Card Game: Playtesting Results – Castle Powers 1st Edition.

Where we’re at:

• Game uses a standard 52 card deck of playing cards.
• Players battle by playing cards against one another. The highest card wins unless the same suit is played in which case the lowest wins.
• Battle is for control of the playing field represented by neutral cards placed at the beginning of the game.
• There are three ways to win, control all neutral cards either by winning battles for them or by replacing them with matching cards, or else by having your opponent run out of cards before you do.
• I’m trying to establish a game with a strategic depth that players can expand on. This involves making competing strategies that will never really come to dominate the entire game.
• To that end I’ve recently implemented special abilities for each suit of card which, when played at the start of the game, give a constant benefit to the player throughout the game. Future iteration of the game will include special abilities in other areas.
• I’m viewing the game through the metaphor of an RPG. These castle bonuses are akin to a player choosing a specific race to play. The general is their class and each army card their a special skill.

Alterations to the ruleset:

• Claim: When a player wins a battle for a land card they claim it and the army cards used to battle over it. They then choose whether to 1)Control - they may place both army cards played onto their bottom of their draw pile and end their turn. 2)Capture – they may exchange either one of the army cards or their general card for the land card and place both remaining cards onto their discard pile and end their turn. (This is the opposite of how I had things before. And the way I had the rules originally. Basically, I switched because I wanted to encourage people to take a risk and fiddle with the game board. If they would alter their strategy – either by changing it or strengthening it somehow - they’d be rewarded a bit by getting to alter the board and to increase their draw pile by a single card. Now, however, it’s turning out that I did too good of a job. There was almost no reason to choose control when you could capture – it’s markedly superior in every way, so there’s no choice there just the illusion of one. So, I’m going to go back to my original idea. That way either players leave the board alone and get rewarded with an extra turn. Or they switch things around and pay the cost of removing some potentially valuable cards from play – about the only reason I could think of to use the discard pile; take some cards out of my deck so that it would be stronger somehow by being more consistent. Not to mention they’ll bring the game closer to the end point by making it easier for them to run out of cards in the future. If they want to go for a big stack or swing things their way they take the risk it could backfire and leave them with a smaller draw pile to work with.)
• Defaults: Two players. Each player contributes three land cards for a total of six. Players’ hands are limited to total of four cards. (Made it official that I want to have hands of four cards and six land cards. Players are free to choose their own numbers, of course, but that changes the way the game plays. Six land cards means the game takes a little longer and makes it harder for someone to rattle off enough battles in a row to win. And smaller hands mean fewer options for players so they’ll have to play imperfect cards more often.)

Now, last time I created an ability for each card suit that would “activate” when a non-face card of that suit was played as a player’s base or castle. That’s the only card on the board that can’t be changed or affected in some way – it can only affect things itself – so I tried to make these powers small but wide-reaching. Something the other player wouldn’t like their opponent to have, no, but also something they wouldn’t overly mind happening throughout the game. To increase the overall effectiveness of these abilities I limited the situations in which they’d be used. And, although I didn’t make much mention of it, I tried to make sure these abilities were “balanced” (Which, in case you haven’t heard by now I don’t really believe in. There’s no such thing as perfect balance only a matter of how relatively things affect the game in a given situation. So these effects are going to be more powerful than one another in certain states but the idea is to make it so that in the average of all game states each ability is more or less equivalent to the others. Since I can’t find a snappy way of putting that into a single term I use balance in its place.) against one another. I don’t want any one suit to be too overly powerful compared to the others – that puts everyone not playing that suit at a disadvantage and that’s not fun. What I want, instead, is to create a situation where players can have a favorite strategy but also won’t mind switching if they get different cards or the opportunity presents itself. To do that, though, there have to be options. And those options have to be roughly balanced against one another – otherwise it’s a communist choice. By that I mean there isn’t really a choice at all. There’s no option between choosing the best way to play and any lesser way to play. Each way of playing has to be somehow different but also somehow equal to the other ways if there’s actually going to be some strategic depth. So, basically, as I see it, the key to making a game truly rewarding is to give your players a lot of options within the arbitrary framework that makes up the rules. And a good way of doing that is to cater to the various types of people who’ll be playing your game each in their own way. Who knew customer service could be applicable to design?

