The Deck That Plays Itself

Another game night behind me, and some new ideas coming from my experiences.
Among the games I played were the familiar Dominion, father of all deckbuilders, and my first play of Troyes, a game with an "automatic" neutral player.

Thinking of these "artificial intelligence" systems in which a set of rules is designed into the game to dictate the movement of neutral pieces for the players to deal with, gave me an idea.

My idea is to create a game in which players need to create their own AI systems, hoping to achieve their goals in the most efficient matter, similar to the PC game Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom, in which players could build building and hire adventurers, which would then go adventuring without direct player interaction, though the player could set rewards to entice his adventurers to go to certain locations.

The way I see my game working is in 2 phases.
In half the game, players would acquire cards. I have a few ideas floating around on this, from playing cards for their monetary value to purchase cards that are worth more, to bidding on cards using money chips gained during the second phase of the game, to placing workers to acquire certain cards, create certain combos and block other players.

In the second half, players would shuffle their purchased cards, and flip cards over one at a time in turns, moving their piece or pieces according to whatever is indicated on the card. In a well thought out deck, the instructions on the cards would work well together to get more money to help the player develop his economic engine even further until some set goal is reached, such as a turn number, monetary goal or something else.

I have some more thinking to do about theme. Fantasy was the obvious choice, but I like to explore less familiar, and writing this post made me think of an idea - perhaps playing as parents sending children on errands.

I also need to think about how the instruction system would work: one idea is to have a grid and have turn left twice and go straight one square instructions, while another idea would be to have instructions based on landmarks, such as going towards the nearest enemy or a location on the map.