Card Game: Introduction

One of the things that have always fascinated me have been what used to be Collectable Card Games or what I gather are now called TCGs (Trading Card Games) these days. I was around when M:TG just exploded and I remember getting my first starter deck and card packs and figuring out this new little game with my friends. It was new and exciting and no one really knew how it was supposed to work. Oh, sure, we had the rulebook (Which we followed…most of the time. My friends and I were great cheaters, after all. Or we liked to make up our own games. Depends on how generous you want to be with our youthful indiscretions, I guess.) but the rules said make up your own deck. How much land did you need? How many monsters? Was a great big one better than a lot of little ones? Could you use these spells and interrupt cards together to get some neat things happening? And how do you make sure you draw the card you want when you really need it? By now those questions have all been answered, at least by the people who’ve kept playing the game. Myself, I dropped out a long time ago. Mostly due to the many costs involved in staying with that sort of game. You can easily spend thousands of dollars getting together a competitive deck. And that doesn’t even mean you can play the game, just that you have the ball, so to speak. To say nothing of keeping on top of all the newly released card sets and rule tweaks and deck strategies that are constantly streaming into the marketplace. It’s just a lot to handle when you’re not really all that dedicated to the game and just want to have some fun from time to time. Oh, sure, I could get the new “starter” sets and the odd pack of cards here and there but I know a bit too much to be satisfied unless I’m running with something killer. And, well, I’ve already done that with my friends. Had some fun, moved onto bigger, better, and cheaper things.

But, I’ve always liked the idea of card games like that. I mean, almost everyone’s played a card game by now. Texas Hold’em is the latest “sport” to splash into the mainstream, after all. And there’s Old Maid and Go Fish and War and any of a dozen other ways of using cards to play with. Some of them, like poker, have a lot of depth to them and can be very enjoyable to play (not to mention you can make a lot doing so) but they lack the complexity of a real good TCG. Mostly because the rules are very simple and they rely on the metagame – the game about the game – for their strategic depth. It’s all about knowing how to read your opponents and when to bluff and when to fold in poker and that’s an example of the metagame. You won’t find those sort of things in the rulebook (of poker) but it’s how the game gets played. TCG have much more complicated metagames because their rules are so much more flexible. In M:TG it’s not just your opponent you have to beat, it’s their deck and since you can make your own deck of cards you can pick from any number of tactics and combinations to employ (In poker you’d see this refered to as “slow-play” or “fast-play”, perhaps). As such strategies become popular methods of beating them become commonplace. These solutions have their own answers. And on and on, a continuing cycle of strategies being matched against other strategies for a competitive advantage. And that’s exactly the kind of game I like to play. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t, tweaking, twisting, turning and constantly being challenged to get better somehow. Perhaps someone else has already come up with a way of doing so without the enormous costs involved in a TCG but if they have I haven’t seen it.

Probably most people these days wouldn’t bother. Games, these days, are made by companies – the ones that get mass-produced and marketed, anyways – and companies like to make money. They like their TCGs because there’s a lot of money to be made as people buy up pack after pack of cards to “chase” after that rare variant they need. Or suck up each and every new set of cards released to complete their collection (This is why I like the term CCG, it’s more honest, somehow.) and can spend a lot of money trading for what they don’t have. A popular, successful TCG is like a license to print money (literally if the people at the grocery store would ever accept my Sol Ring in lieu of a check) so gaming companies aren’t very inclined to tinker with a proven model. Which is a shame because I think there’s an underserved and untapped pool of potential customers that are put off by the insular and exclusive atmosphere of the whole TCG scene as well as the cost of really getting involved in it. I know I am. But, with a card game that’s not so expensive to buy into there’d be a lot more people who are willing to play it if only it was marketing beyond its niche.

Since I haven’t found such a product I’ve been forced to make my own (I know, I’m sick) and from time to time, I do so. Just like I used to do way back when my friends and I first got our Magic cards or were messing around with pen and paper campaigns, computer programs, or other forms of roleplaying. Where I start is not with hundreds of collectable cards but with some very common cards: a standard deck of playing cards. Nearly everyone has one. You can get them at the gas station or a hotel room for a few bucks, tops. I mean, I have a few laying around in my closet or my desk drawer somewhere. What I’ve done in the past is to try and come up with some way of using that card to get two people to have a little competition. Something as accessible as poker but as strategically complicated as M:TG. And I might just have hit upon a way of doing so. I’m still getting the details straight but I believe I’m on the right track, for once. Hopefully, in the coming days I’m going to adopt this little system as a pet project and work on refining it and improving the design until I have an actually playable game that I, at least, can enjoy. If nothing else, by writing about and posting my design process I’ll get a much better idea of what goes on in my own head.