So, anyway, I created these castle abilities and fit them into the already existing rules for the game. Those are pretty simple: you get cards, you play some cards on the board to create the game, then you take turns battling over those cards by trying to play cards which will defeat your opponents. So bolting on castle abilities was fairly easy once I’d thought them up. The tricky part after they were in was actually seeing if they were doing what I wanted or not. I suppose if I really wanted to I could whip up a program to automate the game and then look over the results. A few problems with that, though: 1) While I could with enough time and a decent compiler hack out enough code to handle the battle mechanism designing a program to handle the complex behaviors that happen before and after is beyond me at the moment. I’d need to have not only a card randomizer, not only a card drawing subprogram, not only a way of getting the computerized players (and there’d be one or two depending on if I wanted to just mine a lot of data or wanted a fast way of playing – probably the best way would be to have the option of both.) to select which card out of their hand to play, but also a way of having them pick which land to attack and what to do with that land afterwards plus all the checking for victory conditions and everything else. It’s a big project, in other words, and I don’t think I have the time or skills for it. 2) A large part of what I’d want to see would be how players are interacting with the game. If they can understand the rules, how they feel about the flow of the game, if they’re misunderstanding things or missing opportunities because the rules are too complex. You don’t get that with computers – they’re too smart and too stupid all at the same time. So, I’d much rather get some people together, sit them down with some snacks and some beverages perhaps, and give them a pack of cards, a copy of the rules, and let them go at it for a few hours. Over and over again if I could. Then I’d also like to see what happens when the one and only international Untitled Card Game grand master who understands all the rules and their nuances as well as anyone else alive – namely, me – sat down with those people who were still puzzling it out. See if skill level made any difference or if it was all down to luck – I expect with a game with as much variance as this one that luck’s going to play a large part I’m just not sure how much.

Sadly, I haven’t found anyone willing to play my game with me. It’s pretty unfinished and unpolished – and more of an intellectual challenge to myself rather than any real attempt to build a game (It’s just my intellectual challenge is to try and build a game as realistically as I can so…yeah.) so I haven’t really pushed the issue but one of these days I’ll rope my friends into trying it. Until then I’m left playing solitaire, so to speak. All the “play testing” I’ve managed to do has involved me playing both hands at the same time. Since I try and avoid playing like I know what the other person’s holding it works well enough although obviously there are better ways of doing it. And at least with this method I can eliminate player skill as a factor. And, anyways, I’ve done a bit of playtesting with the castle abilities and I’ve found some things that I want to correct. It’s not a big deal, I fully expected I wasn’t going to get things right the first time around. Game design improves and refines over time and I don’t think you can afford to get too sentimental about any one rule so long as the final product improves. So, let’s look at each of the suit’s abilities and where I’m seeing the problems and how I’m going to correct them for the next round of playtesting. At a certain point I’ll stop tinkering with them and move on to see how adding abilities elsewhere affects these ones and the larger game – no doubt creating whole new problems I’ll need to correct - but I’m not quite at that point yet. Although I am planning for it, which brings me to the first castle power – Clubs/Hearts:

Club: When you attack the number value of your castle card is added to your total value in addition to any other stacking or other bonuses.

Heart: When you defend the number value of your castle card is added to your total value in addition to any other stacking or other bonuses.

Clubs and Hearts have basically the same power it just gets applied in different phases of the game. That does, however, create some wrinkles in how each gets used but the basic mechanic is the same and, I feel, since I set them up to mirror one another if I’m going to tweak one I’m going to have to deal with the other, too. Now, we’re also starting here because it’s the easiest power(s) to deal with. In and of themselves they’re working just fine. Clubs makes for impressive offense. Hearts makes for impressive defense. The problem is adding anything else on top of that. My general idea for expanding the game to encompass new abilities is that the simpler things are the better the game’s going to play overall. Add in too many rules and exceptions and the game gets complicated and harder for people to remember easily. Since this is going to be just a quick little throwaway game I don’t want people to have to memorize all sorts of things – to start with, anyway, what happens when really skilled players start digging into the game is a different matter – so the key is to have a few consistent abilities that get applied in different ways because of how they’re being used. Not a different mechanic for each and every card. In some cases that’s impossible but not here because these abilities are just giving Clubs and Hearts players the ability to extend their stacks beyond the norm. It gives them an effective maximum value of 50 as opposed to the 40 everyone else has.

Which is fine when dealing with just the one bonus but the logical extension of these abilities would be to let more cards that are Clubs or Hearts to also stack. Each time I do that I extend the maximum value that players can reach. And that gets ridiculous pretty fast. Let’s imagine, if you will, that I’m going to extend this bonus to all general cards – now all generals add their value to the attack if they’re a Club and to the defense if they’re Heart. Now, let’s have a Clubs player that has a 5C and 6C as their castle and general pair. Not the best cards to be stacking there but not exactly the worse, either, so it’s a pretty likely combination. But that combination gives them an attacking bonus of +11 to whatever card they happen to play. That means that even with the lowest value card – a Jack – they’re going to win any battle against their opponent (The highest value is a King or Queen or an 11). Unless, of course, their opponent can stack themselves higher or has a card from the same suit to undercut. It gets worse if the Club player can get some higher valued cards in those spots, too. And even worse if they happen to play a club on the attack because that’s not a +11 bonus then, it’s xV+22 (that’s how I’m annotating card value, by the way, for the time being at least.). It’s not unbeatable but it drastically lowers the cards that the opponent can have that will beat it – they have to hope they can match your suit. I’d rather this be a much less decisive advantage, one that gives a Clubs player an edge whenever they attack but not one that’s going to completely alter the way the game’s played.

So, basically, the bonus as I have it gives the attacker or defender way too much of an advantage. And I’m going to tone it down some. After playing around with it a bit, I’m figuring that a max value around 50 is a pretty good cap on things – at least at the moment. Players shouldn’t be able to push things much beyond that under any circumstances. And I have a least three other card types to provide a bonus to total value so that means my clear cut “just add the value of the card” mechanic isn’t going to work. It not only places too much emphasis on the card that gets played as the castle – when, with the other abilities, I don’t really care about the value just the suit. So I’m going to separate the bonus from the numerical value of the card and just say a Club/Heart castle gives you a flat bonus to your attack/defense value regardless of the actual card value. And to facilitate future expansion of the idea I’ll set that number pretty low compared to the previous version – eventually a dedicated Club/Heart player will be able to stack up to that maximum +10 or so but they won’t get there just with a castle – this should also help to reinforce the idea that Clubs/Hearts is about creating “super stacks” because they’ll get additional synergy from stacking higher that others would. There are four possible cards to apply that bonus to so I’m going to be a bit generous and say that, with effort, they can get to +12. That’s four cards with a +3 bonus on each added to whatever card they actually play (If, of course, they can stack four clubs up in which case the numbers are going to be getting very high. That’s a difficult feat, in my experience, but not an impossible one. And neither is beating it. It’ll do.). So…

• Club: When you attack add 3 to your total value in addition to any other stacking or other bonuses.
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• Heart: When you defend add 3 to your total value in addition to any other stacking or other bonuses

This adds some granularity to the system as well. I can play with that number or even have separate values for offense and defense to alter probable outcomes (Once I actually figure those out – math is hard, y’all. But statistical data is showing that defending has a distinct advantage over attacking in the present system. I have an idea why but it’s a bit complicated to get into. After I study up on my math skills I’ll get into it, maybe.) but it will do as a starting point. It’s more complicated than the previous system but it’s not that much more difficult than what players would already do when creating stacks of their own so I’m okay with that as well. Instead of “just add this card to whatever you play” it’s “just add three to whatever card you play”.

Now, unfortunately, we get into the more difficult choices because the other two abilities aren’t quite living up to my expectations. First, Spades…

Spade: When you win a battle you may choose any revealed land card to capture or control not just the one where the battle has just taken place.

