CCG Winning Conditions

Note for those who don?t like to read my CCG posts: I?ve reserved Fridays as Family/Personal Blog day. I?ll wrap up personal happenings, the latest with kids, family, events, and other stuff tomorrow.

Now, with that out of the way, I want to finish the week by talking about?

CCG Winning Conditions

Winning conditions are one of the first things you need to figure out as a designer. Between winning conditions and combat, you?ll find no two greater subjects to tackle. Why is a good winning condition important? Well, not to state the obvious, but?

1. The player needs a goal to attain

2. The set needs at least one condition to build around

Before we get into it, that?s the simplest definition I can think of. You want players to know how to win, in easy to follow terms, and you want cards that are on a power curve equal to your winning condition. Allow me to bold here for a second: Your winning condition sets your power curve, and all of the elements in your game are relative toward it.

For example, VS System gives each player 50 Endurance points. When a player takes ?damage? they lose Endurance. Endurance is used both as a method of payment for abilities as well as a relational value by which the characters were designed. This is why you have 8 resource cost 20 attack character, amongst other things.

To counterpoint, Magic gives each player 20 life points. With such a low number, you?ll never see an 8 resource costing character that can do 20 damage (or at least you won?t without significant drawbacks). But that?s fine. The game has regulated itself to work within that 20 life point rule, and as such designs all of their cards with that value in mind (amongst other things).

So with that said, another thing that isn?t crucial, but is important, to your winning condition is flavor. While Magic and VS System don?t really have this in effect, some other games deliver flavor pretty well. The Warlord CCG is a battle between two powerful sorcerers. Your cards are laid out in front of you in an upside-down triangle pattern. This represents the characters you control, and at the bottom of this flipped pyramid is your sorcerer. If that character dies you lose. This is flavorful in that you know where your power base lies (ie, how powerful is my sorcerer in relation to my opponent?s?) and you know how to manipulate your winning condition (if I make my sorcerer stronger, then I?ll live longer and not lose).

Other space-based games have Star Bases to defend, so when that card is destroyed so are you. Etc, etc. These are flavorful ways that games that relate their winning conditions without being an arbitrary number. While I like some of them I generally dislike a one-way-only winning condition. Why? It pigeon-holes strategy onto a one-way street, and does the same to the designers.

So now we get into Alternate Winning Conditions. What are AWC?s? Well, they?re different ways to win the game silly. Most games will either launch with 1?3 winning conditions, and either modify them with cards that do just that, or add additional AWC?s with cards.

Let?s take for instance, this card from VS System:

Normally if you run out of cards from your deck in VS System, nothing happened. You simply didn?t draw cards. Contrast that rule with this card: It simply gives you an alternate winning condition when there wasn?t one, including basing its creation on breaking an existing rule that most players were (perhaps) taking for granted. For example, they didn?t care if they were burning through cards with Genosha (a card that can draw up to 4 cards if you control Magneto), because they weren?t worried about losing via lack of cards to draw.

Magic already has this rule in place (well, almost: If you are forced to draw a card and cannot, you lose). But they also have an AWC called Poison Counters. If you get hit with a creature who gives you a poison counter, you begin to keep a tally. At 10 poison counters, you lose. Pretty simple, right?

Well, sorta. This is where AWC?s go bad: The winning condition, based on game design, is fundamentally flawed. Where the other winning conditions are just fine (decking and going from 20 to 0 life points), with Magic being a mainly creature-based affair, having just two or three creatures who can efficiently create poison counters is a hindrance. Why? Because 10 halves the accepted standard power level and damn near square roots it (sorry, that?s a terrible phrase, but its what came to mind). Why? Because against normal creatures, if you can?t remove them you have the option to gain life and stay alive. But poison counters, unless specifically removed, will stay there forever. This creates an uncomfortable inevitability-like situation for the person who tries their best to stay poison free, but only needs 10 unblocked poison-givers to lose, no matter what happens, for the rest of the game.

Also, trying to embrace this winning condition means having to create an antithesus to it. So suddenly you?re pushing the playerbase to include hosers for a mechanic that, if efficient enough, can kill rather quickly, and you?re also forcing cards to be played because of the power inherently found in it.

To put this in perspective: Artifacts are huge in Magic right now because the designers made a conscious choice to make them a very prevalent part of the metagame. For the reason, lots of artifact destruction is not only used in the Sideboard but is now main-decked. There is nothing wrong with this inherently, because artfacts are means to an end (either your life points or your deck). However, poison counters have no way to be removed, and to create a mass of good poison-providing creatures will shift the metagame towards an entirely different winning condition, something that the designers have never dared to do because it would be akin to a train wreck. Their unremovability and inherent limitations in terms of game design prevent them from being a focus.

Mark Rosewater, the lead dev, has commented on the poison mechanic before, promising that it may be revisited at some point in the future. I seriously doubt it. Unless there are some rule changes (such as you need 20 poison counters to lose) and some really nice efficient constructed-worthy poison givers/removers, you?ll never see a serious magic player within miles of this winning condition. It is, at best, an afterthought to Magic.

The idea is to make your AWC?s prevalent and meaningful, so as to provide a different and useful avenue for your player to travel should they not use the ?normal? method. Join me next week where I?ll take another look at card layouts (with new images from differing CCGs), amongst other thrilling topics.