Tweak of the Week: Card Activation

Do you like a little bit more randomness in activation order? Do you like bringing more cards onto the table and don’t mind a little craziness? Maybe some added tools for making things more unpredictable for solo play? Well try this week’s tweak!

Instead of just taking alternating turns for actions try this.

• Take a Tarot deck, shuffle and place it face down next to the table. Every turn after the attackers initial action draw a card from the Tarot deck.
• If the suit is swords or sticks the attacker may perform an action.
• If the suit is coins or cups the defender may declare an action.
• The player not performing an action may instead draw three cards from one of his company decks and keep one. The cards may be played according to their tags.
• A player may take an action to deploy any number of logistics and virtue cards within 3 inches of a board edge but outside of command range of an enemy Capo.
• If a major Arcana is drawn then the player who drew may both perform an action and draw three cards from the scenario deck and keep one, the player who did not draw it may draw three cards from one of their company decks and keep 2.
• After a Tarot card is drawn a player may choose to “Contest Fortune” and burn a virtue off a Capo to force a new card to be drawn and that be used instead. Either player may do this and a player may contest a contested card. If the next card would allow the contesting player to activate, then the action must be with the Capo that burnt the virtue to contest the card.

Why a Tarot Deck?

A Tarot deck has two advantages. The first is that they are just much cooler and more thematic for the period as they started to appear in the 1440s. The second is that they also give the design space of major arcana.

Early playtests involved more random activation for units but it added a step to the game and more features when speed of play was a major goal. We also wanted to keep the randomness level to a minimum for the base experience and avoid mechanics where the players didn’t have a way to mitigate the randomness. The contesting is a mechanic idea that came more recently that made it viable to us again. If you happen to be someone who enjoys more randomness you might enjoy this tweak

What if I don’t have a Tarot Deck?

If you don’t have a Tarot deck you can either use one of the free Tarot deck Apps you can get on your phone, an online one or use a normal card deck treating jack, queen, king etc as major arcana.

What do you think of the tweak? Like it? should it have been in the core rules or is it good as an add on? Did we miss something? Let us know on Discord and Facebook!