Spaceships and Hand Grenades

I've been designing a game from scratch but have yet to make a crucial decision: Board Game, or Card Game?

The two are similar on the surface, but surprisingly difficult to choose between this early in development. And the choice needs to be made soon because it'll dictate a lot of the future direction.

Spacefleet (it's a super early working title) is a game about building up a fleet of spaceships to explore new worlds, seek out new life, and  to boldly blow up that other guy's spaceships exploring new worlds and seeking out new life.



Ships use energy to power both shields and weapons, combined in the focus mechanic of the game by individualized decks of cards. For example, a basic Fighter might have an Energy deck of 10 cards shuffled beneath it - 4 1's, 3 2's, 2 3's, and a 0 card. To fire, it would reveal the top card and discard it, and to take damage it would remove the appropriate number of cards as well. Larger ships would have more Energy and could fire more than one card at a time.

On paper - or, more accurately, in a computer - this all sounds fine. But consider a fleet of even 10 small ships who require 100 energy cards. And where on the table do these cards go? Planetary exploration needs to be a component but card games are notoriously bad at space constraints.

A basic card game requires no more space than can be easily protected by your elbows. That is, just the area directly in front of you. Card location is usually left to personal preference because if the rules need to care then suddenly the slightest bump or mishap can ruin everything.

A nice compromise is with oversized tiles as seen in various dungeon crawler board games. It allows you to randomize planetary exploration while still maintaining a position system which flipping over cards from a deck doesn't allow. But now we're in board game territory so we might as well go full nines, replacing the ship cards with miniatures and the energy decks with dice.

As you can see I've thought about this dilemma a lot. Card games allow for easy expansion to multiple players where board games are much more restrictive. Card games are significantly cheaper to produce and require less maintenance. Cards can explain all the relevant rules so that players never need to memorize boring statistics. But how can a card game allow two fleets of 10 or more ships each to orbit a planet without getting super confusing?

This is just the first hurdle of what I'm sure are many. I've already built a Google spreadsheet of ship stats and it's surprisingly difficult to create mechanics to naturally allow for a heirarchy while keeping all models of ships relevant at all stages. But the Board/Card problem needs to be solved soon because so much hinges on the outcome.