Family Matters

Hello everyone, welcome to the Weekly Fam Update. While I’m seriously considering creating a new blog for my CCG postings, for the moment we’ll keep it All In The Blog and see what we can do here.

First up…Ericka, my wife.

She had an awesome birthday party last week, starting with PF Changs (Chinese restaraunt) and ending at Planet Bowl bowling. We went to the latter establishment solely based on their liquor license. And what a license it was. After 2.5 hours of bowling goodness, we headed home. As for the presents, I did register my wife a domain, and do plan on getting her blog up sometime soon. However, due to her recent interest in baking and cake decoration (of which she is The Shiat, rhyming with Fiat, as some may refer to her as), I have postponed its creation and may perhaps build a semi-professional site with a blog, instead of just the latter.

Regardless, she is now my quarter-century old sweetheart, and I love her dearly.

Next up, Annie (my two year old)

She has officially gotten the 2 year old Meanness that strikes every kid. Whether she’s pushing boundaries or, like last night, dipping her entire hand in the vaseline and then smearing it all over the living room, well, them’s the breaks.

What’s really cool about me and Annie is always bedtime. That’s when everything slows down and I get to break out the Shel Silverstein. Where The Sidewalk Ends is a brilliant piece of work, and I’ve made my way through almost all of them. Many of which Annie knows by name.

“I wanna hear about Jimmy Jet and his TV Set,” she’ll say. “Read boo-boo ‘daids,” (ie, Band Aids) she’ll request. “I wanna hear about Captain Hook!”

This is awesome stuff. Unfortunately she’ll be with my mother in law for the greater part of this weekend, and I’ll miss her (and my reading to her) very much.

Lastly, Abby (damn-near 1 year old)

Abby has her birthday party coming up on February 19th, and while many of my and Ericka’s family members will be in attendance, unfortunately no babies will be. Good buds Jeremy and Lesley will be in Nashville, and my cousin Lana and Jim have prior engagements. This doesn’t lessen the fun or anything, but it is something that I wish could be rectified. Regardless, a good time will be had by all and I’ll try to get pictures up here.

Speaking of pictures, allow me to leave you with the following pic of Abby (click on it for a larger image):

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.

CCG Design Scale

Hello everyone, today I want to talk about CCG Design Scale. One of the first decisions made in game design, this a short but improtant topic to discuss.

What is CCG Design Scale? Well, to put it simply, it’s the level of detail by which your resources, characters, and entities in your CCG are depicted.

To better illustrate my point, let’s take for instance an idea of mine that has yet to work out: A World War II CCG. Let’s take a look at this idea and how scale may affect its development.

First, the secret to CCG Scale is knowing what is important to control as a player. What is the scale necessary to make this work? And by scale, I mean what kind of intricacy is necessary for each character and/or action?

To put it in simpler terms: What’s the best way to show soldiers in a CCG like this, by squad or by individual?

In my mind, the Individual Soldier is by far more interesting than controlling a squad. However, you can do far more in terms of design if you went up to a squad-based scale. Let me give you an example:

1 – Individual Soldiers – Equipped Items such as weapons or armor are easier to use with individual soldiers. The players quickly understand that a rocket launcher needs to be stuck to a single guy instead of a hundred. Pretty simple there.

2 – Squad-Based – However, it is more (dare I say) heroic to push against another player with dozens of soldiers fighting tooth and nail alongside dozens of tanks. Squads can be fed via “Supply Lines” and they can also feature dramatic movements to other locales, suffer casualties (and detrements there-in), and be grouped to form Batallions.

So if we’re leaning the way of Squad-based, which I am as I write this (and I’ve flip-flopped about a dozen times on this issue in my head), you can also have powerful Commanders which may or may not begin in play. These Commanders can give you bonuses and/or abilities that you wouldn’t normally have, and there are gameplay trade-offs made by using powerful Commanders with consequences.

However, with individuals you can really personalize the characters, create relationships within them (such as tying one character to another), along with the more grounded sense of each player trying to take their rag-tag army home to victory.

When you think of scale in terms of CCG, the second secret is simplicity. While this is the first rule of combat, it is the 2nd rule of scale. Once you know what is important to control (secret #1), you need to know how to control them, and you want to keep that simple (secret #2). So by doing both of these, you’ll give yourself a great jumping off point to designing winning conditions, resource control, and combat.

