Working on a card game.Follow

Game design and balance have always been topics that interest me. Previously I've thought about the subject in the medium of video games, but as I've been getting more table top and board games under my belt that thinking has shifted. There's also a far lower barrier to entry designing such a game, which helps tremendously.

I enjoy card games, but many typical trading card games have the inherent flaw of requiring the purchasing of specialized cards. I'm a very strong believer that one of the core concepts of any game is that players start out equal regardless of outside circumstances. The idea of being able to buy an advantage has always grated harshly against me, and as it's become more and more prominent *ahem f2p models and legitimate RMT* I've grown to begrudgingly accept it, but never lost my loathing.

Then I played quarriors and dominion. They're mechanically very similar games, one being with dice and one being with cards. The key concept in each is that of deck building. You buy the game set and it comes complete with all the cards you will ever be able to play. Nobody can use extra cash to buy a card you do not have access to by default. All the cards are presented in a common pool, and through certain mechanics player go about choosing cards to build their decks with as they play.

I've played these games, and while I think they are fun to play, I also find them to be flawed. It is very important to me that a game be both fun and competitive. Neither quarriors nor dominion are competitive. They are too random, and have each their own specific mechanical problems.

But I found them so interesting, that I thought to use them as a base to build off of.

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So the card game I'm hoping to design has to be both:
1. Fun
2. Competitive.

1. What makes a game fun is a very broad question. To me a fun game is easy to start playing and has enough depth to keep you playing as you begin to master it. In other words it has a low entry barrier and a high skill cap. Soccer is a game even children can begin to play, and yet professionals are able to play significantly than those of even medium experience. Fun games also allow interesting things to happen. While the core gameplay of a game can be enjoyable, it's the crazy stuff you tend to remember and enjoy the most. In MMORPGs Timelord likes to talk about the time he maintanked as a warlock in WoW. I still remember the manaburns and BCNM40 as a bard in FFXI. In fighting games it's the daring, risky, and flashy moves that are the most exciting. In card games it's the ability to win in a variety of quirky ways, like instead of outright killing an opponent you force him to run out of cards. I think it should be possible to win in crazy ways, and games should allow for players to pull stunts. And lastly they need to be dynamic. doing the same thing over and over again will always become tiresome, no matter how enjoyable it was to begin with.

2. I think competitive games tend to have a stricter set of criteria that is easier to define. First of all competitive games need to not be solvable, because then they are no longer games but puzzles. Chess is only considered competitive because it is presently impossible to solve. Competitive games need to have a variety of viable options, that is to say in another way that they need to be balanced. And lastly they need to have an amount of depth that allows player to distinguish themselves through skill.

So I have six goals to meet.

The final puzzle piece game together when I was reading Sirlin's blog about a Starcraft class at UC Berkley. Dominion is a game I found to be fun, but not competitive. Starcraft is a game I found to be competitive, but not fun (personally). What if I combined ideas from both?

One of the key features of card games, Dominion included, is that they are random. You shuffle the cards, draw a set number, and you deal with what you're dealt. This makes the games more dynamic, but somewhat reduces how much control players have over their chance of victory. Some might say a little bit of randomness is acceptable, but I'm a purest. So I decided my game would have no randomness. How would I achieve this in a card game? You no longer draw cards, you select them. Your entire deck is your hand. You may play any card at all so long as it is a legal option. This may sound strange, and it is, but I'll try to go more into detail about that later.

And being a purist there is another issue I felt of great importance that needed addressing. In chess and go it is generally assumed that the first player to move has an advantage, however slight. Taking turns creates an imbalance in the game. There are a variety of ways to handle this. Games like chess tend to have player alternate sides. Other games try to "snake" turns to lessen that advantage. Still other turns have a bidding/choosing (cyclades, dominant species, dust, risk legacy) mechanic for turn order. That's pretty good, but still imperfect, and I'm a purest. There is only one way to deal with turn advantage and that is to eliminate it completely. Like seven wonders, turns must be simultaneous. Turns make certain mechanics easier, but the sacrifice cannot be made.

With those two issue gone I believe I have the foundation for a perfect game. One that has zero randomness and zero turn advantage.

In doing this though, I have created certain other issues for myself. Randomness is so abundant in games for a very important reason. It is a very easy way to create dynamism in a game. Without it many games tend to become solvable or at the very least highly predictable. solvable means the game is no longer competitive. Repetition means the game is no longer fun. so we need to reinsert dynamism with a different method. The way to do that is with imperfect information, allowing for deception. Rock, paper, scissor is a game that is not random, solvable, or predictable. The same goes for the classic boardgame battleship. Without all the information available, the game cannot be perfected calculated even though there may be no random elements, and so players are forced to guess what their opponent is doing.

Luckily that is easy to do with cards, as anyone who has watched yugioh knows. "I summon one monster FACE DOWN in attack mode."

