Designing the map layer for a deck-building game
I was working a bit at one of my passion projects, a deck building game based on urban fantasy heists and it got me thinking about the design of the "map" layer in the genre. I was wondering if there is any interesting innovation on that front side of the game rather than the combat\encounters one.
Slay the spire and many of its successors use an FTL-like map or a variation of thereoff, it is definitely efficient, easy to read and can be tailored to set the pace of a full session pretty effectively (and players are familiar with it which reduce the cognitive load needed to learn a new game).
I would be curious, though, to discuss some alternatives implementations\ideas if any comes to mind or in general what are this subreddit thoughs on the matter, such as, for example, how complex you think such layer could be without detracting from the fights or without slowing down a run too much.
A game that comes to mind as an example is As We Descend that uses a hand of cards to manage the out of combat moments between expenditions, you have agents cards that can be sent to various location of the main city hub and the rewards you obtain from fights are also cards that can offer different benefits depending on where you spend them.
Not strictly a deck-builder, but the new Battlestar Galactica shattered hope also has a very interesting map layer between fights where you can choose how to allocate resources, level up your characters\ship assing your characters to point of interets\crisis to solve and so on.
I was also thinking that an interesting idea could be borrowing from the hybrid deck-builders board games, for example Dune Imperium is a deck-builder\worker placement game, but at the end of each worker placement round there is a 'battle' where you can send your soldiers to fight and it is the main source of victory points. I can imagine implementing a similar strategy for a traditional deckbuilder where you can use the worker placement section to improve your fighters\army or whatever (buy\upgrade cards or relics level up and so on) or work toward your victory condition, while the battle itself is managed in a slay-the spire-esque system for example.