From: njs@cbnewsh.cb.att.com (nicholas.j.sauer)
Newsgroups: rec.games.board.ce
Subject: Modular Card Deck
Keywords: Long and Boring
Date: 2 Sep 92 21:42:58 GMT
Organization: AT&T


A MODULAR DECK FOR COSMIC ENCOUNTER
copyright 1992 by Nick Sauer

Introduction:

As ususally I will preface this article by stating that it is prejudiced
toward the Eon version of CE.  However, the issues raised should definitely
be of interest to Mayfair players.  In fact, it would be very easy for a
Mayfair set owner to implement these ideas by ordering a blank deck from
Mayfair Games.

I should also add a note that everything in this article should be flashing
House Rules in huge neon letters.  As with any game that you use house rules
in, be sure that all players (especially new ones to your group) are made
aware of this or any other house rules that are in effect.  I am particularly
sensative to having my whole game strategy ripped out from under me at the
last second because of some house rule that I didn't know about, and I would
never want such an annoying situation to happen to any other game players out 
there.

I had always been concerned with the balance of cards in the Eon deck.  
This concern first began when I wanted to add some new Edicts that I had
seen in volume one of Encounter magazine.  However, I never seriously 
looked at "deck maintenance" until fairly recently.  Once I began to
think about this subject certain things began to bother me.  The first
thing that I noticed was the Flare situation.  Why should the deck have
less Flares in it when there are fewer players in the game?  If you
think about it, this idea of two flares per player is kind of odd as you
don't change the rest of the components in the deck as a function of 
number of players.  Once I realized this I began watching our games more
closely for Flare impact as a function of the number of players in the game.
Sure enough, in games with a smaller number of players Flares had a smaller
impact on the game.  Ultimately, we decided that your chance of drawing 
(or purchasing) a Flare from the deck should always be the same regardless 
of the number of players in the game.  Thus, we developed a house rule that 
we would always add twelve Flares to the deck each game.  

Around this time, or shortly afterwards, Mayfair began assembling the
playtest kit for More Cosmic Encounter.  When I heard that they were 
adding even more challenge cards to the deck I began thinking about how 
I would go about doing something like this.  That is how this article came 
to be.

Method:

I wanted two things before I began working on the final version of this idea.
The first was a starting point.  That is a deck that you would use for a
"basic" (i.e. no expansions) game of CE.  The second thing I wanted was an
end point.  This would be the "ideal" final card distribution.  It would also
be the maximum number of challenge cards I would want to see in the game. 

For the starting point I decided to use the Eon deck in it's final incarnation
(i.e. with everything from all the expansions).  This worked out to be a good
starting point and needed only one minor alteration.  This distribution is
presented below:

ATTACKS:

Value:  Number:

  40       1
  30       1
  20       2
  18       1
  17       1
  16       1
  15       4
  14       2
  13       1
  12       5
  10       6
   9       2
   8       8
   7       4
   6       8
   5       2
   4       2
   1       1

Total: 52 cards  
Average Attack card value: 10.75

COMPROMISES: 15

EDICTS:

Name:        Number:

Mobius Tubes    2
Warp Break      1
Cosmic Zap      3*
The Plague      1
Force Field     1
Stellar Gas     1
Emotion Control 1
Victory Boon    1
Rebirth         1
Timegash        1
Finder          1
Keeper          1
Sanity          1
Un-zap          1

Total: 17 cards.

KICKERS:

Value:  Number:

   3       1
   2       3
   0       1

Total: 5 cards
Average Kicker value: 1.8

FLARES: 12

The only change I made was in the Edicts (as marked with the * above).  I
followed Mayfairs lead by adding a Cosmic Zap to replace the Flarezap (as
the Flarezap was the only expansion dependent Edict in the set).  The above
numbers gave me the average values of Attacks and Kickers, which I wanted to
stay pretty close to.  They also gave me a few ratios to work with as well.
Since my primary interest was to add more Attack cards I would use these as
a starting point.  The ratio of Compromise to Attacks above is .288.  I 
also wanted to make sure the Edict, Flare and Kicker ratios stayed the same. 
These ratios expressed in terms of Edict, Flare or Kicker to total number of 
challenge cards are .254, .179 and .0746, respectively.

