Face-Off Prototyping

The game Face-Off is a 2-player competitive game where two players compete to win by strategically playing the right cards and having a little luck on their side.

How To Play

Setup:

Get a playing cards deck and remove all cards numbered 4-10
Place the deck on the pile with the “O” symbol
Each of 2 players get their own set of uniquely colored tokens which are not yet part of the board (10 tokens)

Rules:

At start of play each player draws 5 cards
To determine who goes first, each player rolls a d6 die and highest goes first
During each players turn, they first draw a card. The only exception is that the player going first does not draw a card on his first turn
During each players turn they can only play 1 card from their hand, do the effect of the card (either place a soldier or move a soldier), then their turn ends
When placing a soldier place your token on top of the soldier to indicate that this is your soldier
The effects of each card goes as follows:

CARDS EFFECT

King Place card facing down on any of the three empty bases (Beats Jack in battles)

Queen Place card facing down on any of the three empty bases (Beats King in battles)

Jack Place card facing down on any of the three empty bases (Beats Queen in battles)

A-3 Moves any of your own soldiers(King, Queen, or Jack) the (movement card) number indicated (A = 1 space, 2 = 2 spaces, 3 = 3 spaces)

After playing a number card or a face card “dies” place the card on the pile with “X” symbol (graveyard)
Once a card moves into a space where an opponents card is at, the moving card stops and they both “battle”
The result of battle depends on the cards battling (refer to effects of cards above for who wins) and if they are the same card this is considered a draw and both soldiers die and are send to the graveyard
Once a face card with a token reaches the enemy’s base you are awarded points and it goes into the graveyard
Once the deck is empty, reshuffle graveyard and place it on the “O” to serve as new deck to draw from

How to win:

The first person to achieve 7 points is the winner. Points are awarded based on the following events:

2 pts: a face card reaching the opponents base successfully (Note: if you lose a battle while battling on an opponents base, you get no points)
1 pt: to the player whose soldier battles at the opponents base and resulted in a draw
1 pt: for winning a “battle” (draws don’t award points unless at a base)

The first time i played this game was in class with one other classmate. During this game we conducted the rules above except we tried playing it playing up to 10 points and including 4 as a card you can draw in the deck. During this game i saw that soldiers were able to get to the other base quicker than i initially thought making it easier to reach opponents base. Also noticed how we both had more movement cards than soldiers so i saw that taking out the 4 cards could be beneficial. By taking out the 4 cards there was an even split between soldiers and movement cards. Also we noticed getting to 10 pts took longer than expected during out game so we thought to reduce it to 7.

The second time i played this game was at home with my cousin where when we played he noticed that going first always had the advantage of having the ability to play a soldier first so during our second game he gave the idea to give the player going first a downside which was not allowing him to draw when he went first so that throughout the game he would only have 4 cards in hand. It seemed to work out afterward but will test more to see if first player wins too often because of going first.

The third and final play session I had to test the game was today in class with 3 other people. In this session we faced situations that I haven’t came across the past 2 sessions for some reason. We came to the dilemma of coming to a draw at a base, and in the original rules draws didn’t award points no matter the area but drawing on a base sounded like a good area for the attacker to get 1 point at least for drawing. This was also to incentive the defender to leave base and be more balanced (hopefully).

Mechanics: