NSBA · design summary · for comment
A Science Bowl card game
Hearthstone, but Science Bowl. Built on the NSBA card collection — 249 cards of real players across four seasons, each carrying that player's actual per-category performance.
The shape of it
Your deck is your team. Every card is a real NSBA player with six category scores, a speed rating, and a stamina pool. Games run 2 to 10 players, live and synchronous, over 24 questions.
- Six category scoresDerived from that player's real buzz record — what they actually answered, season by season.
- SpeedDecides buzz order when more than one player commits.
- StaminaA pool that never refills. Spend it and the card eventually retires for good.
How a question plays
The three mechanics doing the work
Stamina never resets
Every commit costs 1, 2, or 3 stamina depending on intensity. Cards retire permanently when the pool empties. Your best player will burn out, and your bench has to carry the endgame. This is what stops the game being "play your best card 24 times".
Difficulty is a deck, not a dice roll
24 difficulty cards of known composition, shuffled. Only the order is hidden, and the remaining counts stay visible — so "three hard questions left, I should hold my chemistry specialist" is a plan you can actually make.
The threshold is hidden
You are told the bucket, never the exact bar. So a mid-tier player can steal a Nationals question on a soft draw, and a star is never guaranteed an easy one.
Why intensity is the interesting choice
Aggressive buzzes earlier but lowers your effective skill. That trade flips depending on what the moderator just announced — and you know which situation you're in before you commit.
Nearly everyone clears the bar anyway, so knowledge barely matters and the round is a pure speed race. Buzzing earlier costs you almost nothing.
AGGRESSIVE ≈ freeYou are scraping the threshold. The accuracy you give up is exactly what loses you the conversion — and a miss is −4.
AGGRESSIVE ≈ punishedThe questions are real
Not flavour text — actual Science Bowl tossups pulled from recorded games. And each one's difficulty is measured, not guessed: every recorded buzz notes where in the question it landed, so a question a real room only ever answered at the very end is rated hard, and one people buzzed mid-read is rated easy.
What we're unsure about
These are the honest weak points. Opinions on any of them are the reason this document exists.
The category is announced before you commit, so you may simply send your best player in it — a lookup, not a choice. It only becomes interesting when stamina is scarce or two cards are close. Is that often enough to carry a whole game?
Only about 1.5 cards get an attempt per question, so most of the table may just watch. A big lobby might be fundamentally low-agency no matter how it's tuned.
Six stats, four difficulty tiers, three intensities, and stamina to manage. The per-round decision is only two choices, but there's a lot to hold in your head before either feels meaningful.
Simulation has two generalist cards taking 60% of top-tier picks. Generalists being strong is realistic for Science Bowl — but if everyone builds the same deck, every game looks the same.