Digimon Card Game's shared resource mechanic

[OgreBattle]

Digimon card game's out in Japanese but has online English translation. Above is the "Memory gauge" that both players use as the energy resource.

1) Memory Gauge starts at 0, each player as their side that goes to 10
2) When you play a card, the X cost of that card shifts the Memory Token towards your opponent's side of the gauge by X
3) When the memory token shifts to the opponent's side your turn ends
4) To play a card of 11+ cost you need the Memory Token to be a positive number on your side



I haven't seen such a system before but it means few cards are truly 'dead' in your hand. But if you didn't start your turn with much Memory then playing a single big card gives your opponent more Memory to play multiple small cards or a huge card of their own before the turn goes back to you.

It's a super interesting mechanic, did they get the idea from an existing game?

[jt]

That is super interesting. I haven't seen it before either.

Is there a way to end your turn other than spending memory until you run out? What happens if you run out of (playable) cards? (Is that even possible?)

[Foxwarrior]

It's one of the standard systems in tactical (C/J)RPGs (mostly ones I haven't played in a very long time and thus no specific examples spring to mind). The ones where you've got like, an initiative tracker bar along the side or top of the screen, and the active character is at 0, and the next character is at 5, and when you use an ability it activates immediately and then the active character is shifted along a number of steps equal to the action point cost of the action they did.

[jt]

Mana Khemia is a good example of a game that very explicitly uses the system you're describing, Foxwarrior. Time is an infinite line of cards, and your turn gets inserted N cards into the future.

I think you're right and the Memory Gauge might be mathematically the same thing as that, but it's a very different mental model for the same system.

[OgreBattle]

That is super interesting. I haven't seen it before either.

Is there a way to end your turn other than spending memory until you run out? What happens if you run out of (playable) cards? (Is that even possible?)

Yeah you can voluntarily end turn but the gauge shifts to 3 on opponent, so rarely do you want to pass.

Rules document here: https://hk.digimoncard.com/rule/pdf/manual.pdf?v1.1

Your hitpoints are 5 Security Cards from the top of your deck. Interestingly if you reveal a Digimon card it will deal its power (no other abilities like Deathtouch work) in damage to the Digimon that attacked you, so you have an incentive to always have some big digimon to remove attackers.

Some cards deal multiple Security Cards worth of damage, but Security Cards are flipped one at a time so the attacker might flip a Digimon of higher power and get destroyed before dealing full damage.

The Godzilla Magic the Gathering set works in a mostly similar way as Digivolutions (with Digimon you need to match color and the card needs to be 1 higher level, fresh hatched digimon are 1, so you can apply a lvl2 Digimon of the right color on top and so on for lvl 3 4 5+), there's some abilities that are passed on like Deathtouch or "deal 1 more security card in damage". You can also hard cast any Digimon so doesn't have the problem of Pokemon tcg (as I remember it, maybe it changed by now) where you got a charizard but no charmeleon in the field.

"Enters play from hand" and "Digivolved" are different 'enters play' conditions so some cards are better off hard casted instead of digivolved

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Oh yeah there's also no blocking by default, you need to have [Blocker] to Block so taking damage is the norm. But an attacking Digimon is tapped, and an unblocked Digimon can choose to hit a tapped Digimon or the opponent. This is balanced against Security cards being able to destroy Digimon quite easily especially if they're low level digimon with low power.

[DragonChild]

I first saw something like this in the board game Crystal Clans - whenever you use an action, the initiative tracker moved its cost towards your opponent's side. When it crossed over, it became your opponent's turn. It's an interesting idea but the game never really seemed to make it worthwhile to do big actions, and the game itself felt kinda flat.

[OgreBattle]

I first saw something like this in the board game Crystal Clans - whenever you use an action, the initiative tracker moved its cost towards your opponent's side. When it crossed over, it became your opponent's turn. It's an interesting idea but the game never really seemed to make it worthwhile to do big actions, and the game itself felt kinda flat.

With the Digimon game every color has access to big "No U" sorcery ('Option') cards, so I might be at 3 Memory then cast a 9-10 cost "Destroy your Digimon that will kill me next turn if I dont do anything" spell and now you have 7ish memory to recover from that loss.

I've played little but that's how the game is ideally balanced, it kinda feels like fighting game recovery frames.