Card Game: Castle Powers Revisited

I've just realized something. I've been having problems balancing the various castle powers and that's slowed my overall progress. The problem, though, is that I've grossly overpowered the Diamond/Spade pair when compared to the Heart/Club pair. And, of course, that the Heart/Club pair is about as powerful as I can make them without breaking the game horribly. And the Diamond/Spade pair is about as weak as I can make them while still making their abilities meaningful. This, by the way, is a bad combination. The only alternative I can see is to drastically revamp the Heart/Club pair but I have no clue what to do with them.

The thing is Heart/Club - where their ability gives them a bit of a boost to their defending or attacking, respectively - is about where I want the castle powers to be. Because, and here's my revelation: they actually have a drawback, which Diamonds and Spades, for all intents and purposes, lack.

Hearts and Clubs by automatically adding to their total value become increasingly vulnerable to being undercut (Which is what I'm calling the flipping of the normal rules that happens when cards of the same suit are played. Normally, the highest card wins. But when, say, someone attacks with a 6 of Hearts and the other person defends with a 3 of Hearts, the defenders wins - when it's the same suit, the lowest card wins. This prevents people from creating unbeatable stacks but also adds variance to the game - it messes with the probabilities, basically, in ways I'm still not sure of how to express or control.).

Now, for instance, let's say we have a Club player who - at the moment - gains +3 to any card they attack with. That means that, at maximum, without any other cards they have an attacking value of 14 (with a King or Queen - these cards don't stack but the castle bonus would affect them.) and a minimum value of 3 (with a Jack which normally has a value of 0). This means they're much more likely to win *unless their opponent has a card of the same suit. Because, unless that opponent is playing Hearts, they'll have a better chance of being able to undercut. Say the Club player plays that Jack of Clubs. Their opponent, normally, wouldn't be able to undercut that at all - they would, however, be able to outplay it with a card of any other suit, of course (Ties go to the attacker so playing another Jack is out and the Jack of Clubs just got played so that's four cards out of the deck that they can't use, the rest would beat that Jack). But with the castle bonus that Jack is really acting as a 3 which means the other player not only has all the cards which beat a 3 to draw on (which is less than the cards which will beat a Jack, true, but only by 8 out of 39 possibilities. That's only about a 20% difference. Since the defender has several cards to choose from that's a really small difference in the chances they have to slam down something to beat your card.) but they also now can play the 2 and Ace of Clubs.

This isn't so crippling at the lower values as it is at the higher ones. The higher the card value the bigger the chance that there'll be a card of that same suit in your opponent's hand that can beat it (And the less chance they'll have a card in another suit that can top it, of course. The inverse happens as you play smaller valued cards.). But it means that although the King and Queen are supposedly of the same value, say, that when the Club player throws down one of them, their opponent can successfully defend with the other. Something that doesn't happen normally. It's a similar story for 10s and 9s which both pass the 11 maximum for single cards.

So, Clubs and Hearts players are actually weaker, statistically speaking, when playing high valued cards. I haven't dug deep enough into the numbers yet to figure out just how much that +3 is hurting them - I can't even conclusively state that it is - but if there is an effect I know that adding more flat value bonuses is only going to make it worse. +3 is fine, I think, but a +12 bonus (Which if I give every card position a bonus similar to the castle one would be the case for a stack of four Clubs, say.) means that every single card of that suit is going to beat any card played by someone with that bonus. Just no other card from any other suit would, though.

It might be workable, it might not, but the point is that there's a built in weakness in the ability that means there's a tradeoff. By gaining that inherent stack the Hearts/Club player opens themselves up to being undercut more easily. Spades have to discard to use their ability, at this point, but so does anyone Controlling land - what Spade's power does is to let them pick any land on the board to do so with. There's a drawback but it's a harmless one. Diamonds are worse because they have no effective downside whatsoever to using their power - shuffling a card into their deck to draw a new one.

Diamond is easy enough to solve - make the player bleed for using that ability, somehow. But Spades are trickier, there's already a cost involved and putting in more means there's a danger of going too far. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to handle this but now I know that something needs to be done. I don't mind some imbalance amongst the castle powers but I do want to make sure that they're at least roughly equivalent.