Hanafuda and the Seasonal Random Effect Device

I have a fascination with all different kinds of games. This blog is mostly about RPGs, but I also play a lot of wargames, some board games, and, especially, card games. Card games are, of course, very different from RPGs on many levels, but they have one deep, shared, philosophically important characteristic: without randomness they are nothing; indeed they are shit. With RPGs the randomness comes from the dice, with card games it comes from the shuffle and draw, but the principle is exactly the same. Indeed, I don't think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that card games and RPGs are basically the same pursuit: reacting to randomness. In this, they say something very profound about the nature of our lives. Yes, I'm being serious (mostly).

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was Hanafuda. Hanafuda is a Japanese card deck whose design is based on the months of the year; there are 12 suits, one for each month, each containing 4 cards. It looks like this:

Each suit is comprised of, usually, two "normal" cards, a "ribbon" card (either red or purple) and a one "special", though this varies slightly from suit to suit. The "specials" are as follows:

January: Crane with Sun
February: Bush Warbler
March: Military Camp Curtain
April: Cuckoo
May: Water Iris with Bridge
June: Butterflies
July: Boar
August: Full Moon with Red Sky
September: Sake Cup
October: Deer with Maple
November: Swallow, Calligrapher with Umbrella and Frog, Lightning
December: Chinese Phoenix

These are, as you can tell, very evocative in character.

One day, I plan to come up with a system for using Hanafuda cards in an RPG. I have a number of ideas, but one is the Seasonal Random Effect Device.

Here, each month in game time the DM or one of the players would randomly draw a Hanafuda card from the relevant suit for that month. If the card drawn is "normal" there is no effect on the game. If the card is a red ribbon, this has some positive blanket mechanical effect - perhaps, for some reason, magic is especially strong due to some motion of the cosmos, and all saving throws versus magic are at -1 for the duration of the month. If the card is a purple ribbon, likewise, there is another blanket mechanical effect which is negative - for example, maybe the weather is particularly bad (either oppressively hot, or unseasonably wet) and consequently everybody is weak and lethargic and function at an effective -1 to STR. Whatever.

If a special card is drawn, it means that at some stage during that month something related to that card has to be thrown in to the game by the DM. For the Cuckoo, this might mean that some ally or henchman of the PCs will turn traitor. For Military Camp Curtain, some sort of military event might take place. For Butterflies, it might mean that some major social event happens. For Boar, maybe some mighty spirit Boar will be spotted in the forest. This should be seen as something for the DM to riff on, rather than something fixed.

This would add a lot of flavour to an Asian-flavoured fantasy game. Something similar could also be done with the European Tarot deck and more European-style fantasy games, particularly, I think, Pendragon or Ars Magica.

Citadel Combat Cards; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gutlagg the Ogre Shaman

When I was a kid my friends and I went through a period of playing the original series of Citadel Combat Cards. These were, essentially, a species of Top Trump made, as the name suggest, by Citadel Miniatures. They sprang unbidden into my mind while reading Jeff's latest entry, which had me recollecting my 11-year-old Warhammer-playing self; I hadn't so much as thought about them in years.

The concept behind the cards was simple. You deal out the cards between the players and each player takes it in turns to call out an ability from the card at the top of his hand (say, "Strength 10"). The other players have to compare the card at the top of their hand with this. The card with the highest score in that abililty "wins" and the others "die", being cast aside. The game ends when there is only one player left with any cards.

My best friend at the time had two brothers, and the four of us spent an inordinate amount of time playing Citadel Combat Cards. I'm not sure where we got the decks from, but we had 5 - Monsters, Chaos, Warriors, Space War, and Goblinoids - which we mixed together in one super-deck; it felt like games could go on for hours (especially if you played it like Top Trumps, where the winning card "captures" the losing cards each turn, allowing them to be re-used).

It turns out that somebody has posted slideshows of all the decks on youtube: Chaos, Goblinoids, Monsters, Dwarfs, Warriors, and Space War. Looking at them, it seems there was an entire subset of rules that we never used - underneath each picture you see sigils containing things like a bow and arrow, an explosion, fangs, and so on. Presumably these had some sort of meaning which we piledrived away.

The thing I most notice about the cards now is the names. There's a real charm in things like "Gutlagg the Ogre Shaman", "Zoat the Forest Guardian", "Klaus Half-man, Mutant Thug", "Drakarth the Ravening: Mutant Spawn of Chaos", "Narx the Whiner, Goblin Musician", and "Fungus the Snotling Brave". When did Games Workship and Citadel Miniatures products get so bland?