Design Philosophy: Deck-based Determinism?
Hey, gang!
I'm working on a design right now and I'm having a kind of internal debate about one particular aspect of the game. Would gladly welcome some insight here.
The game is a horde battler where players cooperatively kill waves of dozens of enemies on a hex board. The enemy "turns" are driven by a deck of Enemy cards, and the boss turn is driven by a deck of Boss cards. Players roll dice to gain action points, then spend those action points to do things like move and deal damage.
Because enemy/boss movement and damage are deterministic (e.g., "do what it says on the card" with no die rolling), I'm worried that the end state of the game is essentially determined by the order of cards in the enemy and boss decks. Players can take a number of variable actions and make a lot of choices, but I think there's a small number of deck configurations which are essentially impossible to beat.
My instincts are that this is a flaw in the design and needs to be fixed - but at the same time, I do want players to periodically lose the game, and I want the game to feel like a challenge. Have you run into a design problem like this? Really just fishing for thoughts and insight on if this is a problem, if so how much of a problem, and what ways have you seen games fix this?