Thread:Talk:Magical Assistant/Great idea!/reply (5)

I like the elements for operations flavor - that sounds fun! To make this small children friendly, and just in general for cleaner cards, perhaps for the base game would have two sided cards - one side would be the spells, with a bit of story with a larger number like 22 or 15 that are targets with some sort of challenge attached. The other side of the card could be spell components - affiliated with water or fire, and numbered 1-9, with a neat little image and name for flavor. For instance, some water 1 cards might be bubbles, rain drops, or a snowflake, compared to water 5s which might be rivers or lakes, and water 9s which are oceans and glaciers. Fire 1 embers... fire 9 volcanos... etc. At the beginning of your turn, you draw a card with the spell side right-side up, but you have a hand of cards with the components side right-side up.

For example, one of the challenges might be to have a spell that causes it to rain flowers. The target number is 13, but with a caveat that you can't use fire/addition cards numbered 5 or above, but you can use two water (subtraction) cards of the same number to count as fire/addition. So I could play two water 7s as a fire 7, then a 2 fire and a 4 fire. The card would be printed with what happens if you match the number exactly - in this case, remove a card from the struggle discard pile.

Another example would be a spell that makes a flying carpet. The target number is 18, but with the caveat that you can only use odd numbers, and 1s count as 10. The bonus could be to draw an extra two cards. The caveats could be more thematic than I listed, of course, and tied into the spell's story better.

Goodness, you start throwing in polynomial math and I might need necromancy to bring back my brain from its rapid destruction...