Then, in 1993, the Collectable Card Game craze was started by Magic: The Gathering. In 1994, Flying Buffalo dipped it's feet in those waters and started selling Booster packs for Nuclear War. Each booster pack contained 8 random cards for use with Nuclear War. So, I bought 20 or so packs and added them to my deck. Now, that brought my deck size to over 450 cards. And, unfortunately, the Booster packs are weighted heavily towards Secrets and Specials, so out of 450 cards, about 100 of them are Secrets or Specials. The last couple of games I played seemed to be dominated by people playing endless streams of Secrets and Specials. Sending bombs over to the enemy seemed to have become a secondary function. This, I felt, was a problem.
So, I decided to thin out my deck a little to make it a little closer to the original philosophy of the game (i.e., lots of bombs and carriers, weighted somewhat towards the smaller bombs) and make it a little more portable.
A fellow owner of Nuclear War, Andrew Looney, has also scaled down his deck and offers his version of how to scale down a deck.
Deck Design: I started by sorting all my cards into 6 piles; Carriers,
Warheads, Secrets, Specials, Propoganda, and "Other". First, I looked at the
Carrier pile and sorted them all by carrying capacity. Of the Bombers, I took
2 of each kind (Stealth, B-1, B-70, and Delta Clipper). I added 2 each of
the unusual carriers like MX, Cruise, Submarine, Atomic Cannon, and Space
Platform. I then added 3 Saturns to give me about 20 Carriers. I added
10 Ten-Megs and 10 Twenty-Megs for a total of 40 carriers.Then, I needed some Warheads. I figured I would need one Warhead for each Carrier, plus an extra Warhead for each Carrier that can hold multiple Warheads. That came to about 50. I started with the most powerful bombs and added one 200-Meg Warhead, two 100s, two 75s, four 50s, and the rest split between 10s and 20s.
Next were the Propoganda cards. In the games I play, most folks really hate drawing Propoganda cards, so I figured I should cut down on them. I decided that 20 Propoganda (about half the number of Warheads) should be enough. I started with two 25-sized Propoganda, eight 10s, and the rest 5s.
I picked through my Specials and decided on 20 cards, with 5 of them being Spy cards. I also picked out 12 Intercept and "other" cards (Killer Satellite, etc.).
Finally, came the Secrets. This was the biggest problem. There were so many good ones, that I hated to remove any. I took out one of each Secret and discovered I had over 60 unique Secrets and that's too many for the deck. Hmm. I decided that I only wanted about 25 Secrets. So, I'd have to think of something. During play, I only put 25 random Secrets in the deck and then shuffle the rest of them and place them nearby. Then, when anyone draws a Secret, they have to put it on the bottom of the undrawn Secrets pile and take the top Secret instead. This is the card they use. This keeps all the Secrets in the game, but doesn't overload the deck itself. This method is a little cumbersome for the casual player, so what you may want to do is simply remove all the Secrets after a game, shuffle them into the unused Secrets, and then choose 25 random Secrets for use in the next game.
Total = 172 Cards
But, Nuclear War has a fair number of charts, Spinners, Dice, and special rules for certain cards (like the Submarine). If I could make those things smaller, I'd have a nice, portable package.
I transcribed all the information on two of the charts (the Nuclear Misfunction chart and the population distribution chart) onto small sheets of paper. I also transcribed the Spinner details onto a another piece of paper (the Spinner says you can use Dice rolls to simulate the Spinner). Finally, I summarized the most confusing rules. This resulted in two, small "cheat sheets" for the game.
I made them into GIF files. The First one has the Spinner and Misfunction chart. The Second one has the rules summary and population chart. The Missles chart that Andrew made up works great with this deck.
