"Best Use Of Regular Gaming Cards In A Wargame" Topic

There are so many games that utilize regular gaming cards.
What is your favourite or most innovative use of them in a war-game?

The Sword and the Flame.
I like how it randomizes movement and shooting.
Contrary to popular wargaming mythology, NOTHING is simultaneous.
"Gentlemen of France, fire first."
You don't get to move when you want to for all kinds of Real Life reasons, and drawing cards shows that brilliantly and simply.

I will second Winston Smith, (damn, I have agreed with Mr. WS twice now in one week. The end is nigh )

I think Brother against Brother and its clone Valor & Steel & Flesh make good use of the card system. Of course both BaB and V&S&F owe much to TSATF.

Fireball Forward also makes good use of a regular deck of cards along with tossing in the initiative chip (based up the scenario) that allows for that moment when you interrupt the other player's action and you take…well the initiative.

Personally I enjoy card based activation. I have found few other methods that can capture in a game the capricious nature of fate, fog of war and the unexpected elements of battle. Card activation, especially if you are drawing (pun intended) two or more cards at a time gives a nice element of friction in a game.

I will third the vote for randomized activations.

BY

Played Gentlemen of France fire 1st rules once had a blast

Besides TSATF (which our group enjoys and helped develop), Big Red Bat's new rules "To the Strongest!" also have an innovative use of playing cards to govern activation (i.e., movement) and combat.

Jim

TS&TF was very innovative and influential and I admire how well it handles complicated mechanics very simply using a deck of cards. I'm frequently drawing from that for my own designs, when appropriate. (Unlike Winston, I do not inherently think simultaneous fire or melee or movement is wrong, there are time and scales where this makes a better game or design, IMHO.) Not only random activation, but simple resolution of casualty determination in TS&TF is marvelous. Card decks have so many possibilities for generating variables or determining results for a designer to play with, and often can substitute for complicated charts, tables, modifier calculation, or cumbersome die rolls.

What I have yet to work out is a way to use the complete tarot deck for some similar purpose -- much like a standard deck, but with even more variables given the numbered Major Arcana cards (not to mention the symbolism attached to these). Some sort of Occult-theme game is begging to use these.

Joins the bandwagon on TSATF

When playing an IGUGO game I use them to play solitaire during my opponents turn.

Using playing cards to build the map for the ground combat module in Squadron Strike.

One of these days, I need to get a copy of TSATF just to see.

The Great Rail Wars is the one for me, though. Pinnacle ended up reusing the system for Savage Worlds.

Tribal.

Cards are use to measure movement, activate units, shoot, fight combat in a round-by-round melee.

piper, back in the 1980s I used a Rider Tarot deck to set up games of the superhero RPG 'Champions, with supers for the arcana and agent/minion/mook teams for the regular suit cards…

Ooh, sounds intriguing, Sergeant P! More details or stories?

I saw a friend use some tarot cards in a D&D RPG at North Texas RPG Con this past June, but haven't asked him yet how this was structured or if the cards had any value besides markers or symbolic indicators for encounters. It wasn't minis, that's for sure.

To The Strongest uses cards A-10 from 2 regular decks (so 80 cards) as a randomiser.
The court cards + jokers are used for stratagems.

I gotta bang my own gong and say the weather system I put in A Season in Hel. It's simple, plays quickly, and adds an interesting challenge to tactical planning. It's really independent of the scenarios and flexible, so you can use it to enhance pretty much any game.

Piper, I remember suits were organizations (so I had 4 villain agent organizations, like Hydra, or such, plus as many supers as I could fit to the arcana).