Okay, what I was trying to do here was to make it so that the Spade player always had a glimmer of hope. Win one battle anywhere on the map and no matter how down they were they could claw back into the game. I want Spade players to be able to turn the tables on their opponents, so to speak, and then press their advantage but I don’t want their castle ability to be too powerful (Or too narrow and only used occasionally. These bonuses should be cropping up on almost every hand in one way or another). This should just let them shape the battlefield to their liking. However, an unintended result of the spade’s power seems to be that they have a lot of defensive strength. Because they can shift the results of any battle they win all it takes is one battle for them to prolong the game. Especially if they can keep winning on a land they own which their opponent is trying to take away from them. It makes them a very tough out. Not really what I was trying to do as I’d hoped for Spades to be the uptempo suit. However, by sticking around it does give them a chance to win the game. It also means that they can be very prone to big mistakes, too, as they can on occasion risk that secure land (Something I find myself avoiding. On the attack I try and capture land I don’t have unless I’m doing something not quite straight-forward. Fighting on land I already claim means I risk giving it to my opponent because if I lose the battle they’ll own it afterwards.) by attacking through it especially if they have a big stack This actually happened during playtesting when down 3-1 in land a Spade player created a stack of 27 through the only land they controlled with three 9s – confident there was no card the opponent held to beat that. A quick check of the rules to confirm that it was the card played by the opponent not the end card in the stack that mattered (The stack ran through the land card which was, obviously a different suit) and on the other side I threw down the one card of that suit not already played, undercut the stack, and won the game in one fell swoop.

Other than that, though, Spade players have proven almost invincible. They only lose when they make a mistake – in my opinion (I’m a bit of a stickler and say that if I put a card down I can’t change my mind. This sucks when I realize I could have made a better play but I want to keep things moving, not worry about making the perfect play at any given moment.) – and otherwise they tend to dominate. Something like a 5:1 win ratio against the field which is far and away the best. I don’t have all that much playtesting done. Certainly not as much as I’d like. But I do have a decent sample from which to draw conclusions from. It doesn’t take long to play these games out – ten minutes, fifteen minutes tops so I can do it while I’m reading the paper (I like to multi-task, you know), watching TV, or waiting for dinner to cook and that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m not really sure what exactly can be done at this point without scraping the ability completely. It fits my concept for Spades, though, it’s just overpowered compared to other powers. So, I’m going to try putting some additional limits on it. In video games they call this “nerfing” because, hopefully, by the time I’m done it’ll be like swinging a foam bat. At the moment, it’s pure chrome and leaves dents so this has to be done, I’m just not sure I’m going far enough.

• Spade: When you win a battle you may choose any revealed land card to capture not just the one where the battle has just taken place.

The change there is a subtle one in the wording but it’s going to have some far reaching effects, I think. Before Spade players could essentially claim any land not just the one they managed to successful fight over. It gave them too many options, I’m guessing. And the effect of the boost from not having to discard when capturing (which is what I call it when the player swaps one of the cards on the table for another after winning a battle before moving on) made it a win-win situation for Spade players. Any land they wanted with an added bonus of getting a new card in their draw pile was just too much. I’ve swapped the effects of controlling and capturing, though, so now they’ll be forced to discard if they want to fiddle with the cards. And if Spade players want to make use of their castle power now they’ll have to discard. This means they’ll be shortening their game rather than extending it – they’ll hopefully be trading long term success for short term gain. It should make them much more aggressive and opportunistic. Because it means that if they stall for long enough they’ll eventually run out of cards and lose. They’ll get weaker and more desperate each time they make use of their ability and I like that because ratcheting up the tension in the game is what uptempo’s all about, really. It’ll take some games played to see if it works but I think it might so at least I’m doing something.

It also brings up an aspect to their strategy that I hadn’t considered before but more on that later. Before I get to that I want to get through the last bonus Diamonds…

Diamond: When you control land after a battle place one card in your possession at the bottom of your draw pile and the other in the discard pile instead of discarding both.

The idea behind Diamonds is that in contrast to Spades they’re about slowly but surely gaining power as the game wore on (I messed up somehow and gave that flavor to Spades, too. Funny how things like that work out.) and to do that I made it so that they’d have an advantage when it came to discarding. I figured that in a long match that players would be discarding left and right and Diamond’s ability would lessen that pain a bit. Turns out I was wrong and games are finishing well before the point where discarding seems to matter (And discarding turned out to be a lot less frequent than I thought).

