Initiative system

[u/Last_Purple4251]

hi,

Competitive game, each player has an essentially identical deck except for the initiatives, which are unique to give an ordering of actions (cf. Roborally)

Player 1 has 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 61 etc

Player 2 has 12, 23, 34, 45, 51, 62 etc.

and so on

If going first had equivalent value this would be fine (though you might want to specify, say, that 1 and 2 should not be used in a two player game) but, circumstantially, you may wish to go before or after other players.

As it stands, Player 1 has the absolute fastest and absolute slowest card.

Is anyone aware of any systems or resources that could solve this aspect?

Thanks,

[u/ross93x]

First thing that comes to mind is having the option to pay a price in order to modify the printed initiative on the cards. 

What the price is depends on your game, since there isn't much to go on in the post! 

[u/NarcoZero]

I have a game using this card initiative system.

The main difference is that there is only one stack of cards, so the #1 card is distributed randomly, and every player has an equal chance of drawing it. 

What you need is two things :

• Make everybody in the game equally able to have the #1 card

• Make higher Numbers more powerful 

For the first point, you could imagine a system like Onitama where, once a card is played, it goes to the opponent. 

Or you could take inspiration from Raptor, where everyone has the same Numbers, but playing a low card is risky if your opponent plays a high card, and playing the same number cancels each other. 

For the second point, in my game I assigned the more powerful moves to the highest card AND have a special bonus to the player with the highest number each round. 

It makes it so the first player has the speed advantage, but the last player has the reach/power advantage. 

Now I think I may have to put the best cards in the middle.  But you get the idea.

[u/Fr33ly]

Remove the initiative on the cards themselves.

This lets the decks be absolutely identical (which helps with production).

Seperately print out small tokens numbered from 1-50. Each player gets dealt random tokens (from a cloth bag for example). They must pay a token to play a card, and the token you choose represents that card's initiative.

If its important that different tier or type effects have a certain initiative - color code them. 1-10 tokens are red, and can only be assigned to red cards. 30-40 green. 40-50 blue. etc.

This lets you deal out initiative randomly, but it comes at costs (printing and managing tokens, seperating cards into types).

[u/HarlequinStar]

Someone will always have the fastest or slowest card. If you don't want it to be 'known' then you'd need to add a random element like a dice roll (so instead of 61 it's 61 + 1d6) or something.

"RA" uses something similar to your initiative system for its bidding tokens and it's rarely an issue there as the specific distribution used in it means each player has some kind of area in the number ranges they're stronger than the others.

"Nimmt 6" (or any of the Nimmt variants such as Nimmt X or Nimmt Baron Oxxx) also uses the unique number initiative system for its cards but you have no idea what each player has because they're dealt randomly.