News You Can Bruise for 2011 October 24

I was talking to Pat about the hot new deck-building wargame A Few Acres Of Snow (great game title, BTW). I was at a conversational disadvantage since I've never played the game and didn't know anything about it other than "deck-building wargame". For discussion purposes I made up a game in my head that had nothing in common with the real game, and Pat said "that's totally wrong." BUT, I think the game I made up could be a really good game. All it requires is months of work and fine-tuning which I don't have time to do:

Picture a card-driven wargame like your Memoir '44. You have units on the board, and you draw cards that tell you which units you can move. Now picture Dominion, the original deck-building game, in which you buy cards that go into an endlessly recycled, ever-expanding deck. Now... imagine that your Dominion deck contains the orders for the units on your Memoir '44 board.

Now you have the war-torn chaos of Memoir '44, in which you can't fire your artillery because you don't have the card that lets you give the order, mitigated by the strategic buying of Dominion, with which you can choose to stock up on "fire the artillery" at the expense of other orders.

Units and orders are both for sale. Maybe orders are bought with "money" cards like Dominion, while units are put onto the board with special "deploy" cards. Maybe when you buy a unit you also get two or three different order cards for your deck. I don't know; months of work go here. But it would be a fun game, and hopefully someone's already done this, or will soon.

Bonus Mashup: spice up your Memoir '44 game by introducing the drafting mechanic from Seven Wonders. Pass two hands of seven cards back and forth, replenishing when you run out. Since this doesn't require months of work, Pat and I will actually be trying this, and I'll let you know how it goes.