Yes, I do have a digital camera.

A mix of text and images might be more time consuming but I would think not much more. Don’t you have a digital camera?

I really like your suggestion of mapping the rank of the card to the number of cards pulled into the Royal Hand. Another possibility could hearken back to your original suggestion about getting a budget of points to spend on as many obstacles as you wish.

I need to playtest this!

I think controlling which cards Player 2 is allowed to play has some interesting possibilities, but I think with your mechanics that the deck that Player 2 is using to offer opposition will be limited in how many powerful cards it has, so it may not work in this context. Changing the number of obstacles without changing the Royal Hand size is problematic. The simplest idea would be to just have the number value of the card you offer as prize set the size of the Royal Hand — offer a 9 and you get to pick from 9 cards when presenting obstacles. You’d have to either analyze the probabilities or playtest that to see if it would actually be workable, though.

Since some cards are more powerful than others, when Player 2 is searching the base deck in step III, is he making an “interesting choice” from a game design perspective, or is he just going to hunt for the “weakest” card available knowing that any card he puts up might potentially come back and bite him in the next match? If you added a relationship between the value of the offered card and the cards Player 2 is allowed to play as obstacles that might put a little more risk/reward tension into the system, if that is something you want to encourage.

Good question, this post is unclear on this. Before the Royal draws up a hand, there is a completely different negotiation process where the Royal offers a card as the prize for the entire mission. this favor card comes from the base Uno deck of the player of the gladiateurs.

Once the player of the gladiateurs accepts the offer of the favor card, then the Royal player draws up a Royal Hand from his own Team Deck and the mission begins.

So, the process goes like this:

I. Player 1 creates the Team Deck for his “PC” team of gladiateurs. Player 2 creates a Team Deck for his “NPC” team of gladiateurs. Both Players play competitively against each other in a match of boile de muertre.

II. Player 1 wins the match. Player 2 takes on the role of the Royal for Player 1’s team and the two have a scene where the Royal congratulates Player 1’s team. Player 2 has effectively become the GM for Player 1.

III. Player 2, as the Royal for Team 1, looks into Player 1s base Uno deck, pulls out a card for the favor. Player 2 portrays the Royal for Team 1 and offers a card to Player 1 if he/she accepts a mission. Player 1 can either accept the offer or try to weasel out of the offer. Player 2 can either up the ante or force the issue. The rules assume that Player 1 accepts the mission.

IV. Player 2 draws his Royal Hand from his own Team Deck, the very one he just used in the match of boile de muertre. These cards are used as the obstacles for the mission that Player 1 undertakes with his gladiateurs.

Supplemental. If Player 2 wants some inspiration for the mission to give to Player 1, he can draw from his Team Deck and use it to color the mission (see What mission should I create? post for details on this).

Does this make more sense? It was helpful to write this down. I need to put this into a post.

If it’s the first, isn’t the obvious strategy for the Royal Hand player to just offer the lowest value card as the prize and save all the high-value cards to make the obstacles tough?