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Determining deck size
After the initial spark, I set about thinking about what a card list might look like – not necessarily from an artistic perspective, but considering how I’d want a deck to feel. I started thinking about the 52 card deck and wondered whether I wanted it to be larger or smaller than that. The idea was that it would be relatively easy to carry around, so it had to be smaller than say an UNO or Monopoly Deal deck. At one point I liked the idea of a 100 card deck to have some symmetry with a century, though I quickly abandoned that as being too large a deck and also meaningless enough to the likely game I had in my head so as not to definitively warrant it. Did that mean it had to be the standard 52 card deck? No, I figured stretching to 80 was the max I wanted (having played around with stack that many cards together!).
The cards
With that in mind, I thought about what from Roman Republican history might be represented on the cards. Senators were easy and obvious. To a degree, legions were as well. Exactly how to present the legions was a different point. 10 cohorts to a legion was simple enough. Then there had to be some special cards. Through some of my own knowledge and additional reading I figured 3 extras would do.
- A centurion, for sure, as the leader of a cohort.
- A Tribune as a blend between a senator and military, since they were both.
- An Aquilifer as a symbol of the legion.
I hadn’t come to what these would do just yet. I knew I wanted it to be rummy style, so having 13 cards in a legion or suit made sense. How the senators played in or how many there should be was different.
So, four sets legions would be 52 cards, which is great, but none of the added flavour I was looking for. At this point I thought if two mechanics – wild cards and the senators.
On wild cards, I debated including wilds similar to jokers that can be played anywhere in the board. I planned to called them Auxilia – foreign components to boost the strength of a legion. This made 56 cards.
Senators were going to be linked to voting in some respect, as were likely all the cards, but senators would carry more weight as they did in life. There couldn’t be too many of them, it had to be an odd number (I was thinking if deadlock scenarios) and they probably need some affiliation with the legions.
So I was at 67 cards (which in hindsight could have been very amusing to my kids).
I could leave it there, though the I didn’t like the unevenness of the deck size. There was space for another legion to get to my target deck size of 80. Would this legion be the same? I did think originally it could just be a fifth suit. In the end I decided to have them as exact number wilds (ie you could substitute in a wild legion Tribune only in place of another Tribune). I called this one Legion Romanus.
A set of 80 cards. Now what to do with them…
A note on evolving design
It may go without saying for some though I think it’s important to note that this is all still evolving in my head as I design the art for cards (with assistance from an artist) and start playtesting with a set of rules. I might find 80 cards to be too clunky or the Legio Romanus be too confusing. We’ll see what happens and tweak as necessary along the way.