itch.io

You should probably look at the rules for Ironsworn, the game this is based off of. It might take some work and hacking things together, since actual conflict seems to be against the purpose of this game, but it's the whole core of Ironsworn. I don't think you're likely to get official combat rules for Iron Valley, unfortunately.

The gameplay is fun, but I think suffers from the demand to grind more and more after each gym. Not only do you need to spend more and more money leveling your deck to keep up, since each new area demands 3 more cards in your deck the costs get worse and worse leading to even more grinding. The demand for levels also delays the timing on glyphs and new cards. I don't think the game was necessarily too easy or hard, just time-consuming.

Some changes I think would help with the gameplay loop would involve making it much easier to field new cards and maintain your favorites:

• If winning a battle leveled up one of the cards in your deck as part of the reward, you wouldn't need to spend nearly as much money on just team maintenance. Since each new area demands three more cards to participate in battles, a lot of your money must go toward leveling new cards, which reduces how much experimentation a player can do with different cards because of the sunk costs.
• New cards should have much higher levels on average, even at the cost of more expensive packs. This would let players experiment more with new Pokemon, train up specific teams to take on leaders, and maybe just demand one less training loop in the outskirts. For example, if the 4th route gave 3rd and 4th level cards far more often, your new cards wouldn't just be dead weight until you find a chance to Level Up.
• If you put a Level Up option in cities, you could remove them from the route rotation. That could mean more chances at the other options, and fewer loops just to level up when you're otherwise ready for the gym. This would work particularly well if the game gave away more levels, but I think removing some randomness to your Level Up opportunities would feel better.

Any one of these changes would probably mean reducing the amount of money trainers give, but you could always add more ways to spend it too. It's tricky finding a balance between "card game" and "monster trainer", but this is a really cool game that gets a lot of things right.