Let's get back to an earlier issue though. Your entire deck is your hand? Wouldn't player just spam the best card over and over again? Well that's not too hard to prevent. In most card games, even if you draw the best card you have on the first hand, often you cannot play it immediately due to requirements. In starcraft if I want to build carriers firs tI need enough minerals and gas, then I need enough food, then I need the thing that builds carriers, then I need enough resources to build that, then I need to have an army that can defend me while I am doing all that, and then I need to make sure the opponent isn't counter building against my carriers. That's a lot of things I have to go through before I get carriers.

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So if you've read this far, you'll notice I have yet to describe any actual mechanics. Those will be left to another post and are still in the works. This post was about the design philosophy. It's worth writing all those words because many games are flawed on a fundamental level due to problematic design philosophy.

Diablo 3 is a quick example. Ignoring the numerous other complaints you may have about it, let's only look at respeccing. Diablo 2 did this completely wrong in that respeccing meant restarting the character over from scratch. Blizzard realized this was dumb and corrected their design philosophy. They decided then that players should basically be able to respec for free at almost any time in Diablo 3. I think this was a good philosophy. However, with nephalem valor and elite farming blizzard decided it might be too easy if players could respec for each individual encounter, and so they made the buff disappear when you changed specs. This is stupid. To solve an entirely different problem they went and broke the thing they fixed.

This is like feeding a class of kids peanut butter crackers and then realizing Timmy is allergic to peanuts. So you take the peanut butter off for him. He then complains the cracker is too dry. So, you decide to add some peanut butter to the cracker to make it less dry. You broke what you just fixed to solve an unrelated problem. This is laziness on a developer's part.

And that is why it is important to have a consistent and articulated philosophy of design.

I'm a big boy; I can take it.

Well no, not really trying to do rock paper scissors as that is understandably quite boring no matter how it is dressed up. Ultimately, if the game is boring I've failed.

Still very much in progress. I tend to design from a top-down approach.

My earliest idea is very heavily borrowed from RTS. Honestly I'm not liking it too much as it seems potentially problematic from meeting my goals, and plainly it just doesn't capture my imagination (it doesn't seem fun to me). Some experimental mechanics I created for that are as follows.

Cards would be divided in unit cards and structure cards. The game area would be divided into three rows where cards could be placed. The back most row would be for structure cards, and this would represent your base. The row above that is a line of unit cards for defense, which represents defending unit near your base. The next row above that is the offensive unit line, represent units you are sending on attack.

Three could be three phases to turns. A build phase where players set cards face down in a build area representing their construction. A move phase where players would rearrange units in there rows between attack and defensive positions. I hadn't decided if their position from left to right would matter yet. And lastly an action phase where units carried out their actions.

So an example of what cards might look like.

Structure card - Command center.
-Has 10 hp/cost (tracked with tokens)
-grants 6 supply (max unit count)
-has attack/defend of 0/0.

those are some basic stats every structure card might have. As a special ability, the command center would grant the following.
-allows the construction of up to 4 SCVs (worker units which gather resources), 1 a turn.

Here is an example of a unit card.

Unit card - SCV.
-has 4 hp/cost.
-uses 1 supply.
-has attack defend 1/2.

as a special ability they could do one of the following
-action: increase income by 3 this turn.
-action: repair structure or mechanical unit 2hp for a cost of 2 resource.



So an example of play might look like this. You start the game with a command center and and 2 SCVs. You want to spend the first few turns building more SCVs to get your economy going. At some point you would want to start building a barracks to allow for the construction of more offensive units. When you make the decision is based on a variety of factors. Is your opponent build an army, so that you need a standing army in place to defend yourself or is he allowing you to focus more on economy? If he's focusing on economy then maybe you should get a small army of harassing units together to disrupt that.

the idea was to mimic the basic concepts of an RTS game to hopefully achieve some of that depth of gameplay. Just like RTS games have different factions, there would be different decks you could choose to start from so that you wouldn't necessarily be matched up against an opponent with the same options as you.

As I said before. I design from a top down perspective, so I'm not overly invested in any of the details of this system. It was just an experiment trying to meet the stated goals, and if I can't find a way to make it work then I'll just scrap it.

Edited, Aug 25th 2012 12:04am by Allegory

I've somewhat hit a block, for as little as I've got done. I've wandered around a fair number of parks trying to both think and not think about the idea too hard.

I know I want the game to be competitive and fun. I think with simultaneous turns and decision based gameplay I have an adequate framework for a competitive game, but I haven't done anything about the fun yet. So I'm trying to switch back to a bottom-up perspective and think about specific things I and others might find fun in a card game. Any personal stories would be appreciated.

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Note to myself: I should have realized before, but without random elements, it's entirely possible for players to become stuck in a trap of repeatedly using the same strategy. Therefore, it's important to make the optimal choices heavily dependent on your opponent's situation and cards rather than your own. IT shoudl always be possible for an opponent to disrupt your strategy if he realizes what it is.

A lot of my enjoyment of games like this comes from building the decks. Customizing for some kind of strategy or just building a deck to fit a theme. And, of course, finding the cards with the prettiest artwork.

Doubt my perspective will help you much(I'm not even sure your decks won't basically be built the same for each player), but there it is.

