So, during the last design brief article, I was in a very confident position with my card game concept, and all I needed to do was to playtest it out to see how it turns out.
Well…
The game itself looks fun and extremely promising, but the part that I understated the most was certainly the card castle building one. It just doesn’t work! Most people are not that good at doing it naturally, card of most material and sizes don’t help necessarily, and even those better suited for the job don’t help less talented players with not dying the very first turn they are tasked to do the castle ( a demographic of players which I am totally part of by the way ). And I’m not even getting started on the countless table-related problems ( being slanted, being shaken, being super slippery huughhh )
No no no no. This just does not work. And the base game sound really good mechanically but without the castle mechanic, it’s just simple, not deep enough. We can certainly do better.
There are a bunch of potential designs I wanted to tackle for a while regarding card games:
• One is about playing a little bit more with card faces. I mean, every single game that involves cards depicts them in the same way: with a front and a back. With all the action happening in the front and nothing going on on the back. That is something that I wanted to try and have an interesting spin on
• The other is about playing a little bit more with the space on a card. What do I mean by that? When you think about a field of cards all placed down on a table, you imagine them all sitting next to each other, and treating the entire face of the card as a full space, but what if that was not the case? You’ll see how I tackled this in a moment.
So I started all over trying to come up with a design that would make use of these two ideas and this came forth:
A game where the card you have in hand have an effect in the front and a little circuit graphic in the back.
You can choose to either use the effect in the front, or to place down the card on the table with the circuit facing up.
Now comes the most interesting part:
Inspired by games like carcassone, where you have to build a network of roads and cities, here you have to build an electronic circuit using the shapes you have in the back of your cards.
The fun part is that you can basically place cards wherever you want on the field, filling all those white spots on the cards! As long as you aren’t cutting any line you can place your cards however you want!
Or at least nearly. The lines can be intersected however you want, but only with other lines and on the same note, you can only place circles on top of other circles.
This already sound quite fun doesn’t it?
Because it really is! And trust me, even without a clear win condition games already play out in a cool way.
But there are some inherent problems with my design that are sadly linked to the ideas I wanted to use:
• where having useful informations on both sides of the card was meant to incentivize players to choose which information to give out( by holding cards either way ); it played awkwardly when players wanted to check the other side of the card while keeping the other secret and incentivized smart counterplay, mostly in the form of hiding the cards under the table or somewhere else.
• The concept of overwriting blank space on card in theory plays well ( and in digital probably would ) in paper plays just bad. With cards moving each other and getting unaligned and with piles getting awkwardly high and unstable, this was a design concept to re-think
• Finally, the theme of the game. Although it worked fine on a surface level ( the circuit being constructed is the neural map of the skynet AI that will destroy the world ) on a deeper level it lacks tangible role for the players, any sort of justification for their actions and any sort of conflict.
These are all problem that I will have solved by next time. For now, seee yaaa.
The Art of Game Design 