Woo! So the rules work great! The only takeaway is that Aces are just plain awful to have in your hand.
Because of this, I'm changing some rules surrounding low cards:
- instead of hearts healing you, the cards valued 1–3 heal you double their value. So Aces would heal 2, 2s would heal 4, and 3s would heal 6.
- You can play multiples of the same suit as usual per turn (i.e., no combining suits for healing).
- If you happen to have Ace–3 of the same suit and play all of them, you can double the total again, giving you 24 HP total!
- This removes the power imbalance that Hearts had by making all suits viable healers instead of just one suit.
- To follow the healing logic, I'm toying with the idea of giving Ace–3s an attack bonus in the armor as well, instead of just Aces, and instead of a universal attack bonus, it'd only power up attacks matching that suit.
- 3s would give 1 attack bonus, 2s would give 2, Aces would give 3, and no armor for a suit would give 4, because not having armor for a suit really sucks a lot!
- This has an unintended consequence of nerfing the Joker attack, because now instead of just swapping for potentially stronger armor, you could also swap for weaker armor just to get an attack bonus.
I have no idea if this will be good or bad, but we'll find out when I playtest again tomorrow! I'm afraid that these will change the game a lot and adds a lot that you need to remember as a player, but I think it changes things for the better because it adds another level of strategy and makes low cards useful.
I'll check back in tomorrow!