Environment Deck

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Banalitybob
Posts: 12
Joined: Wed Aug 26, 2020 12:48 am

I have been building an Arda deck, and keep running into wanting the Environment cards (Doors, Gates, Snowstorm, Star of High Hope, etc) to have a more organic impact on play.

I was wondering if anyone has made or has feedback on a small Environment deck that flips a random card on each players movement/hazard phase (hazard player chooses effects for hazard short events, hero chooses for resource).

The main Arda deck would contain some number of Twilight to combat particularly devastating effects, and a few cards like Crown of Flowers to preserve effects players want. I feel that this would add a fun level to the game of battling the elements, and it would be pretty self policing, because Doors/Gates would be able to clear particularly nasty stacks at random.

Thoughts?
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CDavis7M
Posts: 2816
Joined: Fri Jul 20, 2018 3:10 am
Location: California

Arda is very inconsistent by design. It's very Hit or Miss. I think the best Arda decks are those that try to improve consistency between the players, making decision-making and dice the determining factors, not card draw. Reducing the resource and hazard card set improves consistency. Separate MP hands improve consistency. Drop/Draw for each EoT improves consistency.

I haven't tried that idea. I do like the flavor of randomly rotating environments, but it would reduce consistency. And these resource effects are typically better for Elves and Dunedain, on the whole. So you may not have the luck of getting these cards. And even if you do get them, players now have an incentive to use Elves/Dunedain, reducing the novel company composition found in Arda.

I'm not really sure it would be self-policing given the randomness. And because you would need to include more copies of Gates/Doors to ensure policing. But then you are potentially adding more "bookkeeping" to Arda, which can already have the rotating characters and minor items, with potentially little effect (most of these cards require Gates/Doors, which may not even be in play).

There was discussion recently of playing Arda using solitaire-style hazard play, where the cards just get played off the hazard deck and the players only have resources in hand. I think your idea of random environments might work best in that setting because the hazards that are not playable yet (ie no Doors) would be set on the backburner to be played when Doors did come up. This at least gives the players some notice to reduce inconsistency between players.
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Banalitybob
Posts: 12
Joined: Wed Aug 26, 2020 12:48 am

I was also looking at having hazard decks separated (or even having precon hazard packets to hand out to players (i.e. a Wolves deck, an Orc deck, a Man deck, etc). This might end up with people have essentially 3 "hands" (MP, Resource, and Hazard).

I've also been looking at having gold rings in the MP deck, but having test be an action Sages can take at info sites and a separate deck for ring special items with some draw/look at top x option for when the test is made.

Additionally, pre-declaring wizards and having different wizards start at different locations was another idea, but i feel at that point im not really in Arda any more, I'm in an adjacent multi-player format.
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