If you guessed "Blacksmith Game 4", you'd be half-correct, but half only counts in handjobs and horse-grenades! What's really in this thread isn't an interest check for another game of Blacksmith, but actually, an interest check for a SEQUEL to Blacksmith:
Now, the noobs or the contest-oriented among you might be wondering, "Blacksmith? Beastmancer? What are either of those?" Well I'll tell you! Both of them are fairly simple fill-in-the-blank style pitch games, similar to Snake Oil or Superfight. In Blacksmith, your goal was to convince different customers to buy your specially designed items. Beastmancer has a similar format, but you're playing as conjuring wizards, a hunter with an expansive menagerie, or maybe just one of those guys from Geneforge, using your cards to create evocative monsters you might find in the dungeon of a roguelike or some old pulp fantasy where the monsters were all weird.
Here's how you play:
Each player draws 2 of each card type, and then an additional one (the "bonus card") the type of their choice: Materials, Beasties, Prefix Descriptors, and Suffix Descriptors.
For an example of how these would typically be put together, |Voracious|Ice|Unicorn|Of the West|
Players are allowed to mulligan at any time between rounds, at the cost of forfeiting their bonus card on the next draw.
Players will take turns in order of who joined first to be the "Customer". They will read out a "Quest" card which describes the potential customer and their needs.
For example,
"Plague doctor needs a creature that will clean up the mess after their last dysentery patient exploded."
And then the other players would submit and describe their inventions- Have fun with your interpretation, just try not to veer too far away from what the actual card (the prompt, if you will) is saying! To avoid this becoming a game of people inventing the most all-encompassing magical multitools or just extremely overpowered monsters all the time, the Customer is advised to pick the one best suited to their specific situation. As well as what they think would be funny.
The rest pretty much proceeds as this sort of concept-pitch game always does. After the winner is declared, all players who spent cards this turn will discard their cards to the bottom of all relevant piles and then draw from the decks until their hands contain the original amount of cards. (Though if the "additional" one was spent, the player is allowed to pick a third of a different type.) The winner is awarded the judge's card, and the first one to get up to a number picked before the game starts wins. At least, that's how it would work if this were a real card game. But since we're playing this over the internet, we have to get a little bit meta and honor-system-ey.
Dealing the Cards:
Here is the Random Card picker I use! It comes with a random item generator of its own, both for utility in running the game, and because it's funny.
https://perchance.org/0d5jkwxpbq
Now, the game will proceed with whoever started this game dealing everybody a hand from the "YOUR HAND IS:" line. All cards are dealt in the order of *[Prefix]* *[Material]* *[Beast]* *[Suffix]*, or in the case of "YOUR HAND IS" *|Prefix|* *|Prefix|* *[Material]* *[Material]* and so on. Since some cards have a lot of words, all of them have been marked with asterisks to show where one ends and another begins. Remember, a full hand consists of two of each kind of card, and one bonus card! If there are repeat cards, you are instead to replace the copy with an item of the same kind from the "YOUR RANDOM BEAST IS:" line. Because of the nature of how I plan for this game to be run, it will be impossible for everyone to catch all duplicate cards made by this infernal machine, but everybody try your best and it'll be fine. The Dealer (and every customer after him) will also PM the "YOUR CUSTOMER IS:" scenario to the next customer for them to write up the appropriate spiel in the game thread and get the blacksmiths thinking.
Importantly, the original "dealer" will abstain from the first round, for maximum fairness, because they've seen everyone's cards already so being the first judge would be silly. All future rounds will be "dealt" by the previous customer, with the players of that round PM'ing them which cards they need to restore their hands, (If it's only one, give them the card of that type from the RANDOM BEAST. If it's two, give them both cards from the YOUR HAND IS. If it's three, give them all cards of that kind from both. If any of the cards you need to give the other person are repeats from previous points in the game, refresh the generator!) and the dealer being PM'ed their hand by the first customer. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Post your questions if it does not make sense! I will draw diagrams if I have to.
For the purposes of expediency in dealing and clearing up confusion in card holders, players will be asked to include a footnote at the bottom of each of their posts saying what cards they used and therefore will need a replacement of. Add an Asterisk (*) after a card if you do not need a replacement (I.E. it's a bonus card and you're going to ask for a different bonus card)
If I submitted the "|MOLDY| |GREEN| |POOP| |EMU|" in a round, for example, it would be useful to note that POOP is not an item (though it could be used as one) and GREEN is my bonus card, in which case getting two prefixes back would leave me with way too many cards. So I'd just leave that notation at the bottom of the post when I'm done, like so. Hopefully this clears up some recurring dealer confusion we've been having in games.
Prefix, Prefix*, Material, Beast
As far as card syntax rules, I'll say that a creation doesn't need to be just one of each card in that specific order. At bare minimum, it can be two cards. At maximum, I'd say 5. As long as it makes grammatical sense for what you're proposing, you can even use materials as items and vise versa, since they're both nouns. You could, say, use "Skull Ape" to mean an ape made of/associated with skulls, or "Ape Skull" for an undead ape that's just the head. I don't want to be too restrictive, if your creation makes some kind of grammatical sense, it should be legal. If anything's dancing on the edge, remember that one of the oldest unwritten rules of Cystia is that anything funny is legal at least once.
We'll need 4 (including me) to 6 people to play this game, and the first person to 3 points wins... 15 Golden Frijoles! But of course this kind of game is rarely ever about the score, is it?
