CCG Development and Questions

That major development should probably be deep pockets for marketing and a huge license, primarily aimed at kids instead of adults. We are in an economic downturn and many new CCGs are considered to be plague-ridden.

In the past couple of years, the only new one that I can remember doing quite well was Bella Sara and it wasn't really a typical CCG, and was more a set of collectible horse cards targeted at young girls to get them access to electronic horses online.

Most publishers aren't interested in buying rights to CCGs right now, and many consumers aren't interested in buying CCGs at all. Upper Deck had layoffs totalling 110 people. Other multi-million dollar companies that produced CCGs went bankrupt. Our company produced a non-random customizable card game that was lumped in with collectible games, causing our bottom line to suffer

WotC has A patent. At least 2 other CCG companies have patents as well. Nominally, each of these patents extends to the specific mechanics of the games in question. WotC has for years claimed to have a patent on "customizable card games". WotC's patent could be invalidated by several key industry players because they revealed the content of their patentable products more than a year prior to filing. As a result, WotC occasionally fires off a cease & desist letter, but has not taken anyone to court (to my knowledge). They did have licensing agreements right after filing but only a few companies signed on.

Do you mean as a PDF (print-and-play) game? Or as a play online video game platform?

If the former, it's a great idea, but the cost of art can be prohibitive for most PDF games.

If the latter, sounds possible, but expensive and time consuming. Join Gamasutra and read their article on Star Chamber. It talks about the development of Star Chamber pretty thoroughly. If possible, license one of several professional or fan-created card trading engines that have been implemented for a variety of online CCGs (I'm not talking about Apprentice, but stand-alone online CCGs).

Design top-down. Envision your rules set thoroughly. Make sure that EVERY card you design fits within the rulebook without constantly padding it out. If you try to tweak your rules for every card you design, chances are your rulebook will break under the weight of any significant card combination.

Here's one majorly odd find we made when doing a core rulebook for our game. Fans like detailed games with replay value, and play games with hideously long rulebooks, but most gamers don't actually read those rulebooks. They want a short rules introduction to the game, even if it doesn't answer all questions. Then they want a rulebook that answers ALL their questions, but they don't want to read it -- they want one of their smart bored friends to read and memorize it.

You need playtest teams which you are a part of AND blind test groups which you do not directly play with, but who instead teach themselves. You need at least one group of rules lawyers who intentionally try to break the game by misconstruing all vague parts of every card.

Beyond that, how you playtest depends so much on your rules that it's not really worth talking about how you should playtest YOUR SPECIFIC CCG without info on it, since it may have specific play or deck building requirements that encourage or restrict card synergies in certain ways.

Lee Valentine
President
Veritas Games Company LLC

to create a free, browser version of the game, and use that as both marketing and playtesting.

I work professionally as a Playtester for several online TCGs and so I'll offer some advice. Thoroughly research the competition and see what good ideas they've implemented and what big mistakes they've made. Look at both games that were successful and those that were failures and try and understand why they were failures. A game that really comes to mind that was a huge flop was Ophinian. Play tons of CCGs and try and think about the thinking behind the marketing (which could mean the complexity of the game mechanics, the universe chosen for the game, the art style, etc).

The future of profitable CCGs is in digital CCGs. Players like digital CCGs because they don't ever have to worry about having someone to play against. Even if it's 4am they can pop online and play someone from Sweden. Digital CCGs are a great business model because you cut out all of the manufacturing and distribution. There is such a bigger profit margin that you really don't need as big of a player base as you would need with a paper TCG (research Lord of the Rings TCG and its digital equivalent to get an idea of this; the digital version had probably 2-5% the size of the player base of the paper version, yet was still profitable).

As far as writing cards, play testing, etc, it was mentioned earlier that you want to work from top to bottom. First of all, get your game mechanics firmed up before you get yourself certain on anything on a more micro level. Once you have the game mechanics in a nearly final form, start to make a complete card set. You do this by starting with high level ideas for a group of cards (i.e. I want 10 cards that feature aliens who shoot acid spit), then break those up into smaller groups (i.e. 5 of those aliens will shoot their acid spit close-range while the other 5 will do it long-range) and then just keep breaking it down like this until you finally have the idea for each card laid out. Then continue to tweak and tweak and tweak until you've got something you like. Have as many eyes laid upon your game as possible and pay attention to everybody's reactions. It's a long process but it's definitely doable. I hope that this helps.

-Adam

doing a non-flash version: much quicker load times.

Also I'd make playable turn-by-turn, and/or have the option to play a 'bot', to help with the problem of insufficient players being on at one time.