Card Games: Design Expansion and Brainstorming

To review here’s the basics of where I’m at with my as of yet untitled game:

• Players battle by playing cards against one another. The highest card wins unless the same suit is played in which case the lowest wins.
• The value of cards can be modified if conditions are met.
• Battle is for control of the playing field represented by four neutral cards.
• There are three ways to win, control all four neutral cards either by winning four battles for them or by replacing them with matching cards, or else by having your opponent run out of cars 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.

Improvements to the ruleset:

• I was edging towards this but I’m going to firmly state it now: Face cards break stacks. They cannot be used in combination with other cards to increase the value even if their value or suit matches other cards. They have null value for the game, at present, except when used as armies where they have special values. 11 for Kings and Queens, making them the highest base value card (though other cards can stack higher), 1s for Aces, and 0s for Jacks, making them the lowest card. Originally I was thinking that they’d add into a combo or would at least allow a player to link two cards of the same suit but, I think, in order to make the numbered cards special themselves then face cards have to be opposed to the whole stacking mechanism. If I’m going to add special abilities to face cards – which I plan to – that will mean players will either have to play for those special abilities or for the ability to stack. They can’t do either. And as long as the two are roughly as valuable then I’ve already created two competing strategies that players can develop further. And one they can change on the fly since I allow players to switch cards at various points. (This means I may need to go back and remove the rules about what value a face card has a land because it’s no longer necessary. Doesn’t matter. Although I may leave it in in case of future expansion but if that’s the case I can just re-add it later)
• Optional rules: Variant rules can be introduced to allow for things like multiplayer and longer or shorter games. I should work up a few of these if only so that my players can be encouraged to come up with their own little twists on the basic pattern. I’m going to be letting them customize their decks, after all, so I don’t really have a problem with them changing anything else if they think it’ll help them to enjoy the game more.

Now, last time I also mentioned that in the future I envision being able to release new cards and new suits which can replace the current four suits and four face cards so that players can customize their decks not by changing around the number of card types – as in some TCGs where deck construction is extremely flexible – but by changing around what they do. I used the metaphor of thinking of these as expansion packs, the way video games are extended from their base gameplay by additions. And, really, I think the video game model is a good one to follow here, especially, say, an MMO. Not least because I’m familiar with it and it provides a handy framework to build my game mechanics around what with the questing and combat and loot and such but also because MMOs, at least the ones I liked, are very intricately and finely balanced so that there’s no one class or race or ability that’s completely better than any others. Oh, in a given situation there might be a clear cut “best” solution to any problem but for all situations there’s no one truly dominant strategy. For my game to really work I’ll need to achieve similar levels of balance (Because, let’s face it, perfectly balancing everything is impossible given that there are players who are going to rip apart the game to find the optimal strategies for any given circumstances and no matter what I do they’re going to find a few tricks somewhere. The important thing is that they don’t get too overpowered or that there are other tricks out there which can balance them. So perfect equivalent balance is impossible but getting a fairly level playing field that shouldn’t be much different in most cases should be possible.) not only in the mechanics I already have but also in the mechanics I’ll introduce.

Now, it needs playtesting and all but I’m pretty confident that what I have already has enough going for it that it’ll be balanced (What I really need to figure out with what I already have is how fast the game will be played under those rules, how changing those rules will speed up or slow things down, and just how many cards each player should start with – which affects the percentages they’ll draw any single card at any point in the game but that’s going to take a lot of games by a lot of people to gather some numbers to crunch, as far as I can tell.). The basic of having players match cards from their hands to see who’s got the higher one shouldn’t be much of a problem. It favors the person who plays a card last, what I’d call the defending player, but the other player has advantages of their own by being able to pick the card and the land to battle over. Offense gets to dictate the terms of the battle but the defense gets to respond to what the offense is doing, that sounds more than fair and a lot like what actually should happen according to game theory among other things. Thanks to some wrinkles players can make card combos and elaborate schemes to capture the board but there are mechanisms in place to prevent them from getting to carried away. It doesn’t matter how many cards a player can stack up the other player can always ruin their scheme by playing a card of the same suit and flipping the game so that it’s the lowest score that counts. A player could try and force a confrontation over the lowest card but with a few cards in hand then there’s a pretty good likelihood that they have a card of a different suit so playing low is just as risky as playing high. I’d imagine the best cards to throw on offense would be the ones in the middle – not too high, not too low – where the odds of being under or overpowered are smallest. I introduced some special rules to take care of the face cards – Ace, King, Queen, Jack in this iteration – so that they were a little special and different from the numbered cards. They’re either the lowest or highest cards you can hold but they can’t be used in the stacking that allows players to add up scores (They could, I suppose, but then people would have to remember their arbitrary values and it could lead to some twisted math. I like a maximum offensive number of 40 – from a stack of four 10s and a minimum defensive number of 0 – from a single Jack as the boundaries of what people will play with. Allow my revalued face cards and those numbers get skewed) so they stand just a bit apart from the rest of the cards while still being useful.

