Simple casual card game

So I was thinking..can't do much graphics, can't do much music, can't do too much content, what game can I make?

After playing Dnd a lot an idea popped into my mind - a simple card-based game where you explore and survive. To be clear, the cards are just a visual, it could as well be a text adventure.It goes like this:

• You are a character with stats like health, gold, maybe some kind of karma
• You are in a certain environment - a tavern, city, forest, dungeon - each has a set of cards and a property - for example in tavern you can regenerate health
• Based on the environment you draw cards with NPCs, special occurrences, loot, and other environments
• You can interact with NPCs - fight, trade, get information - probably only one choice and then the card gets discarded
• When you draw another environment, you "travel" there
• You can have a few cards stored - items, companions..

The goal could be either to survive the longest you can, collect epic loot or just enjoy the world and lore. It could be a completely random adventure between different environments, or the environments could be unique exact places and the player would make their way far out from the starting point.

One similar game that comes to mind is Reigns where you rule a kingdom, different situations occur and you make binary decisions about them.

Do you know other similar games I could look up? Ways to make this interesting and fun even with little to nothing aside from text?

 

You could check out the old World of Warcraft TCG (not Hearthstone, the paper version), specifically the way they did dungeons near the end of the run. Each player has a deck that they've crafted as normal, but the dungeon has its own deck of cards that are specific to the deck. Each player gets a turn, and then the dungeon takes a turn, which presents the players with some enemies to fight and some magical effects to overcome.

Card Crawl on android may also be interesting to you. You have a set of actions you can take like attack, pick up loot, use item, etc. The inn keeper has a deck of baddies that you have to face in whatever random order the deck is in. You see how far you can go / how much loot you can make.

The success of a game like you are describing, I think, comes down to the lore you can try to pack into the little bit of space you have on a card. You could look at Magic the Gathering for this sort of thing as well. The cards in a block help tell a story using the title of the card, the effect of the card, and the flavor text associated with it.

 

Hey do you have skype? My partner and I are currently working on a card-based management game. You might be interested in working with us.
Jeff

 

Are you still working on your card-based management game? I have 2 which I'm designing, but would like to team up with some coders to help with a stats system.

 

I'm not working on any project right now. If you send me some info I'll look into it.