More ch-ch-changes

I've talked a little more with the person I play tested the game I mentioned in the last post and have been mulling it over.

Tokens

One change that was suggested was switching from a deck of cards to tokens. It felt like such an obvious move actually.

One of my problems in the design was having too few or too many cards. Too few and players were shuffling way too much. Too many and it was impossible to do any sort of prediction with card counting. With 6 of each of 3 suits, if I increased the number of cards evenly I had either 18 cards with one of each suit (which I felt was too few), or 36 with the next jump up. This last version I had 27 cards, with two of each of the 1-3 cards and 1 each of 4-7, though I thought this was a bit clunky with card counting.

Now I have three colors in place of the suits, red white and blue (Easy to remember order for beating them). I used some poker chips I had, with numbers sharpied on.

Having tokens eliminates these problems. There's no shuffling, just a quick shake. We'll see how this works when I do the next test play.

Forgotten Contest

Another suggestion is if someone forgets and reveals the card/token when they should have hidden it because it's a contested move, just make it so they have to stop before it would have been triggered anyway. one thing about that is, if the unit triggered because it moved out of an enemy's range it just means they don't go anywhere, which seems like a big penalty.

The Reserve

Another idea suggested was lost cards/tokens not being recovered at the end of your own turn, so you only get the unspent cards/tokens  to defend with, and then recover at the end of your opponent's turn.
This I'm less sure about simply because you only get 5 tokens/cards, and I don't want to increase this number too much, or else I'd have to increase the total pool. It seems like it'd basicly encourage turtling much more, so players have enough cards.tokens to defend with.
I'm willing to give it a try anyway.

When does it all (token effects) end?

Another aspect I was struggling with in the testplay that I didn't mention is the order of when tokens are removed. I had it simply at the end of your turn, but it makes no sense for a defense token to be placed on your turn and then immediately removed. One solution would be to make it so attack tokens remove at the end of your turn, and defense at the end of your opponent's turn ,but I don't really like the idea of tokens having seperate timings, since it's just one more thing to remember.

Maybe all tokens are removed at the end of your opponent's turn, since attack tokens aren't doing anything anyway.

I was considering just making clean up after both players go, but this would requite some sort of initiative check at the beginning of each round (I know a lot of miniatures games have this, including   Guild ball, a game I' recently discovered and I'm looking forward to playing) which I feel is a bit disruptive and slows the game down, and so I'd rather avoid it.

So those are things I'm looking at being some more changes in the next play. I'll report here on how that game goes, and I'll try to take pictures this time.

Do you have any thoughts on these mechanics? Are there any good examples where these types of mechanics are used well, or poorly?