Now, I’m going to add even more complexity to the system by giving special abilities to certain cards – the face cards especially as I’ve already separated them out as something different and they’re not doing much beyond that at the moment – but also to each card suit. Now, there’s a bit of convergence here as there are four face cards, four card suits, and four places for cards to be played on my board – as a base card or castle, as a card that modifies that card or general, as cards that battle against other cards or armies, and as cards that are battled over or land. There are also four land cards and four is the most cards anyone can stack so maybe I should be emphasizing fours – I’ve been using five card hands because that’s fairly common but limiting hands to four not only adds another potential turn it lowers the potential for any card in a player’s hand to be useful at any given time (The limited play test I have shows that the defense has a pretty good advantage for most of the game because it’s easy to find a card to nullify the offenses advantage. Could just be a statistical aberration as I haven’t bothered to run the math for the various combinations and desired outcomes at this point since things are still in flux but in case it’s a systemic problem that’s tilting the game towards the defender, it won’t hurt to have a few solutions in my back pocket.) – but we’ll leave that for another time. Right now my issue is just what I can do to add special abilities and modifications of the existing rules into the game.

As I see it I have at least twelve places to do so. Each card position can have its own special mechanics – they already do in how and what you can use the cards for but I’m talking about what happens when you use a specific card, the Ace of Spades, say, in each place. By making it do different things – something I’m already doing a bit anyways since each face card has a specific value when used to battle and roughly no value anywhere else. Also, each face card can be given its own twist perhaps depending on their place but perhaps just in general. And, finally, each of the four card suits can be given a mechanic of their own. Since I’ve already decided that to cut off any problems I’m not going to allow players to have face cards as their base I think I’ll start there, since it’ll be the simplest. Eventually I’ll want to develop special rules for generals, armies, and land as well as for my castles but the more I add the harder it will be to keep track of things and the more complicated the game will become to test and change further. So, I’m going to alter one thing at a time and see how it works before moving on to the next.

Now, what I’d like from a base card – which is the only card a player will play that will be immutable for the entire game – is some sort of permanent, game changing effect. In video game terms I want a long-lasting buff (Or debuff I suppose, but for the basic edition I want to concentrate on thing that change what the player is doing. I can add in mechanics to mess with your opponent later on down the road when I understand how people play better. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun by having someone force them to play a way they don’t want to. Well, nobody but me as I’m hopefully going to make sure they have fun if they play things my way.) which will affect the player and their actions constantly. This means that they’ll have to be relatively weak effects since they’ll be happening quite a lot. More specific effects that only trigger in certain circumstances or far more rarely can be a lot more powerful but each time these effects happen it’s going to tilt the game in the advantage of the player so making them too effective will create that competitive imbalance I’m looking to avoid. Also, by having a pervasive and ongoing effect for each card played in the base spot – which I’m going to tie to the card’s suit as its value already matters for stacking purposes – I’ll have a guide for what I want each suit to do in the other positions. I’m thinking that if I keep those abilities consistent – even very similar to one another and only changed by the specifics of each position – then I’ll be able to keep things steamlined and far less complex than if I come up with specific rules for each individual card. So, what I’m really looking at here is coming up with some unique characteristic for each class or card suit that will allow me to have a “class bonus” that will almost always affect the player.

To do that, though, I’ll first need to get an idea of where exactly I can add special circumstances and modifiers to my existing rules. I’ve already done a bit of thinking along these lines and I’ll spare you the details but it all boils down to what, exactly, it’s possible for my cards to do already. As I see it there are several mechanics already in place. They boil down to offense – attacking another player with cards and increasing (or in certain circumstances decreasing) their values to have the better total number. Defense – opposing another player’s cards with your own in a similar matter (although it’s much easier to have lower or decreasing values play an important role here thanks to my undercutting and suit matching mechanics) to defeat their attack. Those are pretty apparent and easy for most people to grasp, I’d think, because the game is already all about matching one card against another. As I mentioned earlier although the two are very similar they are different if only because the offense gets to act first, that puts them in an aggressive role (which makes sense) although defense can also be aggressive because they can turn the tables, so to speak, on the offense. One or the other will always have the advantage and, on average, I’d prefer it to be offense because I’m hoping to make this game both fast and fun. When defense is on top it’s going to be dragging the game out – unless I channel defense into the ability to counter which, really, I’m already doing. But, as a matter of doctrine if nothing else I’d rather the people taking the risks were rewarded so that more risk taking is encouraged. So, there’s defense and offense working as natural opposites. I’d like to find another pair of natural strategic enemies because that would give me four – one for each suit and beyond.