For the end point, I had to make a bunch of decisions regarding what the
final Attack card mix would be.  First, since Mayfair was going to introduce
negative Attack cards did I want these in the mix?  Based upon the warm
response our group had to the ones in the More Cosmic playtest I decided
to scrap this idea.  Next, what did I want the Attack distribution to look
like?  I ultimately decided that I wanted a mirror point in the Attack
distribution such that going up from and down from this point the card
spread was the same.  The idea here was to make some small attempt to
follow a "bell curve" type distribution.  Again, following Mayfair's lead, I
wanted to fill in the "holes" in the spread by adding Attack 11, 19, 2,
and 3 cards.  Finally, I wanted to get a roughly even split between even
and odd Attack cards for purposes of the Wild Calculator or any cards like
it which might come later.  With all these factors in mind here is the final 
"ideal" Attack card distribution I came up: 

ATTACKS:

Value:  Number:   Original Number:  Difference:

  40       1             1               0
  30       1             1               0
  20       2             2               0
  19       1             0               1
  18       1             1               0
  17       2             1               1
  16       4             1               3
  15       8             4               4
  14       8             2               6
  13       8             1               7
  12       5             5               0
  11      10             0              10
  10      10             6               4
   9       5             2               3
   8       8             8               0
   7       8             4               4
   6       8             8               0
   5       4             2               2
   4       2             2               0
   3       1             0               1
   2       1             0               1
   1       2             1               1

Total: 100 cards  (48 new cards)
Average Attack card value: 11  (original average was 10.75)

Multiplying this number by the Compromises/Attack ratio gives 28.8 or 29
total Compromises.  This would mean adding a total of 14 new Compromise
cards to the deck.  This creates a grand total of 129 challenge cards.

Multiplying 129 by the Kicker/challenge card ratio gives 9.6621 or 10
total Kickers.  Using much of the same thought that went into the Attack
card mix, the following "ideal" Kicker mix was what I came up with:

KICKERS:

Value:  Number:   Original Number:  Difference:

   4       1             0               1
   3       2             1               1
   2       3             3               0
   1       2             0               2
   0       1             1               0
  -1       1             0               1

Total:  10 cards  (5 new cards)
Average Kicker value: 1.7  (original average was 1.8)

The final figure I want to look at is the total number of Edicts.  Again,
multiplying 129 by the Edict/challenge card ratio gives 32.766 or 33 Edicts
total.  This makes for a grand total of 16 new Edicts.

Implementation:

With the above starting and end points I then had to merely devise a way to
easily move between the two.  Since I was primarily interested in adding
new Edicts, I decided to build the whole system around adding one Edict at
a time to the deck.  The handy aspect of this is that there are 16 new
Edict "slots" and 48 new Attacks to be added.  Thus, we see that we can
rather conveniently add 3 new Attacks per Edict.

Doing some simple math here, I found that to keep the Attack average even
the sets of three Attack cards should add up to a total of 33.75 each.  How
I handled this was to have all the sets of new Attacks add up to 34, except
for every fourth set which would add up to 33.  Compromises would simply be
added one at a time as the total number of Attack cards gave a new whole
number (rounding up) when multiplied by the Compromise/Attack ratio.  Kickers
were handled in a similar fashion.  Likewise, the total number of Flares 
to be added to the deck could be determined.

The final problem to consider was one of user friendliness.  With the
exception of Flares (which are always pulled at the end of a game anyway),
I wanted a way to quickly be able to seperate any new challenge cards, 
Kickers or Edicts from the deck.  Fortunately, we already had the solution
to this problem in place.  When we play CE the first thing our group does is
mutually decide which expansions (if any) we would like to play with.  As
a result of this play style I had labelled any expansion dependent cards 
with a letter in the lower left hand corner.  The following letter code is
what I use:

F=Flares, F1=One shot Flares, M=Moons, L=Lucre, K=Kickers, R=Reverse system
hexes, Rp=Warp/Praw, Rf=Fan, E=Enoc (reverse cone), and P=Prisoners.

We had already added a number of Edicts that were expansion dependent which
were the first cards we coded.  This allowed us to quickly look through the
deck (by looking at the lower right hand corner) and find these cards when
we wanted to remove them from the game.  Later, I added these codes to the
various expansion dependent Flares in the game as well.  Thus, if we wanted
to play a game with only Flares, we could quickly go through the Flare deck
and pull all the Lucre, Moon and Prisoner dependent Flares.

With all this in mind, I generated the following table of cards to be added
to the deck as a function of the number of Edicts added to the deck (beyond
the initial 17).  How this works is fairly simple.  I added a new letter code:
N=New card.  Add up the total number of "non-standard" Edicts added to the 
game.  Once you know this number, add all cards with this N number or less in
the lower right hand corner to the deck.  The table also gives a total number
of Flares that should be added to the deck.

Modular Deck Table:

Number of             Challenge      Kicker    Total     Reinforcements*
New Edicts:  Label:   cards added:   Added:    Flares:   Added:

    1         N1       10,11,13,C                12        +1     
    2         N2        1,14,19,C      -1        13        +5
    3         N3        9,11,14,C                14        +1
    4         N4        7,11,15,C                15        +3
    5         N5       10,11,13                  16        +2
    6         N6        2,15,17,C       4        16        +4
    7         N7        7,13,14,C                17        +2
    8         N8        9,11,13,C                18        +3
    9         N9       10,11,13,C       1        18        +1
   10         N10       3,15,16,C                19        +5
   11         N11       7,11,16,C                20        +1,+4
   12         N12       9,11,13,C       3        20        +3
   13         N13      10,11,13                  21        +2
   14         N14       5,14,15,C                22        +4
   15         N15       7,11,16,C                23        +2
   16         N16       5,14,14,C       1        23        +3

* For a more thorough discussion on Reinforcements see the final section of
  this article.
     
Examples of some of the new Edicts we have included are the following (letter
codes for the Edicts are in brackets after the description):

Flarezap:  Standard Eon text, we use two (F,F1).
Lucre Zap:  Prevents a player from using his Lucre for the rest of 
            the turn (L).
Moon Zap:  Stops effects of one Moon.  Tokens on the Moon return to bases and
           the Moon is discarded from the game.  This one will probably be
           replaced with Mayfair's New Moon Edict as people seem to like 
           that Edict better (M).
Klein Tubes:  Mobius Tubes for the Praw, we use two (Rp).
Praw Break:  Warp Break for the Praw (Rp).
Solar Wind:  Flips the cone anytime before cards are played (E).
Handzap:  As per Mayfair (N1).
Edict Zap:  We allow ours to work on an Un-zap as well (N2).
Space Junk:  As per Mayfair (N3).
Breach:  As per Mayfair (N4).
Cosmic Gas:  As per Mayfair (N5).

One final note is that you are not really just limited to 16 new Edicts in 
your game of CE.  The above chart can be extended using the alternate 
challenge cards presented in issue two of Encounter magazine.  Alternate
challenge cards should be added in groups of four as per the chart below.
Alternately, if you don't have 16 new Edicts and still want to use some
of the alternate challenge cards, just sustitute the four cards from any slot
below for the four challenge cards in one of the slots above (note you should
use a slot above that actually gets for challenge cards for the substitution).

Number of             Challenge            Total     
New Edicts:  Label:   cards added:         Flares:   

   17         Nmd     2 Mirrors, 2 Decoys    24     
   18         No1     4 Overkills            25 
   19         No2     4 Overkills            25 
   20         Npv1    4 Pyric Victories      26 
   etc.

For details on the above challenge cards see issue two of Encounter Magazine.

Special Notes on Reinforcements:

I have not seen More Cosmic as of the time this article was written.  I know
that during the playtest I was unhappy with the way Reinforcements were 
handled as far as quantity and values went.  So, below are my "ideal" starting
and final Reinforcement mixes.  I should note that these values and 
distributions are best guesses based upon our alpha playtest of MCE.  They
may need more tinkering to get them "just right", but they should, at least,
work.

REINFORCEMENTS:

Initial:                  Final:

Value:  Number:           Value:  Number:

  +6       1                +6       1
  +5       1                +5       3
  +4       2                +4       5
  +3       3                +3       7
  +2       5                +2       9
  +1       7                +1      11

Total:  19 cards          Total: 36 cards
Average value:  2.37      Average Value:  2.52