I’ve been taking an exercise class at my university recently, and my instructor introduced a workout that she calls the “Deck of Cards.” The idea is that you draw from a deck of playing cards, then do an exercise based on the suit with a number of repetitions equal to the value of the card you drew, then repeat until you get through the entire deck. For example, maybe pulling the five of clubs would mean doing five push ups. For the purpose of this workout, she counted Aces as “ones,” and the red and black face cards got completely different exercises with a set number of reps (for example, a black face card could be five “burpees”).
For obvious reasons, I connected this to the cards used in a game of Yomi and thought, “What if these were combined into one?”
Let’s lay out my first draft for a Yomi Fitness system. Keep in mind that this is not intended to replace a proper workout routine; I thought this could be an interesting and fun twist on the game, as well as a good community project (to get the rules balanced reasonably well and come up with character specific exercises). On a related note, I’m not going to claim these rules are perfect by any stretch. I’m still a beginner at Yomi, so balancing something like this on top of the balance of the existing game is probably beyond me. I’m still going to give it a try, though!
To do this, play a normal game of Yomi except that if a player loses combat, they must do an exercise based on what kind of card they combat-revealed that turn. No exercises need be performed by the winner of a combat, though they can join if they want!
- If they lost with a normal attack or throw, they must do a number of repetitions equal to the rank of the card for the exercise that matches that card’s suit.
- Losing with a normal block results in 4 reps of the exercise that matches that card’s suit.
- Losing with a normal dodge, on the other hand, results in 5 reps of the exercise that matches the suit of the opponent’s combat card.
- Special (named) attacks, throws, blocks and dodges on 2-10 follow the above rules but add +1 rep (for example, Jaina’s Knee Bash is a Throw on her 6 card, so losing combat with it results in 7 reps).
Exercises for each character’s Specials (Jack, Queen, King) and Supers (either side of Ace) should probably be tailored for that character. Picking exercises that match the flavor of a character would help to make the decision of which character to pick more interesting, and let those who try multiple characters get a variety of exercises. Also, I honestly have no idea how to handle Jokers, since I don’t think they even came up in the “deck of cards” workout (or if they did, I didn’t notice it).
Any thoughts on this idea or suggestions for the rules? I’ve intentionally left it vague what the exercise for each suit is, since I’ve forgotten all of them but push ups I’d like to hear what you think might be good for that! Also, since I’ve gotten a couple of IRL friends interested in Yomi (to the point where one of them texted me out of the blue to ask where he could buy decks and which ones I recommended), how bad of an idea would it be to have newish players do this? I’d expect this to warp play around minimizing reps of exercises a player hates, which could lead to bad habits if a lot of their early games use this system… But maybe throwing it in once in a while would be okay. What do you think?