Combat Cards

A couple of weeks ago, Joh pointed out that the Second Life version of Combat Cards didn’t allow cards requiring a single point of energy to be played when you have 2 points of energy available. I hadn’t thought about this – the switch from groups to resources was supposed to just make the real life game easier to play, not change the game in any way.

The reason the Second Life version didn’t allow the play was that behind the scenes it runs the same group conditions code that it did in 1.5, but sure enough, the way the real life rules are written, what Joh was describing should be legal.

I quickly hacked in some code to make it possible in the Second Life version and Mich and I tried it out: with disasterous results. If you can play a card requiring one resource when you have 2 available, you can sit 1 turn away from finishing a 3 turn combo indefinitely, which makes it impossible for your opponent to anticipate when the combo will end and makes 3 turn attacks much more powerful, unbalancing the game.

So, instead of adjusting the Second Life game to match the real life rules, I’ve instead tweaked the real life instructions to match the old behaviour: if a card has a consume resources condition you must have exactly that number of resources available, no more no less. A nice side effect is that we can add a version of consume resources as Joh imagined it working to new cards in the future.

The updated rules can be freely downloaded in the print and play version of combat cards here.