After listening to Tom Chick’s and Jason Lutes’ podcast on emergent narrative, I was inspired to make a game to try it out on my own. Since I had just seen the new Sherlock Holmes, I ended up creating a detective card game called Frenemy Detectives.
It works like this. Each player builds a deck of 30 cards. These cards represent the skills, backgrounds, possessions, and actions of their detective. A mystery deck is also built of 30 random mystery cards and 1 villain card and shuffled.
The Broken Window mystery card
During the game players can either draw a card from their detective deck into their hand (to power up) or flip over a card from the mystery deck (a risk, but with good rewards). Each mystery card has challenge numbers on it. Challenges can be social, physical, or investigative. The player that revealed the mystery card can play cards from his or her hand to satisfy the challenge numbers.
For example, if the broken window mystery card revealed – a level one investigative challenge, the player could flip their physics skill (providing one investigative skill) to satisfy the challenge. The next player counter-clockwise may then respond by either playing a different investigative skill (one-upping) the first player or play an action card (to double cross for instance).
The last player to play a card in the challenge gets the success effect of the mystery card if the challenge is won. If the challenge is lost all players who played cards get the effect of the failure line of the mystery card.
The goal of the game is to defeat the villain (a mystery card somewhere in the deck). Only the player that plays the last card in the defeat of the villain (thus getting credit for solving the crime) wins the game.
Frenemy Detectives After Action Report
After a few failed games with some tweaking of the mechanics, I played the first completed game of Frenemy Detectives last night. The game went pretty smoothly with some funny emergent narratives arising. An early one was when my frenemy failed a “Dagger in the Dark” mystery card thus getting stabbed in the back, followed by drawing a “Bloody Dagger” mystery card, apparently deciding to check the weapon in a failed attempt on her life for clues. Another funny one was failing a “Library” mystery card, having the result of having to discard a card, forcing her to discard a “Sherlock Holmes Anthology” – apparently an overdue book!
The villain in the encounter was Cthulhu, and was revealed late in the game (about 5 cards from the bottom of the deck). When we first encountered my character, a coward, threw a smoke bomb, thus getting out of the fight without consequences. My rival got hit with the consequences which contained the chance of adding a “Secret Villain” card to her hand. This card allowed her to win the game when we faced Cthulhu again at the bottom of the deck. By playing the “Secret Villain” card, the player that plays it wins if the other players lose the villain encounter.
I need to add some more cards to the game, but I plan on posting a card list and complete rules at some point in the future.
sounds interesting. A bit of a minor question, but the villain could be anywhere in the deck?
Also, I haven’t listened to the audio yet, but is there anything you did in the design to foster emergent narrative?
The villain could be anywhere in the deck at first. If you lose to a villain the villain card goes to the bottom of the deck.
To foster the emergent narrative I just made cards that were fairly simple elements of a mystery story. The magic happens just by going through cards sequentially.
I don’t play many of these games, but how does the deck building phase work? Is it like Sealed Deck tournaments in Magic: The Gathering?
Is the mystery deck building a group activity?
The deck building is pretty straightforward. I made a ton of different cards, but each type of card has a certain power level. Skills usually are +1 to some skill. Allies are a total +3 but cost 1. Backgrounds are either +3 or have some other effect and cost 0. Items are more crazy. You MUST have so many of each card.
You don’t really build the mystery deck. You just draw 30 random cards. I didn’t make more than 30 cards for it, so you just use the whole thing. I need to make more mystery cards.
Do people take turns to pick a card for their personal deck? Or is it more of an informal free-for-all? It also seems each card has a cost against some deck-building fund, which makes sense.
When I played it was pretty informal. You kind of want to do it secretly though since how backstabby you are should be kept a surprise.