The Beauty of Simplicity
So after having gotten my Newsporn post out of the way, I'm now back at where I left off: What to do with, and how best to design, my CCG.
There are many roads here, particularly at the early design stage, which will set the entire game going in a single direction. Now that direction can be a good one with gorgeous sunsets and chirping birds or it could turn out like a bad Stephen King novel. You just never know. Today I want to talk about Resources.
Resources
You see, each CCG has its own characters, locations, equipment and/or objects that define what that CCG is, does, and how it operates. But one of the most telling ways to see how a CCG is adequately designed is how to get those cards into play.
Let's begin, as I will probably always will, with Magic: The Gathering.
Magic expels its resources via mana, the magical fairy dust of the world they have created. Many objects, characters, and places can create mana, but the game began with Lands as their core mana source (don't argue with me about Moxes either, thanks). Lands have no limit as far as how many may be in play, but you can only play one per turn. They are not characters. They cannot engage in battle nor can they be "Defended" as it were. You tap them (meaning to turn sideways, that word also has a trademarked symbol associated with it:
) to produce mana.
All of the resources and characters, other than lands, require mana to come into play and activate. This mana requirement is the basis for the power level and pacing of the game, as all things have a cost of some sort, and the designers have expanded this cost engine to include life, cards in hand, and cards in your deck as alternative means of paying for things. But in the beginning, and even today, mana from Lands is the primary source of payment for things you use in the game.
VS. System has a very similar system, but quite different. You see, as VS. System was designed by Magic geeks (much like my own), they took the whole "my turn/your turn" thing and combined it into a single turn and a keyword: Initiative. Technically, initiative is used in pretty much every CCG in existence as a marker for whose turn it is and who gets to respond to something, but nevertheless, this is how they combined the turn structure.
VS. wants you to use a Resource Row, which is cards that are turned faced down in front of you, at a limit of one per turn (contrast to Magic, which has ways of laying many lands on a single turn). After laying a resource you then have a Build Step which gives you an amount of resource points equal to the number of resources you have in front of you. Take a look at this card:
There are many roads here, particularly at the early design stage, which will set the entire game going in a single direction. Now that direction can be a good one with gorgeous sunsets and chirping birds or it could turn out like a bad Stephen King novel. You just never know. Today I want to talk about Resources.
Resources
You see, each CCG has its own characters, locations, equipment and/or objects that define what that CCG is, does, and how it operates. But one of the most telling ways to see how a CCG is adequately designed is how to get those cards into play.
Let's begin, as I will probably always will, with Magic: The Gathering.
Magic expels its resources via mana, the magical fairy dust of the world they have created. Many objects, characters, and places can create mana, but the game began with Lands as their core mana source (don't argue with me about Moxes either, thanks). Lands have no limit as far as how many may be in play, but you can only play one per turn. They are not characters. They cannot engage in battle nor can they be "Defended" as it were. You tap them (meaning to turn sideways, that word also has a trademarked symbol associated with it:
) to produce mana.
All of the resources and characters, other than lands, require mana to come into play and activate. This mana requirement is the basis for the power level and pacing of the game, as all things have a cost of some sort, and the designers have expanded this cost engine to include life, cards in hand, and cards in your deck as alternative means of paying for things. But in the beginning, and even today, mana from Lands is the primary source of payment for things you use in the game.
VS. System has a very similar system, but quite different. You see, as VS. System was designed by Magic geeks (much like my own), they took the whole "my turn/your turn" thing and combined it into a single turn and a keyword: Initiative. Technically, initiative is used in pretty much every CCG in existence as a marker for whose turn it is and who gets to respond to something, but nevertheless, this is how they combined the turn structure.
VS. wants you to use a Resource Row, which is cards that are turned faced down in front of you, at a limit of one per turn (contrast to Magic, which has ways of laying many lands on a single turn). After laying a resource you then have a Build Step which gives you an amount of resource points equal to the number of resources you have in front of you. Take a look at this card:
Note that the number in the top left of the card ("6") is its Resource Cost. This means you have to be at turn 6 in the game before this card will ever see the playing field.
Now, based on how VS. is setup, Turns 8-10 see some crazily powerful characters. Basically they designed the game to never really last beyond turn 10, as the characters at that level are amazingly powerful and even though you have 50 Endurance (ie Life Points), this is a limit they've designed into the game to keep games short.
To compare, you would never see a 20 attack / 20 defense creature in Magic on turn 10, there simply isn't one and it doesn't exist. It doesn't need to exist for Magic. But for VS., this turn 6 12/12 is actually smaller than a lot of his counterparts.
What does this all mean? It means that I'm currently debating the best way to dole out resources for my game and I wanted to demonstrate how differences in resource control can completely affect the way that gameplay happens, how long games last, and the tempo a game has. It's all very perplexing and you never want to make the wrong choice. You also want to be different and have something fun, unique, easy to understand and (god help me) simple so that people can learn the game and not have to remember a bunch of rules or bring along extra equipment.
The best CCGs, in my opinion, are those that can be played without special counters or trinkets or what have you. Just sit down and play. That's my goal. If you know some basic rules, then you'll do fine. It is finding those easy to understand yet fun to play rulesets that is the challenge, and am inching closer in discovering every day.
Until then, I'll keep plugging away, waiting to see what works.
Now, based on how VS. is setup, Turns 8-10 see some crazily powerful characters. Basically they designed the game to never really last beyond turn 10, as the characters at that level are amazingly powerful and even though you have 50 Endurance (ie Life Points), this is a limit they've designed into the game to keep games short.
To compare, you would never see a 20 attack / 20 defense creature in Magic on turn 10, there simply isn't one and it doesn't exist. It doesn't need to exist for Magic. But for VS., this turn 6 12/12 is actually smaller than a lot of his counterparts.
What does this all mean? It means that I'm currently debating the best way to dole out resources for my game and I wanted to demonstrate how differences in resource control can completely affect the way that gameplay happens, how long games last, and the tempo a game has. It's all very perplexing and you never want to make the wrong choice. You also want to be different and have something fun, unique, easy to understand and (god help me) simple so that people can learn the game and not have to remember a bunch of rules or bring along extra equipment.
The best CCGs, in my opinion, are those that can be played without special counters or trinkets or what have you. Just sit down and play. That's my goal. If you know some basic rules, then you'll do fine. It is finding those easy to understand yet fun to play rulesets that is the challenge, and am inching closer in discovering every day.
Until then, I'll keep plugging away, waiting to see what works.
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