my next topic is the treasure deck.
There are so many good ideas around treasure cards, that i simply don't want to do the cherry picking that you normally do for a good card deck. I want to use them all.
I also do not want to use any dicing table, ever, anywhere. This is personal. So instead, i think about creative ways of using cards.
But ok, let's start from the beginning:
That's the original treasure deck. No, ok, the original is more beautifull, i admit that.
Roughly 50% is good and 50% is bad, symbolized by green and red (sorry mohawk).
It fulfills some functions in a very elegant way: It is a risk to search for a treasure, and the risk gets higher the more the quest progresses. At some point in time, you better stop searching or it will kill you.
That's the treasure deck with all the expansions. There are a lot more good cards now than bad cards, even if some bad cards are added, the add on for the good card is bigger.
It waters down the initial danger, and then the danger ramp up is also slower because there is a higher total of cards.
The effect is not as strong as shown here, because Heroquest simply stopped expanding after a while.
It's really becoming bad if you just add your own cards and combine two or three base game boxes.
Now some of you use a two step process to avoid too much watering, looking more or less like that:
You add a number of cards "take a potion from the potion deck" or "take a scroll card from the scroll card deck", sometimes even "take an artifact from the artifact deck" to the original deck.
Then you take an effort to make the original deck with the distribution and amount of cards you like, for example in my case it would be 22 good and 18 bad cards.
It is quite elegant, because afterwards you can add scrolls and potions and artifacts to your liking, endlessly, without ever watering down the treasure deck.
It also involves near-zero preparation before the game.
I see only two disadvantages: You have two, for some of you even three extra piles of cards on the table. That's a small one as long as these stay the only extra piles.
The big one is: It's not backward compatible. You'd have to reprint all the potion, scroll and artifact treasure cards on new backs, and discard the originals. If you intend to do that anyway, go forward, because then the backward compatibility is not a problem.
For my games, I am thinking of doing that:
What's that?
First, you use only the active cards. The inactive cards wait in the game carton for the next game.
First time you want to use it, you remove all the negative cards from the deck and count them. Then think about how many good cards you want to add.
As said elsewhere, in my games i want to have 18 bad and 22 good cards typically.
Then i mix all the good cards that i have, and add 22 of them to the deck. Mix. That's it, that's the active deck for this evening.
The "inactive" deck goes back to the game carton / Heroquest treasure chest. Discarded cards go back to the inactive treasure deck as well.
Next time i start a game, i mix the inactive cards and refill the active deck until it's forty cards.
Here you have the careful balance between danger level and danger ramp up from the base game, plus downward compatibility, plus all the cards you like to add.
You can even put crazy cards like Treasure Horde with 300 Gold Coins in your deck. Normally, for that, you need a treasure deck with 100 cards or more so that it is not found too often. Bad side effect is that the danger ramp up is watered down.
Here, you just have all cards two or three times according to your liking, but the strong cards only one time. Like that you ensure that it will slumber a long time among the inactive cards before there is finally a game where it will appear once.
The biggest advantage from my point of view is, you can invent and print as many cards as you like, be cleptocreative as you like, you will never water down the danger level or the danger ramp up.
No separate Card decks are necessary - they can all be Treasure Cards.
Though you CAN combine it with an extra deck.
This is the reality, today: I use this for my Play by Post game:
And in a PBP Game, it is of course most practical to do it in Excel:
Excel with treasure makro for Download
For my real-life games, i didn't yet print enough cards and certainly no scroll deck, so i use the original watered down deck with all the expansions... My next project is NOW, to do all the treasure cards i like and use that system as well for the real life.
Have fun!
