I'm still developing my ccg. At first i wanted to keep it simple and say the goal was to deplete your opponents deck. well after closer examination i have found that randomly losing chunks of your carefully planned and balanced deck doesn't suit my game. I'm searching for other card game mechanics that could be used to keep score. the game is a wargame theme and you do damage to eachother, but i need a way to keep track other than just 50 hp or what ever. the number needs to be around 50, i'm just looking for something more creative than life points. thanks
ccg win conditions
Sun, 05/15/2005 - 10:38
Sun, 05/15/2005 - 13:19
#1
ccg win conditions
How about having a Damaged pile? When a player takes damage, their fielded units are sent to the damaged pile. These can slowly be repaired, though, so don't count as being discarded. The player can choose which units to repair, though, giving a player who is behind some control over their fate. A force that is fully damaged loses the game.
Tue, 05/17/2005 - 01:39
#4
ccg win conditions
As you are going with a war theme, the main deck sounds like it could represent public support for the conflict. As they feel more and more of the impact of the conflict the public support dwindles, as does that deck. Lose support of the people and you must pull out of the war and lose.
Stemming from that, the deck you are really drawing from could be thematized as a recruitment deck. As the war hits home public support declines, but military recruitment increases.
And when recruitment runs out and you need to draw directly from the public support deck? You just instituted the draft :)
-MMM
Tue, 05/17/2005 - 11:57
#5
ccg win conditions
Usually deck-building combat games have victory conditions such as, your opponent running out of cards (Or possibly you running out of cards first), or some sort of scoring system (life points, victory points, etc..)
There are also hundreds of other victory condition mechanics. You could have land, and whoever conquers all of the land wins. Or if you have multiple players, a secret diplomatic victory.
Of course it depends how complicated you want the game to be. I happen to have problems with my games being too complex. So maybe it would be wise to stay simple.
Tue, 05/17/2005 - 14:59
#6
ccg win conditions
An idea i had that might help u out.
Instead of dumping cards from a deck(this could become confusing which deck is which. use population cards like they do in the game Nuclear War.
each person can have a set amount of cards or can draw so many either way. Then as cards are played you kill off people like civilian casualties during the war. When you run out, you must pull out of the war before your people revolt.
U could also have cards that could be played to counter attacks or at least save half the people that were hit in the last attack.
camper
Tue, 05/17/2005 - 21:57
#7
ccg win conditions
Heres a quick idea, the point is to deplete your opponents supplies, so you have a combination resource and health format.
Wed, 05/18/2005 - 01:43
#8
ccg win conditions
Heres one...
Go right back to your original "lose cards for hit points" idea, but introduce *buffer* cards (armor cards, health cards, yadda yadda).... These are basically blank cards that can be sacraficed for awhile before damage gets down to the *meat* of your functional deck.
Thu, 05/19/2005 - 10:39
#9
ccg win conditions
Quote:
at first i wanted to discard cards, because it would be such a simple mechanic. But i soon realized i didn't like having random chunks of my carefully planned out and balanced deck removed from the game. I have since come to a brilliantly simple compromise, i can't belive it didn't come to me sooner. you have you main deck face down, you also have a que pile that is also face down. when you take damage you remove cards from your main deck and place them (with out looking at, or revealing them) ontop of your que pile. when you care called upon to draw a card you draw fromy our que pile, if your que pile is empty you draw from your main deck. so now you have an easy way to keep track of your score and not chunk your deck randomly.
I love this idea, but the only flaw that I can see is that there is very little strategy here in deciding whihc pile to draw from. If your opponents goal is to deplete your main deck, why draw from it (in essence helping him win) when you can draw from the que deck. There are ways to balance it by adding advantages to drawing from the main deck or disadvantages from the que deck, but I just don't see any reason I would ever draw from the main deck if I could help it.
Sat, 05/21/2005 - 14:04
#11
My experience
I had desigend a mecha game that use this system of loosing card for recording health points. This idea was inspired from the WWF collectible card game. In my case, It made sense that you lose cards because your mech get damaged, so you lose it's abilities. Here is the way I did the rule:
All damage received goes into a damage pile. At the beginning of your turn, you can draw up to you maximum hand size but only 1 card can be drawn from the damage pile. So drawing more cards will make you loose more health. Some attack had the special ability "cripple". In this case damage was discarded in the discard pile.
