Princess Wing awakened a hunger in me for card-based tactical combat systems. Further examples have been limited and/or I keep forgetting when I find them, but I did find a couple cool examples recently
His Majesty the Worm
HMTW is a tarot-based system that makes very good use of cards as dense little packets of information. Each round of combat, players receive a small hand of cards. The first card they play determines turn order and their defense rating against attacks and similar actions. that is, the later you go in the turn order, the harder it is to mess with you. On your turn, the card you play receives a value boost depending on its suit and your stat corresponding to that suit. You can also play cards to perform actions on other players' turns, but when you do that not every card can be used for every action.
There's also some clever use of face-down vs face-up cards, but what I want to highlight at the moment is that when you look at your initial hand, you immediately have to weigh your current hand against your ideal game plan. do you want to spend that high card to save yourself, or to attack the enemy? does it change your answer if the high card is in a suit that you can't do much with? Each round becomes a tactical puzzle, contributing to the overall combat puzzle. It's a little like Dracurouge's dice pool tech that way.
Dead Beats
Dead Beats, in contrast, barely uses its cards for more than an RNG source, but that's okay, because the really cool part is all the resource gauges it gives you to manage. Dead Beats does not use a grid map, or even a free-drawn zone map like HMTW. Instead it abstracts each fighter's position into a single Evasion stat that gets compared against various weapon ranges. If they're out of range, they can't be targeted, better hit the other guy instead... or you rush them down to bring their Evasion back within your targeting range. It's a simple solution, but it feels really clever to me.
The other defining feature of Dead Beats combat is the random-ish action chaining, which makes it very different from most combat games I'm familiar with. After every action you draw a card to see if you can take another action, gradually getting more difficult with each additional action. You have a limited resource called Fury you can use to raise the card value if it isn't quite enough, but you need to spend more and more of it the deeper in the turn you are. It creates a dynamic of "expensive actions now or cheaper actions later" that needs to be answered moment to moment, depending on the course of the fight.
Lessons to learn
Because I like cards, I appreciate how much HMTW gets out of them, especially the ability of cards to prominently display information like your current defense rating. Because I don't like needing to make maps, I appreciate how Dead Beats is able to evoke the idea of positioning without requiring more than a single number from each player. I'm playing with the idea of "range bands" based on a card each character is displaying in front of them. Hearts/Hearts is close range, Hearts/Diamonds is midrange, Red/Black are far-range, something like that. I also appreciate how both games give players several resources to manage and weigh against each other, a meaningful tactical puzzle even before the opponent makes a move. As I keep investigating mapless combat design, I feel like that kind of texture has a lot of potential to keep combat challenging and interesting, reorganizing the mental budget as brainspace is freed up in the absence of a spatial map.
