[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<Issues that arose:

[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.