Reading another forum, and read something I didn't fully take in, but the brain went off on one.

Card driven games, you draw a card, then activate that unit. People complain about the lack of control/planning.

Has anybody tried
Have a hand of 3 or 4 cards.
Draw one
Play the card of your choice?

You'd either have to have a pack each, and take turns, or turn the top card, whoever's card it was goes, but your opponent would know what you had in your hand.

Thoughts?

(Son has just pointed out this is essentially Memoir 44, but I'm thinking now IABSM.)

The board game Eastern Front Tank Leader had a system whereby each unit had a card.

The active player played a card to activate a unit, his opponent could trump it with a better card, the active player could trump that in turn and so on until a player dropped out. Then you activated units from the top of the stack down.

Better trained/ motivated/ supplied units would have higher values.

It gave players more control over things than Memoir '44 style card play.

Im thinking a straight port into already existing games, to give a tad more control

Also the Combat commander series of games from GMT Games

Quote from: Last Hussar on 14 October 2015, 08:46:25 PM
Im thinking a straight port into already existing games, to give a tad more control

Heh! I'm tinkering with Memoir '44 trying to find a way to do away with cards in favour of something less random but still unreliable. I'll wave as we pass

Simin Miller's To The Strongest ruleset uses cards to activate and re-activate depending upon the value of the card drawn.

If you google, there are some play-throughs and reviews.

Outside of that boards games have been making use of cards in this way for some time and entire series have grown up around working game engines.

I note that East Front Tank Leader (out of print for many years) is on a re-print list.

A simple sytstem is to use the colour of the suite to activate - so say, black will allow a French unit to activate and Red an Austrian unit to activate. then create a deck that represents the command capability, so in a battle where the French had better troops and leadership, your deck of say 30 cards, might have 17 black cards (French) and 13 red cards (Austrian), so that over the course of 30 activations the French get 4 additional activations.

Last Hussar,

Yes, I have played a system of approximately the kind you're asking about. It was a friend's tweak of Napoleon's Battles, we fought Quatre Bras. As I vaguely recall:

We Anglo-Dutch started with and could hold up to 4 cards, the more numerous French had 5;
Turns were IGO-UGO and cards were more like command pips, not tied directly to particular units;
drew 2 cards at start of turn;
use a card to move a unit or group of units, OR to rally a unit (OR maybe some other special function I don't recall);
court cards had special functions, one a bonus when firing, another a bonus in melee, a wild card etc.

Worked pretty well. Does that help?
I don't really like card activation games where you draw a card to move a unit, certainly not for multi-player games*.
Not that you asked for my opinion. :-)

Chris

*Even though that's how Scott and I did it with the "Arc of Fire" skirmish rules ...

Card activation is something that the TFL rules seem to use a lot.  Dux Brit and Sharp Practice for instance.  They are more based on the commanders and when the card or Chit for a commander is drawn they activate and spend their activation/initiatives to make people around them do stuff.

Anything not activated by commanders at the end of the turn get allowed some basic actions. 

Sharp practice also has the tiffin card which ends the activations when it's drawn, so not every commander will get to act. It makes you have to think on your feet to get things done and simulates the chaos of battle quite well.