Another thing in the game that I can identify at present are what I’d called resource control and draw control or tempo. Simply put, consider each card in the players hand or on the board as a resource, this sort of strategy is concerned with having a better ability to marshall and direct those resources than the opponent. In, say, StarCraft, this is playing the build up your economy game so that you can roll out with the big units later on. In a game like a TCG, for example, the ability to draw more cards so that you have the cards you want in your hand is extremely powerful and highly valued. It allows you to control the speed at which you play the game – speeding it up or slowing it down as needed so you can employ whatever it is you’re going to win with as soon as possible or stall until you can find it. It’s a bit less intuitive than the offense/defense set but there’s a lot of possibilities. To oppose it I’ll have to get meta. As in find the strategy that’s going to let you spoil other strategies by being able to somehow twist the game’s rules to the advantage of a player. Here I can add the rare or temporary but extremely powerful effects I mentioned earlier because they’ll be limited to countering a specific move (And, again, as a matter of doctrine the answer to a threat need to be overwhelmingly powerful in order for people to actually use that answer. If the threat’s too good then they’ll just stick with that.) or be otherwise situational. And it will oppose the resource strategy because it will be all about ruining the intricately laid plans of an opponent. In a traditional card game this would be where you’d develop interrupts and other cards that work only on the rules of other cards. It also has an element of altering the game’s speed, as well, as this would be where you’d find the idea for the Zerg rush of StarCraft fame – the maneuver that rolls over anyone trying to sit back and build up their base by throwing everything into the first punch. So, I think I’ll run with that for a bit and say that (although I could do different things with it) my resource suit will be about slowing the game down and building things up slowly and surely to have an overwhelming advantage. While my counter suit will be about speeding up the game through powerful quick, specific effects.

So, there’s offense vs. defense and counter vs. resource as the four basic strategies I’ll map to my basic four card suits. There I already have a ready-made pair of opposing sides (which should help to develop the competing strategies I’ll need for a fully functioning metagame) in the red and black suits. I’ll try and have the two red suits be complimentary and the two black suits somehow antithetical. Mapping one of my already opposing strategies to opposite sides of that line will work to create an identity not just for each suit but for the suit’s colors as well. But I’ll also want to draw parallels between them as well so that although each black suit is somehow opposed to the two red suits they’ll also be able to be used with either one as needed. Which, conveniently, I think already happens when I have one of each pair in red and the other in black. Those opposing pairs are linked in opposition, after all, and share some similarities. Now, though, I’ll need to figure out which strategy belongs with which card suit.

To do so I’m going to borrow an idea from the folks at Wizard of the Coast who develop and publish the Magic: The Gathering Game. Which, of course, is the standard by which all other card games get measured. What they do when coming up with new cars – and there are a lot they come up with – is to figure out where they fit on a color wheel. There are five colors or suits in M:TG and each one has certain strategies and concepts associated with it. To figure out which suit a card belongs to they figure out which concepts its using and place it on the color wheel in the right spot. Now, I’m not going to be developing individual cards – just yet – but I am trying to place specific abilities within those suits. But with an eye on expansion figuring out just where these suits are will help me to develop complimentary suits in the future – I imagine players will be able to modify their decks to play more strongly to one strategy or another by pairing, say, my offensive suit with one or two others to have a deck that will play very strongly when attacking or by matching the existing black suits with another newly made one. A Venn Diagram, so to speak, of just where the design space for each suit and strategy is will help me out there and I can always add new basic strategies as I find them. For now, though, I need to come up with a basic, four cornered diagram that can encompass everything I want to be doing at the moment – doing it well will allow me to easily expand later but I really care about getting things done now and can always discard a model that no longer works. To find out just what should go with what I’m going to free associate for a bit (don’t worry, I’ll spare you the mess and just give you the results). Each suit is already symbolic. Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Spades, they have images and concepts already grafted onto them and all I need to do is make the connections. So I’m going to write down the name of each suit and then surround it with words and pictures and whatever else I think can be used to describe it, then words to describe those words and so on. I’ll do the same for each basic strategy I’ve identified. And, hopefully, there will be some commonalities between the two and I can make those links. Here’s what I’ve come up with (cleaned more than a bit up, of course) :

• Hearts: Emotion. Courage. Passion. Love. Protection. Blood. Sacrifice.
• Clubs: Weapon. Harm. Damage. Anger. Strength. Power.
• Diamonds: Jewelry. Treasure. Riches. Wealth. Success. Precious.
• Spades: Tool for digging. Moves earth. Dig. Undermine. Arrows. Daggers. Threatening.

And for the strat:

• Defense: Prevent damage. Heal. Protection. Compassion.
• Offense: Overpowering. Danger. Damage. Harm.
• Resource: Build. Store. Gather. Economic. Wealth.
• Counter: Turn the tables. Answer with threats. Prevent. Undermine.

So, to me anyway, there are some good threads to weave here.

• Hearts will be defensive and the hardest to finish off.
• Clubs will be offensive and constantly on the attack.
• Diamonds will concern themselves with hoarding resources and using them to draw the game out.
• Spades will be about twisting the rules to the advantage of the player and using that to end the game quickly.

This also has the effect of making some other pairings – the black suits are more aggressively minded, the red more reactive, for instance. And the straight forward Club/Heart pair is matched by the more subtle and complex Spade/Diamond pair. Even the iconography works out there with the rounded clubs and hearts versus the pointier diamonds and spades. That’s enough for one day, I think, although I can easily see how to extend those designs into in-game mechanics to alter the game play and provide each suit with a bonus when played as a castle.