That ends today’s short blurb. Tomorrow we’ll elaborate on some ideas here, and perhaps throw around the importance of good winning conditions.

CCG Mechanics Gone Bad

I can’t help myself. This was just too much not to comment on:

Allegiance: War of Factions

I’m not even going to touch on the layout problems (Go here for that), or the Debate mechanic (whatever that is), but the Investigate mechanic needs some work. Here is how it was explained on the Allegiance homepage:

“Inspector Crowther has the ability Investigate, which can be used to stop a crime in process. Whenever a criminal ability is used, an Investigation can be called. You take the crime strength (the number following the crime on the card), and subtract that from the total Investigate strength, with the minimum being 1. The Investigating lord then rolls a die, and if the result is equal to or less than the required number, the criminal is caught, which results in the crime being negated and the criminal going to the discard pile.” – (Additional bolding for emphasis.)

Okay, so the idea is to have investigators hanging around to stop crimes and kill crooks. Fair enough. But here’s where it goes right off the rails: This card has Investigate +4. He just said that you take the crime number and subtract it from the Investigate total. So I subtract X from +4? What, are we going to have -4 Investigate for the really clueless sleuths?

Wow guys, that’s just fucking brilliant. No reminder text and the mechanic holds no logic in how it is written on the card.

Dear Allegiance devs: Please know that Reminder Text doesn’t suck and helps your game. Oh, and can I get some more stats per card? I think we need a few more (hopefully color-coded too). Thanks.

CCG Card Layouts

Sorry for the lack of a posting yesterday, I was feeling awful and stayed home from work. However, I think this will make up for it:

Today I’d like to talk about CCG Card Layouts, and the differences in each. Through these examples, you can then learn what makes or breaks a card game in the aesthetics department.

Please note, I haven’t played most of these games, and I’ve tried to just get a nice selection to view. Also, I tried to pick characters from each CCG so we can focus on one area.

Magic

The defacto standard, here is the general breakdown before we begin to look at other CCGs:

• Name in the top left.
• Resource requirements in the top right.
• In the center you have the card type (ie, Creature), and then character type (Cleric…which will soon be Human Cleric when 9th edition is released).
• Power and toughness on the bottom. Not necessarily on the bottom-right.

There is also an expansion symbol, but I wasn’t going to put it down as defacto, because the expansion symbol is sometimes left off of some CCGs (when a basic set is released), or simply aren’t used at all (VS. System uses set names as expansion symbols).

Also, Power and Toughness are listed in that order on almost every other card game, or top to bottom. Players have almost universally adapted to this system.

VS System

I like this layout. It doesn’t get too symbol-happy (limited to just the Flight and Range symbols on the left represented by wings and the aiming circle), and the power and toughness conforms to the top-bottom standard. Resource cost is moved to the top left, but that’s okay because there is nothing on the top right to confuse players. It also looks better when you have a grip full of cards to be able to quickly see (and arrange) cards by resource cost. Character type is moved to the left, but is done so in a classy way.

The only thing wrong with this one is the lack of Mechanic explanation. Allow me to say that sometimes Mechanics are never explained when in “Expert” expansions, but for any game that has less circulation than Pokemon or Magic, you really need to explain your mechanics, regardless of how often they show up in sets.

Star Trek TCG

Ah, refreshing. An awful card layout. Firstly, I don’t recall if Star Trek actually has a resource system in place. I’m sure if did it would still shit all over this one. Let’s see here. We have a ton of icons (particularly those around the V.I.P. Flavor box), we have even more in the abilities and attributes box. The only thing I really like about this card is the affiliation marker and name position. Otherwise, this is just too busy and a little ridiculous.

Cyberpunk 2020

Ah Cyberpunk, how sad art thou. First, the good things…er, thing: I like the Money cost of the card on the left, as it is easy to see and arrange cards by cost when in hand. And…that’s about it. We have 4 different stats, with defense and power reversed from the accepted standard, and SR and LR (whatever those mean), along with POW/DEF values all in small font and hard to read (and all over the card). Oh, and that cost in the bottom right? What the hell is that? Beats me…

Doom Trooper CCG

You just have no idea how hard it was to find this DoomTrooper CCG card image. A now-defunct CCG (revived to play on CCGWorkshop), there are a few things I like about this one: First, the factions at the top of the card. While I don’t like two differing factions, as it tends to muddle a card’s uniqueness, I do like the fact that you can mix and match to create a diverse amount of characters.

