Information presentation will be a bit of a challenge for the game. My initial goal was to keep the paperwork and writing things down to a bare minimum to further facilitate pick-up play. But the details that get created became numerous pretty quickly. Maybe a note card for each character and heist element will do the job, but something more organized may be needed.

-Finally, the game's mechanics currently require exactly 4 players and a GM. I'd like it to be playable by fewer people but I'm not sure how to adapt the card playing mechanics to pull it off. Currently each character role is tied to a particular suit so having only three would mess things up. If anyone has any suggestions on how to overcome this obstacle I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading.

[Paul T]

This seems pretty cool.

My initial impressions are:

1. I can't quite follow how the card mechanics work from the writeup, in particular when it comes to whether we play them one at a time or plop them all down. A rewrite or some examples could help, although maybe I just didn't read it carefully enough.

2. It does seem a shame that the GM is not more involved in the prep for the game. I would like to see the GM as an equal participant in this stage. If you're tied to four statements per topic, maybe they could rotate through the whole group, like A, B, C, D, then GM, A, B, C, then D, GM, A, B, etc.

3. It also seems a shame to be limited to exactly five players, all the time. Removing a suit was the first thing that came to mind for me, but it might have other unwanted side effects.

Sorry I don't have anything more useful to say. I just wanted to chime in and let you know I read your post and the rules document, and am looking forward to more.

[Paul T]

Oh, one more thing:

How does keeping track of Edge work in terms of tension and pacing? For instance, if the players accumulate a ton of Edge early, will it take the tension out of the last few rounds if play, since we know we're unlikely to fail? Or vice-versa?

Not having played the game, I wonder if something might be needed to preserve the tension until the end of the story. How was it in the playtest?

[Eric J. Boyd]

Paul,

Thanks for your comments. With respect to playing the cards, our GM varied between putting them down one at a time and dropping them in bunches. I definitely need to think more about how best to play the cards to create the fiction I'm shooting for. I'd like for play to be able to have a quick, staccato quality for an action sequence as well as the option of a smooth build-up to a single big crisis. That could be as much a function of the GM's narration as the exact method of card play, though.

The rotation method you mention for prep would definitely help the GM be more involved. Maybe I could always include the GM and rotate among the players.

Dropping a suit to play with fewer people occurred to me, too. I also could reallocate the powers among the players and maybe have two scenes each per round. Not sure if that would throw the mechanics off or not.

In the playtest, the players accumulated 9 Edge during the two rounds of play and spent 2 of them to create two sidekicks. The GM never did better than tie a player during a scene, so he had no Edge at all. On the other hand, two players had used their special abilities twice, so they would have been more vulnerable in later rounds. Giving the GM more cards will hopefully balance things out to create the tension I want to see.

In addition, we discussed changing the Edge structure so that the GM starts out with a pool of Edge (20 or 25) and the players take Edge from that pool into their own collective pool upon successes. The GM can then take some back if adversity succeeds over a character. And spending Edge would return it to the GM's pool, making it a risky proposition indeed. This should make the game tighter and tense without depending upon large player failures, but we'll have to give it a try next time.

[Ron Edwards]

Regarding the prep phase, could it be as simple as having the GM elaborate on the job based on each character?

"This job is especially hard for you because ..." and the "because" is based on some aspect of the character. Plus it actually does make the job harder, maybe increasing the GM's starting hand or something.

Best, Ron

[Eric J. Boyd]

Ron,

It would be pretty cool to have the GM give the job character-based traits for the GM to invoke during play rather than (or in addition to) the player. And anything that gives the GM some extra oomph at this point is welcome.

Thanks.

[Jason Morningstar]

One nice thing about this design is that the exception-based special powers, combined with playing cards, means that you could easily introduce more than the four canonical types - maybe the Muscle, for example, or the Inside Man.  They'd have different rule-bending powers.

It seems pretty brittle, really sort of requiring four players and a GM.  Could you add a fifth player whose "suit" was face cards?  That'd be 12 cards to the regular suit's 13, but the introduction of NPC rule might make it weird. 

[Jason Morningstar]

Oh, hey, I really think you should encourage teamwork.  Maybe one way to do that would be with discards - if the players are using their discards to build hands (maybe poker hands) with some narrative/mechanical payoff for the guy who finishes the hand, that'd be fairly easy to manage.  So as a group you build up a straight, and the guy who finally lays the last card can choose any special power from among his team-mates, or he can narrate a moment of cooperation, or gets an extra Edge, or something fun and cool.

[Eric J. Boyd]

Jason,

More team-based mechnics is definitely another thing I'm looking for. I'm revising the draft to allow players to assist each other by playing one of their own successful cards during another player's scene--bringing them into the other player's scene to help out.

The poker hands formed from their discards is super hot. Maybe the GM could get into the act as well, making it a race between the sides to complete a particular poker hand and claim the mechanical benefit from it.

I really do want the ability to accommodate a flexible number of players. Using certain ranks of cards or maybe certain ranks of a particular color (red or black) might work and I could likely balance out the number of cards by giving them an extra wild card. I guess I also could simply have the additional roles piggyback and use the same suit as another one. The Inside Man and the Muscle (which kind of got clumped together with the Wheelman a la The Transporter) both would make good additional roles. Any thoughts on the other end--reducing the number of players below four? Does removing a suit from the deck get the job done?

Thanks for the comments.

[Jason Morningstar]

It's hard to say without playing whether just removing a suit would impact play in a negative way.