The game is designed for 2 people. One plays for scropion and the other one for grasshopper. Roles are distributed by wish, coin toss or any other appropriate option.
Card types
2 – scorpion and grasshopper (goal cards)
4 – short path (2 for scorpion, 2 for grasshopper)
8 – long path (4 per each. Flood cards for scorpion and explosion cards for grasshopper)
2 spare or some kind of special cards? or just add them to the long path cards? Or special start cards (player can’t start building the path until gets this card)
Goal:
To win the game you must place 4 cards of the long path or 2 cards for short path faster than your opponent.
Cards are shuffled and set in one card deck. Players are allowed to have only 2 cards for each turn. The game works on “believe me or not” principle. During each turn a player must place one card. Despite they have or don’t have the right card, they can place a card face down and the opponent decides if they believe it or not. If the opponent believes, the card is left as it is and the game continues. If they don’t believe, the card is revealed. Player can use any card, whether it’s long or short path.
What if it’s the truth (e.g. flood card for scorpion or explode card for grasshopper)?
- Opponent has to give one long path card. If they don’t have one, it can be substituted with a short path card. If there’re no opposite cards in stock, they take away one card from their path (first long or short) and it comes back to the deck.
What if it’s a lie?
- The card is passed to the opponent to add to their long or short path (depending on the card type revealed)
The game ends as soon as one of the players complete any path to their goal.
Questions to consider:
- How to get short path cards? (solved) – they appear randomly from the card deck. Luck element.
- How to distribute long path cards? (solved) – shuffled card deck and take some amount of cards by each player.
- How to implement “believe me or not” element? (solved) – read above.
- What if you don’t have the right card and how to get the right one from you opponent? (solved) – read above.
- Can you exchange short path cards? (solved) – generally not, but they can be passed within “believe me or not” system
- What is the optimal number of cards a player can have? (to be play tested) – It doesn’t work with no restrictions, works fine with 2 cards. Maybe try 3.
ALternative option:
To extend the game, short path cards can be used only as marker of each round’s winner. Maybe 2 spare cards can become one more pair of short path, so that we can have a min no. of rounds 3 (pure victory) and max of 5 rounds.
Current project state: ready to playtest the draft.