So, simply put, not working. It’s too subtle for it to matter in most games I’ve played. And the only times it does is when things are horribly stalemated. So it’s definitely not up to the power level of the other bonuses.

I still like the idea of reducing the cost of a capture/control and easing that dilemma so I’ll keep it in mind for down the road. But that old ability is getting shelved for the moment. I want something bigger and better here that’s going to let the Diamond player feel like their bonus is actually doing something. I still want to be dealing with cards (again, more on that later) because the power to draw cards can be a tremendous advantage in games like this. Having more cards than your opponent gives you a noticeable advantage – doesn’t mean you’ll automatically win the game but it means you’re a lot more likely to have the right card at the right moment. I don’t, however, want to go beyond the current limit on hand size – it’s four and that’s a hard cap. If I were to, say, let the Diamond player draw an extra card each turn that would mean their hand will get larger and larger. That fits the theme, sure, but it gets ridiculous as the game wears on and they have basically no draw pile whatsoever. Drawing cards is also typically a hallmark of the uptempo style (which, I suppose I could swap uptempo and downtempo between Spades and Diamonds and I might if I can’t solve things but I’d like to try and make them work how I intended first.) and Diamonds are supposed to be slow. So, I have to find a way to somehow let the Heart player extend their hand without actually letting them have more cards. The way I’m going to do that is thus:

• Diamonds: Once per turn before you have played an army card you may take one card from your hand and place it on the bottom of your draw pile and draw a new card to replace it.

Which, I think, is rather nice because it gives the Diamond player a very nice yet still subtle advantage. If they don’t like their hand at the beginning of a turn they can try and change it. That’s a good effect that should make them particularly annoying on defense – they get an extra chance to come up with a card to beat an attacker – which will help them stay around and build things up. It effectively extends their hand without costing them anything. The card they lose gets pushed down into the deck but it’ll be back (Something that more advanced players, perhaps, can use to organize their decks as the games go on past the initial draw pile). And, more importantly, it helps to further refine the Diamond suit’s theme.

Before I did a little bit of brainstorming about the theme or concept behind each suit. I came up with a few simple, basic strategies and attributed them to each card – I had some internal logic but it was more or less arbitrary. However, as I’m refining my game I’m able to add more and more to those quick sketches of each suit. Spades, for example, I now realize are going to be very concerned with land – gaining it, controlling it, and especially with denying the same from their opponent. By controlling the battlefield they can set their own terms and twist the game in their favor. It fits with my plans and even helps me to develop them further but I hadn’t realized it was there. Likewise, Diamonds are about resources, true, but they get there through card control, if you will. They care about having bigger draw piles, drawing more cards, messing around with discarding, and otherwise having more power over their cards than other suits. Clubs are for attackers, of course, just as Hearts are for defenders. But this way not only do the cards align with the various meta-strategies I can see but they also correlate to in-game activities. Everyone can draw cards or attack it’s just each suit has their own particular focus and does one thing that every player can do better. So, my design document’s (which is basically a four cornered chart with each suit in each quadrant surrounded by a bunch of associated concepts) expanded to include the following:

• Clubs – offense, attacking
• Hearts – defense, defending
• Spades – counter, land control
• Diamonds – resource, draw power

Hopefully, this will guide me in adding new abilities to the game. When adding new powers to Diamond cards, for instance, I’ll know to try and make them revolve around the movement of cards. That will help me to achieve that consistency I was talking about earlier while still including varied mechanics. Because, really, I don’t think Diamond players need to be able to fold and redraw their entire hand the way they’d be if castle, general, army, and land gave them the chance to redraw one card each. So, there’s going to be some variety in what they can do. Since Diamonds and Spades (which, likewise, what am I going to do? Let players tap four land cards a turn?) are the more advanced in terms of overall strategy I’m okay with that – Hearts and Clubs will have simple, easy to remember, and direct abilities for beginners if they want but the other pair will have some more subtle things going on that they might overlook. The trick, though, is making sure that Hearts and Clubs still have enough interesting things going on that really advanced players won’t completely ignore them. Which, well, I’m working on.