Delta Deck: cards for playing G40 Delta house rules

@hengst said in [G40] Hengst's Standard Rule Simplifications:

A bombardment may be declared at any time; it need not be in support of an amphibious assault.

This is interesting. Do you think maybe BBs hit @2 and CAs 1 would be better for Bombard if no Amphib ? Regular 4 and 3 if the Marines going in ?

Nice that you’re testing :)

During an interview with Larry Harris we did a few months ago, I mentioned house rules for A&A centered around Espionage. We got a ton of feedback about it. So, now that we have completed the complete series on Air Combat and Sea Combat, we decided to double back to make a video about possible set of house rules that center around the concepts of spycraft.

We worked with our friend Jonathan Bosch to develop a few fun options. We aren’t claiming these are 100% flushed out, but our hope is that folks will give them a try and have some fun with them. Let us know what you think in the comments and if you would like to see more videos like this one!

Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/6MaDGKjVbDI

@Faramir
Thanks for your reply. I’ve considered this as an option too. It’s simple and easy to remember.
Damage can range between 4 and 20 though which is a bit inconsistent for my liking.
Thanks for sharing your ideas nonetheless

Thanks, we might give it a go not to change anything.

Off topic: I’ve thought about Europe 1940, but it’s so many rules and exceptions. I’d rather underwhelm than overwhelm them  :-) If they like Spring '42, they can always ‘upgrade’ to Global/Europe 1940 later on. If they think Spring 42 is too complicated, then the game series just isn’t for them. If they think it’s too simple, I can spring my Global-1940-monstersized-board-trap  :lol: I just want them to have a good time, get used to the flow of the game and see what happens.

@der-kuenstler For some reason I’m just finding this thread now. I mostly agree with what others have said. The only thing I want to add is that if you want to play with more than the simplest of house rules, you should feel good about creating play aids to support those rules. Seriously, go out and print your new rules, in full color. Put some thought into how to design and lay out a chart or a cheat sheet that will help players remember and use your rules. Cut them out so they’re the right size, and then laminate them or print them on heavyweight cardstock. If your rules involve any special pieces, buy sculpts for those pieces or use some paint or something to convincingly alter the closest available piece; don’t just slap a chip underneath artillery and say “OK, now it’s a self-propelled artillery.”

If you’re not willing to put in that work to make things easier on your players, then why should they put in the work to test out your house rules? It can take 8+ hours for a single playtest; if you invite 3 friends over, that’s 24 hours of other people’s time. You should be willing to put in at least 10% of that (2 hours) on creating play aids to improve that experience. If you’re not, maybe that’s a sign that you’re having so much fun imagining new rules that tickle your fancy that you’re not really thinking hard about whether those rules will be fun to play with for others.

You’re correct CWO marc, that was more or less exactly what I was suggesting.  :-D But its just a suggestion.

I find that a collaborative approach is generally stronger, than trying to strike off and develop a bunch of independent competing systems that are trying to achieve similar goals. House rules likewise are more fun when you get a couple houses trying the same thing to see how it plays out.  Forums communication is slow sometimes, since we have lives outside of A&A, but I’d trust YG to pull in the reigns, or excise the extraneous, if I’ve gone too far left field.

The main reason I think it’s cool to try and attach values to the standard deck, is that it’s very easy to tweak and test the advantages this way. So from a development standpoint, it is possible to test things right away before we plug in values and set the deck. Rather than drafting rules first and sending it out to the printers in China, only to find a week or two later, that it would be awesome to add something or tweak some aspect of it.

@Young:

Sorry for my absence here, I’m working on many different things at once.

My plan is to create a deck with 54 cards…

2 of each nation specific strategic advantage cards = 32 3 of each community specific strategic advantage cards = 15 1 of each nation specific progressive advantage cards = 7

If all this can be easily translated into a generic playing card deck, than all is good… However, my custom cards look much better than a regular deck.

Thanks for all the comments and interest in this idea, I will address all your post’s in detail soon.

Cheers.

Oh cool there’s the man! So with a 54 card deck planned that matches exactly a full deck including jokers! I expect also that the printers print with those numbers in mind for their boxing. This is a strong start because it means you’d have the same number of total fortunes cards as you have in a normal deck.

So picture this, to achieve a specific 1:1 card to card ratio, all you’d have to do is flag the joker… (You mark it with a felt pen on the face side.) Now you have 54 distinct cards, and you could match every card in your fortunes deck to a card in the flagged standard deck (both jokers in play.)

Now consider that all you would need at that point, to make the fortunes deck a standard deck (a deck that could function just like a real deck as well as a fortunes deck), is to include one small graphic in just one corner of the card!

It could be very small, and doesn’t need to be mirrored (not on two sides,  head and foot, just at one or the other.) Tiny as you like.

Envision a small K inside a Heart, or an A inside a spade, a 10 inside a diamond,  or a 2 inside a club. All small and tucked off to the lower right hand corner of the card.

These symbols would look badass anyway, like tiny war code designations!  :-D The sort of thing one might paint on the side of a bomber, or draft up in a patch. It could look cool and unassuming, but provide addition functionality, while retaining the overall aesthetic cohesiveness of a WW2 era Fortunes Deck. It could even provide a shorthand reference for the individual cards.

Manhattan Project = Suicide King, K inside the Diamond
Or things of that sort. For each card

You know like code hehe

It wouldn’t dominate the card aesthetically, it only needs to be large enough that it can be read by the player holding the card. This doesn’t seem like too tall an order, considering that this one minor addition of suit/number info, would expand the potential use of the deck considerably.

Think of all the things you could do with a standard deck of cards, one that had cool art and cool R&D bonus rules. It just seems fairly easy, so I thought I would make the case. Not only could you use it for R&D, but you could do R&D and anything else you can create with a full deck of playing cards. It just seems like an easy win on all counts.

And it would make testing the fortunes pretty easy.

There are only two conditions you need to meet for this to hold up in translation.

First: Uniform backs
If the backs of the cards in the fortune deck are not uniform,  then the fortunes deck could not function as a normal deck (even if they all have suits/numbers). However, a normal deck could still have the fortunes values translated onto it in that case. Going one direction fortunes translates to standard (but not the other way round unless the backs are uniform.)

Second: Each card is distinct.
No two cards in the fortunes deck are exactly alike. (Unless you want just 2, in which case you could use unflagged jokers.) This would make translation pretty simple. We could start playing with it tonight if wanted :)
Again you could translate one direction, but not the other unless all cards are distinct.

Anyhow, these are just suggestions, but I think it could be cool. I like the first edition Delta deck a lot. I’d play black jack with it or crazy 8s or poker, if I could!

@CWO:

@Young:

The problem as it is right now (if it actually is a problem) is that the Axis powers (Japan in particular) will absolutely profit the most for capturing enemy cities (Japan will essentially claim up to $9 for cities that are easy to take and hold), so to add a Chinese capital city for no reason but to give Japan yet another target to profit from may unbalance the game.

Fair enough.  As I said, it was just an idea that I tossed in for fun in case it it turned out to be worth considering.  It arose from the discussion of the player capitals versus the cities, and I didn’t scrutinize it in any detail because I wanted to leave it up to you to decide if it worked or not in the context of your house rules.  So I have no problem with the idea turning out to be problematic.

No problem, I greatly appreciate all your suggestions and there have been some great modifications because of them, I guess my problem is that I have played over in my head a lot of angles to these objectives, and it’s very easy to tip the scales of balance when restructuring an entire game mechanic like this.

its another house rule that I had dug up in another forum that allows artillery to “shell” or bombard an adjacent territory for 1 ipc per shot