Otherwise, the problems on this one is that CAPS are used instead of altered font and/or positioned keywords that should be bolded or simply better formatted. With attack and defense values in the right top-down order but seperated by a “bullet value” (whatever that icon stands for), along with some sort of Magic value at the bottom, this one has a lot of problems that could be solved with just a few differing layout options.

Legend of the 5 Rings

Ah, Legend of the 5 Rings. I can’t believe this thing is still around after a decade, yet absolutely no one in my area plays it. L5R has always been the Thinking Man’s CCG, which basically amounts to it being quite a bit more complex than most. First, what I like: The Force and Chi values at the top, flanking the name. This provides an easy to compare context. I also like the Gold cost in the center. This is the generic cost for all cards, not just characters.

What I don’t like: The flanking values next to the Gold amount. I can’t recall which is which, but one is honor and the other is…how many followers the person can have? Anyway, is Soul of Hida Tsuneo really necessary there guys? In the character type? I understand the Crab Clan, and Unique, but defining his mystical origin really doesn’t add anything to the game/character itself.

A Game of Thrones

This is from A Game of Thrones CCG. Let’s see if we can decode this one: Well, it costs 4 Gold, it has 3…banner, allegience, influence? (who knows.) It has an axe icon and a crown icon, and that has to mean some sort of loyalty…to the king? Anyway, he’s a Lord we see, and has Stealth. What is stealth? Who knows, this mechanic isn’t explained. Oh, and all of your Army characters gain stealth (Whatever this is) while attacking during axe challenges. Uh…huh.

Cthuhlu CCG

Here is a character card from the Call of Cthuhlu CCG. As a lot of this game is “investigating stories,” it has a lot of sleuth-minded attributes for each character. Based on what little I’ve read, characters have a Sanity Value or quotient or something, and I can immediately assign the “3” over the pages in the middle-left of the card as this value. The other 3 in the top left is its cost, and on the far left we see a magnifying glass and an open book, surely more attributes for “stories” that must be investigated. I like this layout quite a bit, as the character type is easy to find and the Artifact search text is easy to understand.

Neopets CCG

Okay, hold on to your seats, we’re getting wacky. This is a Neopets CCG character, and all that that implies. Firstly, I haven’t the slightest idea what those stats on the right are. Mag may be Magic, and I believe the red/blue coded numbers are attack and defense, but their 3–character pseudonyms are nothing closely resembling either basic statistic.

What I do like: The character name and types, and I like the fact that the text box still lets you see the rest of the art.

Pokemon

Just when you thought it was safe to finish reading, here comes the Pokemon card! This thing is all over the place. First: Character name -below- character type? Stupid. VS System pulls this off because superheroes have alter egos and vice versa. Here it looks shoddy because of the font positioning. Secondly, having the health points of the character in the top right may be the default layout, but I still feel its bad form. The top half of a card should almost exclusively be reserved for name, cost, and perhaps type/faction icons.

The font fluxuation is jarring, the “weakness / resistance / retreat cost” nearly hidden by its small font layout…Bleh. Oh, and what does Dark Thunder do? I have no idea. But apparently Apocalypse was important enough to actually explain.

Battletech

Ah, Battletech, that other Richard Garfield game that tanked. I remember playing this game and thinking it was an interesting concept but ultimately too simple to really play on a competitive basis. The ability to have Monster Mechs to Smash Face is always intriguing, and all things considered, they could’ve done a worse job.

First, the cost (2) and power/toughness look just fine. It’s when we get to the bottom where things get iffy. Do you know what that 1–>5 is? Or that 1 in the bottom right hand corner? Me neither. Perhaps a small blurb (ie, 3–letter description) or some sort of image to clue you into to their use would’ve improved its chances of survival.

Netrunner

Though I tried my best to select Character cards for each CCG I speak of, I simply couldn’t find one for Netrunner (I’m not sure right now if there even are character cards in Netrunner). Hell, it’s a miracle I found this one, period. Anyway, I like the layout of this one, very simple and easy to understand. Though the “Playing double prep cards for two consecutive actions this turn instead of one.” is a bit odd in its placement (is it reminder text or rules text?), the rest is very acceptable and I love the flavorful layout.

And that wraps up my glimpse into card layouts in various ccgs. I hope we’ve all learned something. Class dismissed.