Wikipedia talk:Trading card game/Rules proposal 5
Wikipedia: the card game
This section describes a co-operative card game where 2-5 editors aim to produce an excellent encyclopedia. Rather than one player beating the others, they win or lose as a group as in Z-man's Pandemic (board game) and Repos' Ghost Stories[1]. It involves playing cards rather than "trading" them, though that element could possibly be added if felt essential.
The players represent editors working on four articles. They take turns in rotation (representing collaboration on WP from different time zones). Each turn consists of a negative phase, when the player carries out a mechanical process of discovering problems, followed by a positive phase, when he uses his skill and his colleagues' suggestions to improve matters. The only component is a pack of 52 special cards detailed below, each with a positive and a negative end. The game ends in victory as soon as all four articles reach GA or FA status, or in defeat if the cards run out before this is achieved.
To start the game, each player is dealt one card face up, which remains on the table throughout the game as a reminder. The player with the highest numbered card is the administrator who can protect articles, and will start the game. The other players are experts on the article shown on their card: art, geography, history or science. Each player is then dealt two cards face down which they pick up as their initial hand. For cards in hand, only the positive end is relevant.
An article is represented by cards in the centre of the table: sections as described above and problems. An article with four sections and no problems is a GA. An article with five or more sections and no problems is an FA. All articles are initially blank.
In the negative phase which starts his turn, the player turns over two cards and places each sideways across the article named. This article now suffers from the problem described on the negative end of the card. If he is unable to draw two cards, the game ends in defeat.
In the positive phase, the player has four hours to spend. In each hour he does one of the following:
- Add a section to an article
- Remove and discard any problem
- Protect an article
- Give a card to another player
- Pass
A section contains two cards from hand: a fact and either a source or a link. Facts and sources must be for the correct article but links must be for one of the other three articles. Any player can carry out the first two actions but he must also discard one other card from hand as payment, unless he is that article's expert. (Giving cards to an expert instead may enable them to be played later without a discard.)
Protection can only be carried out by the administrator. He can semi-protect GA against the type of problem shown on the negative end of fact cards, or fully protect an FA against all problems. (It is not necessary to make any article an FA to win the game, but it allows protection from problems which could reduce it below GA.)
Finally the player draws two cards from the pack into hand. If he now has more than five cards, he must discard cards of his choice to reduce his hand to five. Again, if he is unable to draw two cards, the game ends in defeat.
The deck contains the following 13 cards for each article (art, geography, history and science). + denotes the positive end, - the negative. Each card also carries a number from 1-52 for the sole purpose of determining the administrator.
- 7 x +Fact; -Advertising, -Spelling, -Grammar, -Incomplete, -Troll, -Sockpuppet, -Bias
- 3 x +Source; -Copyvio, -Unreliable, -Outdated
- 3 x +Link; -Spam, -POV, -Broken
Graphically, cards can resemble WP sections. The fact cards will show typical section headers for such an article, e.g. geography will have transport, culture, wildlife, etc. These details add interest but have no effect on game mechanics.
I have not yet been able to assemble a suitable group to playtest this game properly. Testers may wish to use a normal pack of cards with one suit representing each article and ranks indicating function: A-7=Fact, 8-10=Source, J-K=Link. Feedback is very welcome on both the mechanics of play and the relationship to real-life WP concepts. For example, I almost certainly have the problems allocated wrongly between those semi-protection can cure and those it can't. If the game is too hard or too easy, the number of sections required for GA/FA status can be tweaked and possibly a small number of problems of certain types allowed.