Fun story: for a couple of years I had an idea about a tabletop game that would both cards (French 52-card deck) and dice (1d6). This idea went nowhere further than the traversing concept (and the draft blog post is long gone), but here's how i imagined it:
- roll 1d6
- draw that many cards from the stock face down, only turn the last one face up, the rest go at the bottom of the stock
- resolve the card
As for the card interaction, i wanted to base the stuff on objects and mobs from Shattered Pixel Dungeon, but wasn't able to come up with any correspondences between them and the cards, so this idea went stale. The only part that i was able to make tho is door cards that, when opened, force you to resolve the "hidden behind the door" object (the top card in the stock).
And this September i discovered Scoundrel, which was roughly my idea of what a card-based dungeon crawler should be like (sans, of course, dice rolls). However, there was one detail that bothered me a little: red aces and face cards are not used. So i decided to take this opportunity and make them doors (hearts) and keys (diamonds; because they're equippable like weapons, which are diamonds):
- only the matching key can open the door
- you can equip multiple keys, unlike with weapons (where only one can be equipped at the time)
- if you resolve a door that does have a matching key, you discard the door and the key cards, draw the top card from the stock and resolve it
- if there's no matching key, discard both the door and the hidden item ("the
door was the only way to that item, you won't stumble across it anyway"); there
are a couple of alternative ways to resolve this, because i wasn't sure if
discarding up to 4 cards just because there was no matching key was a good idea
(now i think it's fine, there's 44 more cards left anyway):
- discard the door, put the hidden item at the bottom of the stock ("the door wasn't the only way to that item, you can find it on a different route")
- put both the door and the hidden item at the bottom of the stock ("you can reuse the door later, when you find the key")
To roll or not to roll... #
At the moment of writing this, i still haven't played Scoundrel, so i was also thinking of how to integrate dice rolls into my version of Scoundrel:
- like in my draft: draw the given number of cards (later N), only resolve the last drawn one
- compromise: draw N cards, turn the last one face up and fill the room until there's 4 cards on the table
Both ways also remove the ability to flee the room, since the dice rolls already skip cards for later reuse.