Super Mario Card ideas

[Kriven]

I've had a few ideas for Mario card games in the past...

...the one idea between all of them which had been consistent was the "Power-Up" gimmick. It essentially worked like in the games, where a character retained their power-up until they were damaged. Power-Ups are activated by placing a power-up card ontop of a player character card (like Mario). For the sake of neatness, I had Fire Mario, Star Mario, etc. cards. Of course, the health counter remained the same between a power-down and powered-up state... unless the power-up changed stats (for instance, the Blue Shell increased the character's Defense stat).

For "Little Mario", I didn't have him revert to that form after damage, but considered it a "Curse" which could be cast by certain characters or items. Little Mario has much worse stats than his other forms.

There were two types of item cards: Power-Up cards, which could be used as I described above, and traditional item cards... a Life Shroom to revive a fallen ally (or protect a living one). Sleepy Sheep to knock out an enemy for a set number of turns. Sometimes I would mix in dice or coin flips, to keep players on their toes.

The rules for my card games are always pretty simple... Attack Strength - Defense Stat = Damage dealt. A card is removed when it is defeated. Some cards had elemental attributes (for instance, a Podoboo would have a fire attribute) which influenced how they had to be attacked, and of course each attack had its own attribute as well... So even though a Cheep-Cheep might be able to use the water attack Squirt and damage Podoboo, Cheep-Cheep couldn't just Flop onto the fireball and hurt it very much. I don't know if you would want to make elemental attributes different from other physical properties, like being spiked or having wings.

I never had a Captain/Partner mechanic, though I like where you're going with that. I would recommend going one step beyond the single partner idea, though... Hide the Captain behind a wall of three or four partners, or something to that effect. My games always involved a player's personal HP (each player had about 1000 HP per game). When the player had no monsters out, they were open to attack. The Captain cards could be used in place of the Player HP for this model...

Maybe even make the designated Captains non-shuffle-able... rather, a player has to stick with their chosen Captain for the duration of the game. Peach might have lower HP than Bowser, but she can heal her squadron (granted, this would consume FP) without the aid of an item.

I would say Paper Mario is definitely a good model to be looking at... You've gotten me wanting to make my own again :p