Man, I had so many different themed decks for MTG.
I wasn't so good at reacting to other people's plays, but I put a lot of thought into how my decks would work. Whether it be cards synergizing with each other, or making up for weaknesses.

I think the most fun part of any competitive game is trying to get your opponent to over think or otherwise misunderstand your intent.

Edited, Aug 27th 2012 3:46am by Kirby

I'm liking the pokemon idea a lot more, and I've messed around with a few specific card designs. The game ramps up much faster, in that interesting things happen on turn 1. It also has a better back and forth feel, and eliminates the problems of slippery slopes that occur in rts/economy systems.

There are three major categories of cards. The first is the "base", in terms of fluff I guess it can be thought as summoner or pokemon trainer. It's equivalent to choosing a class in an mmorpg or a faction in an RTS. It very broadly defines your strengths and weaknesses, and also anchors your strategy and style. IF you see a WoW warlock in pvp then you have a decent idea of what he is going ot try to do to you, and likewise as that class you have a good idea how you can try to win against your opponent. Once you star tthe game with this, you're basically locked into it.

After the base are the "monster" cards. these would be equivalent to the pokemon, or to your mmorpg spec, or to teching a certain way in an rts. You're less committed to this than your "base" because it can be change out or it might die, but it's probably going to last a few turns.

Finally the last major category are the "move" cards. These would be equivalent to pokemon attacks or mmorpg spells. You make these on a turn by turn basis.

Basic gameplay consists of playing cards face down and then flipping them over and resolving any affects.This functions similarly to pokemon in that you and your opponent both lock in your moves and then execute them together.

Moves would be modified by the "monster" using them, so as to achieve the head body combining effect mentioned earlier. I've thought about including types as sandy mentioned earlier, but my thoughts all seem to fall into the trap of a rock-paper=scissors system, which might not be too bad if it was minor enough.

Having thought more about Poldaran's comments on deck building, I realize this is something that a lot of players like about card games. Even dominion has it in a form. Perhaps players might be limited to selecting only some of the cards that would ship with the game. So while the game would ship with all possible cards inside of it, let's say 200, players would be limited to choosing maybe 50 cards to form their "deck." So there is still deck building, but no requirements of having to buy booster packs or rare/powerful cards.

If it helps, I've read most of your posts in this thread, though I don't necessarily understand all of em.

I've been mulling around some ideas, but I thing we need to get some more of the raw mechanics down before we design the 'exeptions to the rules', that way we can attack the strategic diversity issue intelligently.

I'm been thinking about this idea again, because I really like what I'm trying to do with the concept.

I've read the rules of Yomi, because I think Sirlin has a lot of great insights into design, testing, and play. However I was a bit disappointed how much of a core concept the RPS mechanic is. He has adjusted the weights of each of those to make it more interesting, and a skilled player will beat a random player more than 50% of the time, but it just rubs me the wrong way. However, I have yet to play the game. One aspect of his style that I incorporated long ago was the importance of asymmetrical gameplay. I've always hated mirror matches in games, and found that even winning was often less fun for me than losing an asymmetrical match. His perspective seems to emphasize asymmetry and hope for competitive balance though, while I'd prefer competitive balance and hope for asymmetrical play.

I'm attempting to write a Game Design Document in word, but I have little experience with such formats. Mostly I want to be very clear about my objections and organize information into a very readable format.

One card game I really enjoy is Thirteen. It's played with standard playing. The essence of the game is making value judgements about what you can get away with, and when to control the game versus when to hold back. I wonder if there's something to steal from there.

Edited, Mar 14th 2013 5:12pm by Allegory

Oh I know, but like I said, he has good insights into design, testing and play. I incorporate what I see as his good points.

I started off this project pretty much inspired by quarriors/dominion (they might as well be the same game). I thought they were fun, but fundamentally flawed. As I thought about how to fix them I realized that the problems were too core to make house rules for, and I might as well start from scratch.

I know I haven't accomplished anything yet, but what I hope to accomplish is something startlingly different from what is presently common on the games market. Most of the board/card games you'd find in a comic book store rely on elements (such as chance through dice rolling or card shuffling) that make mechanics much easier but erode the game's competitive core. I want to make a game that is fun while being devoid of uncompetitive elements. A game that isn't random, that isn't solvable, that every play has an equal chance of winning where decisions determine the outcome, and that somehow manages to achieve all of that while being fun.

It's hard to imagine that someone hasn't done it before, but I honestly can't think of a single game that does so. Perhaps the closest is Aarima, but that has first turn advantage.

I have not, and will look into those.

Puerto Rico is the only one I can think of that comes close. It has a very small luck element to it, but it is very minor. I can't think of anything that has less.

Unquestionably, there are well balanced board games out there. I mostly wanted to build this game as a proof of concept. To show it is possible to have a functional game that plays like popular games today, but has a perfect competitive balance conceptually (even if I perhaps ***** up and make particular cards too strong).

I like game design, but when I approach the subject I don't want to make my game, as I often think others think about it. I want to make a game that is--in my opinion--a fundamentally different offering than what is out there.