Bug in CCG card design

1-Spell casting game : You cast attack spells that has a number of damage, special spell ability, casting cost.

2-Mecha game : Each card is a weapon that you can add to your mech. A weapon contains a number of damage and special effect ( like blast, armor piercing ).

3-Card fighting game : Each card has the number of damage, a letter to make chains and combos, and special abilities.

Hey Larienna,

This is an interesting topic!

I don't think there's any single "missing component" -- you could "fix" the bug a number of ways.

1) Mechanics of card play.
In games like rummy, the cards are very boring, but the mechanics of playing cards provides interest. Matching sets forces you to carefully discard and pick up. It also forces you to watch your opponent's moves in an attempt to figure out what they're holding.

So, for the spell casting game in your example, you might introduce a "play based" mechanic to add spice. For example, mana from expended spells can help boost new spells of matching color (assuming all spells come in one of 'n' colors). So, as my opponent plays red spells, I might choose to cast fewer spells in exchange for picking up his red cards. This allows me to "boost" a future red card by laying his expended reds on a future turn.

2) More base mechanics.
In the three examples, the games seem to consist of "play cards to reduce your opponent's strength to 0". That's a time-honored goal, but there aren't many supporting mechanics. In M:TG you've got to manage Mana. In the Settler's Card Game, you have resource production systems. These extra game systems provide more ways for cards to affect the game.

Try adding another "degree of freedom" to the combat systems. How about "morale" for the fighting game. Now you can introduce cards like "In the Zone" which increases your damage as your morale goes up, or "Desperate strike!" when increases it when it goes down. You could have "taunt" cards that affect only morale. Now, as I customize my deck, I can formulate a meaningful strategy: do I balance my cards or focus on either damage or morale?

3) Persisten cards that record long-term game-states.
You mentioned that the 3 example games all involve laying attack cards and immediately removing them. This does limit you. If you can introduce some cards that stay on the board and can change state (via tapping, flipping, etc), you will have even more interesting possiblities. You don't have to do this with your attack cards.

For example, in the Mech game, the "Mech" cards themselves could have a "status" word on each border: OK, Overheated, Gyros Out, Shutdown (turn to this whenever you are both Overheated and have your Gyros Out). Now you can make cards that force status changes but do less damage. This goes back to #2 and building a deck around a particular strategy.

The themes of tradeoff and strategy buildings form a common thread through all of these examples. If the cards seem flat, you probably need to introduce a new mechanic around which cards can be split: "do I pick cards that interact in manner 'A' or manner 'B'?" Defensive cards double the permutations as you have to decide whether to protect yourself from 'A' or 'B'.

Enough rambling. I hope you'll share your final thoughts on this topic as you read through the replies.

Good luck.

K.

I read this thread very quickly, so I might be mistaken as for what you are looking for, but I can see a way to combine the three given exaples of card games.

If you have cards as you described ("magic/spells", "technology/mecha-stuff" and "fighting-skills/special-combo-attacks"), you could assign them to creatures/persons. Each creature has a couple of stats, which determine how good it is at using magic/tech-stuff/martial-fighting.

You can then add cards that these creatures can use. (their ability to use certain attacks can modify how well they do at these attacks with other dice or a fixed bonus to a die roll) More powerfull attcks do more damage; less powerful attack can be combined to get maximum effect (yep, loads of playtesting to eliminate balance-issues...)

It certainly could make for a deeper game, as you try to decide which attacks you play or combine, or which ones you will want to save to assign to another creature or to combine with another attack-method.

Just an idea, though... (must go to bed, too tiring a week and somewhat drunk... I love weekends...)

Cheese!

(PS: On a far sidenote: your post about the space-race-game (something about tile/battlemap-issues) some months ago, has sparked ideas that are slowly shaping into something more concrete... More about that later or on demand...)

This is very opinionated and fairly general but I'm hoping you can get something out of it...

Some games attempt to balance by mathmatical and probabily means and may seem somewhat lacking in creativity to some... Other games, such as MTG for instance, have so much variation it is impossible to balance so they depend on people's ideas and creativity to achieve the balance for them... Please remember this is a matter of opinion and how I see it...

Mathmatically balanced games seem to have a more stategical/statistical/logical element to them where as variety balanced games have more of a user creativity/variation balance to them. To me, I guess it depends what audience you are seeking and what your strategic goal is for the game. To the extreme some prefer variety/randomness and some prefer the game to be based purely on skill and consider randomess a cover for the player'(s') weakness or the reason for a winner or loser. (I have no idea how to show ownership with apostrophe's with a sentence with parentheses by the way!) My best guess as what would be best for both worlds is to try and take them both into consideration as much as possible...

Have randomness, but when using dice use some sort of bell curve dice rolling method as the foundation for expected values when you mathmatically balance it. For example 2D6 is random... however it has much much greater predictability than a 1D12. Most values produced by die rolls realistically should not be totally random and would have some sort of average values. A D12 would have 1/12 as all probabilities and thus be susceptible to the "randomness is a cover for strategic weakness" idea, but 2D6 you could use to you advantage in this area.

Try to take all possibilities into consideration that you can think of, such as the casual player. What will they come up with for their strategy or stategies? What won't they ever think of? In my opinion having a big audience is better in the long run, but appealing to both casual and harcore gamer is even better! The problem is finding a compromise in the gameplay that is acceptably deepstrategically, yet simple enough for the casual gamer to comprehend, come up with ideas and be comptetetive with.

I hope this helps!

Respectfully,
Sgraffite

I don't know if you want to add this layer of complexity and extra time to the game, Larienna, but you might consider something like letting the players 'control' the cards they obtain by having them bid on each card, like a M:tG booster draft. It would add to the playing time, but it would also add an interesting element to "character creation" as each player could attempt to build-in combos during the drafting stage.