Wolves of the Four Seas - stuck with rules designing

[Suna]

Hello, this is my first post in this forum, and there is one dire problem I am trying to solve, but with no visible success.
I'm going to try and avoid to make this post too long.
Basically, the game I am currently developing would like to be of the gamist type, set in a fantasy pirate world where cards' symbology is recurrent. In this world, pirate captains tend to rule ships together with other members of their brotherhood, possibly 4, there are 4 known seas (the four seeds), characters have four basic characteristics, the laws are 13 laws in the brotherhood (ace to 10, plus king, jack and queen), so all considered, the most obvious option was to use cards for conflicts' resolution.
I had developed my first draft of the rules, then I had an evening in which a friend suggested a game with Primetime Adventures, which I did not know... and I saw that rules end up being very similar, as by drawing your hand you have a 50% chance to get a success on each card drawn. The only difference was that it's not red cards winning but cards of the same colour as the ability you chose for that conflict (hearts: social; diamonds: exploration of any kind; clubs: navigation; spades: physical fight). Players may add passive situational description to draw more cards. But apart from this and the fact that the GM sets difficulty in a way that is similar to Don't Rest Your Head, now I feel like my rules end up being a clone of Primetime adventure.
Any suggestion on how to change this embarrassing similarity -after all, I want to design something completely new!- would be precious to me.
I'm no native english speaker, but I hope my explanation was clear enough. In case, please let me know if some parts of this post aren't clearly expressed...

[Vulpinoid]

It could be worse...

You could be designing a card driven pirate related game with mechanics very similar to the Eighth Sea, which I released in the middle of last year.

Both use Cards.

Both use Pirates.

Oh...you are designing something similar to the Eighth Sea. I won't say, "the same as the Eighth Sea", because I'm sure you'll have your own twists on things, and you probably don't want to throw in the complications of time travel.

I've been told by a few veteran indie game players that the Eighth Sea has some similarities to Prime-Time Adventures in the way it handles player interaction compared to character interaction.

I actually use suits rather than colours for most tasks (clubs = physical conflicts, hearts = social conflicts, spades = mental conflicts, diamonds = mystical conflicts).

There are a lot of things I could offer you in regard to this topic, but I'd feel that I'm just helping you rewrite another version of my own game (with a slightly different setting).

I'm not asking you to just buy my game and have a look at the way I handled various concepts...but it might help.



Otherwise, throw some questions my way, and I'll see what I can do to help.

V