Collective Setting System: The Basics

Before play begins, it needs to be established how many nations you’re building and how many players you have.  There should be at least five cards per nation, so the starting hand size should allow for that many cards, total plus however many more cards are needed to give each player an equal starting hand.

You can share starting hands, make some plans, discuss your intentions for each state, and determine starting player and order of play by mutual agreement. It would also be a good time to hammer out some names and talk about general aspects of the setting; its themes, environments, and moods. This isn’t a competitive game where one player is trying to make the strongest state. It’s supposed to be a fun semi-collaborative effort to produce surprising game world elements. By default, hands are concealed, direction of play is determined randomly, and the starting player is the storyteller for the game the world will be featured in.

Play it, don’t do it.

On each player’s turn, they may either play a card or draw a card, discard a non-history card, and then play a card. Cards are played on states (though some specials may affect other cards in play) and remain on them as long as that nation can support them.

History cards are a special case. Each state has two periods in its history; Distant History and Recent History (there is also an Ancient History Special card which can produce a third period). Once all states have a History card on them for each of their periods, play is over.

Looks kinda like this.

Lightning Round

Sometimes, a group of players will run out of cards. When a player has an empty hand at the beginning of their turn, instead of usual turn options, they draw three cards, play a History card if possible, then discard the rest.

The Lightning Round exists to keep things simple. There are only so many features of a nation that people can keep track of before they simply glaze over everything. The purpose of this system is to make memorable nations that players are familiar with, not large stats and piles of descriptions. The Lightning Round exists so that if players are having a hard time finding the History cards to finish up, they can search for one without having to pass a turn without doing anything.

With any luck, your results will look similar to: