(https://i.imgur.com/0EJf2GO.png)
Permitted to gather wood - but for how long?
The Betrayal of the Card
By rbuxton
They’re the most important (or only) component in many games: randomisable, concealable, invertible, portable, rotatable, categorisable and packed with information. Cards have huge potential for a game designer, but my mechanics have always lacked something crucial. Take a look at these:
1. A combat system in which players use cards to increase their strength. Imagine a Risk variant in which the more cards you have, the more you can increase your die roll.
2. A second combat system in which strength is tied to how many action cards a player has used this round. Time your attacks for the end of the round for maximum effect.
3. A game in which “worker” pieces are placed on the board to collect resources. Some resources will be off-limits until you hold a certain number of cards.
Have you spotted it yet? I haven’t really told you what those cards do because it is largely irrelevant. Only the number of collected cards matters – I might as well use boring counters instead. My playtesters are also getting frustrated by a lack of interesting cards:
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Carta_Francese_retro_Blu.jpg/436px-Carta_Francese_retro_Blu.jpg)
Does it matter what's on the other side?
“I completed my quest. What do I get?”
“You get a relic card!”
“Cool, which relic is it?”
“The relics are all identical, we only care about how many you’ve collected.”
“That sucks. Couldn’t it be a magical sword or something, which gives me new powers and makes everyone else afraid of me? Wouldn’t that be exciting?”
“…. I don’t do exciting.”
It’s a good point, but for now I’m preoccupied with something else: Decks. Decks are to cards what cubes are to squares: much more complex, but with many characteristics in common. I recently improved a deck by splitting it into three smaller decks, which had to be used up one after the other. I put the strongest cards in the final deck – this meant that there were no over-powered upgrades appearing early in the game.
This change also allowed me to improve game flow by categorising cards as “weak” or “strong”. If the weak version of a card was sitting unloved on the table, the strong card would eventually replace it. But there was another logical way of looking at this mechanic: perhaps the weak card was still present, it had simply evolved into the strong card.
So now we can imagine a new game in which weak cards are drawn early on, but bring with them a deck of two or three strong cards. Shuffle them up with your existing cards, draw them as the game progresses, control your deck so that the strong cards appear after the weak ones. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That’s right, watch this space for Pokémon, the Copyright Infringement Game...
Editor's note: You can read rbuxton's previous article, Game Design's Ultimate Challenge (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5748.0), here, which contains some of the mechanics discussed in this piece. All connected!