Card or Not to Card?

During the Escalation campaign I pondered on how to give more "order" to the irregulars.  In many accounts of insurgent fights the insurgent forces are not poorly organized as a random roll on a table would make us believe.  So I propose a system that can both incorporate some, lots or no order (depending on hand size).

So, how about this, a Reinforcement Card Deck and a Hand of 3-6 cards.

How this would work, say you are leading a force which has a Deck Hand of 6, you draw six cards on turn 1, you play 1, discard 1 unused and keep 4.  On turn 2 you draw two new cards, and then decide which of the cards you will keep, play and which you will discard.  This will give an element of control over which forces will arrive and when they will arrive. But, you still do not know exactly what your whole force will turn out to be.  The advantage of this system is it is easy to add thematic cards, and is easy to add a whole gamut of reinforcements types, and with the number of cards one can control the frequency of particular reinforcements.

Here is an example, I have a hand of four cards, I will draw two more and then from my new hand of six I must play one and throw away one.  Special events may allow you to play more than one card.

My Reinforcement Card Hand

So, for example say I draw these two cards:

I like the commandos' so I decide to keep them, but I do not want to use them yet, I do not see much opportunity of bringing down artillery so I discard the Rocket Battery card.  One of my hotspots is close to be overrun so I decide I will play the Leader which gives me the opportunity to move a hotspot.  

We can setup the cards that the insurgent player gets to play 1 or 2 card per turn.

So, is this too complex?  Do you prefer tables?  Does this add too many cards to the table?  Does this add more strategy for the insurgent player?

Another nice advantage of this system is that the insurgent player will want to accumulate good cards for when they are best played.  But, if the regular players has interdiction or reserve units the regular player may attempt to remove either a random card from the deck or may with say a UAV inspect the deck and select are card to discard...on a successful TQ.

If you like/dislike this idea, how about a slightly different one, you have a small deck of Morale, TQ and INI cards, you can draw two cards from one deck and one each from the others (or even 3, 2 and 1).  From the two card selection you get to select one of them to represent your force.  The other two single draws you get what you get.  So if you feel you want to go for a better morale you can decide to select two Morale cards and keep the one you like.

Here are four examples of some TQ cards.  Each player gets to draw their own, so if there are two insurgent players each gets to "create" there own forces INI, TQ and MOR.

And here are examples of INI and MOR.  You will not each can come with a Special Attribute and Hand Size for Reinforcement cards.  This will allow flavor to be added in a very simple manner.

So what do you think?  Like/Dislike?

Falling asleep in the early evening or watching TV...and falling asleep... has not helped this week in getting the campaign done, but the setup for the campaign is coming along, I have added the initial insurgents, the elders, the militia and the retreating Hotakistani Forces.  You can see the Veteran units from the last portion of the campaign are chasing down the Hot's.  They are low on ammo and high on fatigue.  We can start the campaign whenever you want, the rest of the rules can be formulated as the regular conflict dies down.

Let slip the Dogs of Major D. Zaster!