The WWF system did not have a damage pile that you could draw from. But when losing cards from damage, if the lost cards was a "reverse move" that could normally counter the move, you stop losing cards. So the counter card help in you hand and in your deck.
If you are making a war game, you could place 4 or 5 face down cards that repreent your territoris. Duel Master use 5 card as shield, when you lose your 5 shield, the next attack kill you. But when a shield is destroyed, the shield card goes into your hand. Legend of the 5 ring used 4 tokens to represent 4 territories. Each territories had a card(face up) that you could hire in your army. Losing territory reduced the number of cards available.
Or you can use your max cards in hand to represent the territories you have. Each time you lose a terriotory, your maximum number of cards in hand is reduced.
I also tried to do a card game where you owned buildings, defenses and unit. It looked like making a cardgame out of Starcraft or Dune 2. The idea is that there was the main key building that must not be destroyed. Of course, the opposing player can concetrate his fire on this building but destroying it take more time, so he better destroy other building to weaken you and then destroy you main building.
By the way, there is a flaw in this game design. If you make your unit production depend on the building you have (like in the original video game ) ( ex: have a factory to build a tank ) you end up needing to place many building card in you deck to make sure you have a good probability to draw your buildings. It is the same bug in magic the gathering regarding land cards.
Sat, 05/21/2005 - 21:32
#12
Re: My experience
Larienna wrote:
I also tried to do a card game where you owned buildings, defenses and unit. It looked like making a cardgame out of Starcraft or Dune 2. The idea is that there was the main key building that must not be destroyed. Of course, the opposing player can concetrate his fire on this building but destroying it take more time, so he better destroy other building to weaken you and then destroy you main building.
By the way, there is a flaw in this game design. If you make your unit production depend on the building you have (like in the original video game ) ( ex: have a factory to build a tank ) you end up needing to place many building card in you deck to make sure you have a good probability to draw your buildings. It is the same bug in magic the gathering regarding land cards.
I have worked on many ideas like this myself. The key to this is to remove the "deck" aspect (or lessen it) from the game. A deckless card game allows for much deeper strategy as one of the largest aspects that can ruin a game - that being chance - is removed. The players skill is more based on "how" they use the cards rather than "what they were lucky enuff to draw" - which is my biggest issue with "deck" style games.
Mon, 05/23/2005 - 11:21
#14
ccg win conditions
CIDIC wrote:
that uncertainty is what makes the game interesting...
While a level of uncertainty does make things fun and interesting it in no way reduces the fun to remove random elements and doesn't make it more complicated to do so.
Look at chess - no random element outside of your opponents skill. Simple rules but very complex strategy.
Anyways though sorry to get OT - this thread is about how to apply card discards as a means of determining victory.
Some ideas:
-discard from your hand OR your deck
-some discards are not permanent, ie. they may end up going back into the deck later
-some cards are worth more than 1 "discard"
-i like your que pile idea!
Fri, 05/27/2005 - 14:05
#16
ccg win conditions
CIDIC wrote:
well the cards don't require a number of cards to be discarded. each card has a value, and different cards have different playing cost, you have to discard a card or cards who's value is equal to or greater than the playing cost.
Surely that would mean you'd have to have two good cards to lay one. I wouldn't have thought that discarding a higher value card to lay a lower value one would generally be worth it anyway.
Hi, and best of luck with your CCG.
As for win conditions, there are a number of ways that you can approach the situation. You could have mission cards where players are trying to defeat a certain number or type of enemy units. Or players are trying to overtake a certain terrain type or map area (not knowing much about your game makes it a little difficult to give you more specific comments).
My favorite, though, is a mixture of victory conditions that are hidden until the end of the game. Each player could draw from a small pile of victory cards so that their conditions are more random. Then their conditions would be hidden until the end of the game so that the other player never really knows what he's trying to do.
You could either keep score by having counters for each unit type or by using a scoring track for each player. Alternatively, you could use terrain cards and each player could play uniquely colored counters onto them (so that each player would know whose coutners are on what terrain, but be seperable after the game).
Just a general comment about CCG's, are you really in love with the idea of your game being a CCG? It seems a little overdone in the marketplace. One of my first games was a CCG that I am looking seriously towards making it more of a standalone game (game comes with 2 full decks that are shuffled together and used jointly by the players). To have the expandability of a CCG, you could make your game customizable instead of collectible. Expansions would be available (like Blue Moon for example), but not in the overdone and saturated way that a CCG would require.
Just something to think about...