Card Games

Cost Granularity in Card Games

Celia Wagar14 Comments

In Charmed Chains, I chose some early restrictions to emulate some of how Yugioh plays, and over time I’ve been shifting towards different ideas of what I want to do with the game. I chose these restrictions because there are a lot of indie and industry collectible card games that emulate Magic The Gathering (Force of Will, Hearthstone, Lorcana, Final Fantasy, Digimon, etc) in whole or part, and very few that emulate Yugioh (Dual Spirits). When I started making this game, I was really into Yugioh (I’ve recently been swallowed whole by MtG Commander), and I was very much inspired by different facets of Yugioh’s design that I felt could be pushed further (having a defined grid and effects that are based on columns), as well as some aspects of Magic The Gathering (blockers getting a choice in whether to take damage with their creatures, or let it hit them directly).

However, these limitations have lead to some issues with granularity, which I’ve previously discussed. I’m worried that low granularity in creature costs will lead to homogenization in people’s decks, unless I either adopt a resource system more similar to most card games, or start to enforce more strict archetypal synergies, like Yugioh did.

To understand the issues I’m facing, first I’ll need to explain how the resources in Yugioh and Magic The Gathering work.

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What is Charmed Chains? (My New Card Game)

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For the past year I’ve been drafting ideas for a constructed card game (a game where you build a deck out of a bunch of cards, then play an opponent). I’ve been hinting at this game a little in recent posts. My working title for the game is: Charmed Chains.

I think the best way of illustrating what the game is about is by showing you the game mat:

Every card in the game is either a Familiar (Creature/Monster), or a Charm (effect card, like a spell). Familiars and Charms are played to the board, and can have effects specific to where they are placed. Familiars can move during the battle phase, and many charm effects extend across the row or column they’re placed in.

This means Charmed Chains is a game about position and placement of your cards. As the attacker: You want to place your familiars in places where they can destroy or attack past your opponent, and the defender wants to move their familiars to block or evade your attacks. You also want to move your familiars into position to take advantage of buffs your charms will provide, and evade the debuffs of your opponent.

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Card Game Design as Systems Architecture

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Designing a card game has honestly called on more of my programmer skills than thinking about video games. Card games are surprisingly a lot like enterprise web applications. Cards go through lifecycles and have callback functions and methods similar to an object going through its lifecycle in any enterprise application.

Lifecycle Hooks & Callback Functions

Objects in an enterprise software application, such as components in Angular or React, go through a lifecycle as they are instantiated, go through state changes, and are eventually destroyed. Each of these has a “lifecycle hook”, which is a function that is called when that particular lifecycle event happens.

In card game terms, these are similar to effects that trigger when a card enters the battlefield, leaves the battlefield, is tapped, or attacks or blocks. Trigger conditions are lifecycle hooks for cards.

A callback function is one that triggers when another object goes through some type of change. It’s subscribing to another object’s state, then doing something when that object does something.

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Tiers are for Queers

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And the queers always pick a top tier.

Tier lists have been controversial since the dawn of fighting games, and have slowly seeped into every other competitive game featuring pre-game or mid-game loadout choices.

From a casual perspective, it can be easy to be skeptical of tier lists, especially in modern times. Casual players typically don’t play the game consistently enough to be able to execute the counters that can shut a low tier character down.

Alex in 3rd Strike might be scary to someone who can barely block crossups, but a higher level player can simply parry option-select Alex’s crossup stomp, tapping exactly as it connects, and either getting a parry if it’s same-side, or a block if it’s crossup. Urien might seem mediocre, since he doesn’t have incredible frame data, his specials are slow or unsafe, and have crappy hitboxes on top of being mostly charge moves, but when his moves are mastered, he has ridiculous combo damage and setups into unblockables.

A higher level player can play Chun Li, Ken, or Dudley, and simply tank Alex’s slash elbow, or block the EX slash elbow, and punish it with a super. Chun Li can get roundhouse kicked in the face by Q, and then punish him with super art 2 for more damage than the roundhouse.

These types of weaknesses aren’t as obvious at low level, so it can be hard for lower level players to understand the true shape of the game.

The fact that characters are different from one another means that some will be better against others. They’ll counter each other. If a character counters a lot of other characters, especially if it’s by a wide margin, then that’s a top tier.

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How do you Set the MAXIMUM LIMIT? (For Health & such)

Celia Wagar2 Comments

Almost every game has resources of some type or another, whether that’s health, mana, meter, etc. A topic that is rarely discussed with these is: Exactly how much health should you have, and how much damage should stuff do? What should your resource limit be, how much should stuff cost? How fast should it be built up? The decisions made in each of these can significantly affect the tone and feeling of something.

The most critical technique for thinking about this problem is thinking in percentages. The actual values can be arbitrary, but percentages help you keep track of the actual impact. A combo across different games could deal 8000 damage, 120 damage, or just 6 damage, and in each case, that could be worth 90% of someone’s healthbar. Thinking in percentages helps you weigh the relative impact of something, without getting bogged down in the exact numbers.

This type of thinking also suggests thinking about the resource in terms of how many times it can be tapped before it’s extinguished. If each touch deals about 10% of your health bar, a game will have 10 touches before it’s over. If a touch can deal up to 80%, then it’s a 2-touch game. Consider the range of variability between how much impact each touch makes as well.

In Card Games, instead of touches, it’s measured as a “clock”. The clock is how many turns a player has left before they lose the game. In real-time games with fine-grain health and guaranteed hits, this type of thing is measured in DPS (Damage Per Second) and/or TTK (Time to Kill). In these cases, it’s worth considering what tradeoffs a player should be making in order to get a faster clock, or a lower time to kill. It’s also worth considering how fast the average clock for a match should be, or what the average time to kill is across the game, and watching out when those things end up lower or higher than you originally planned.

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How Magic’s Mana System Divides its Design Space

Celia Wagar3 Comments

Magic the Gathering invented trading card games, and with it, resource systems in trading card games. Countless games following MTG have mimicked MTG’s 5-color mana system, because of course they did, why wouldn’t they?

In Magic The Gathering, spells and creatures cost “Mana”, a resource that regenerates every turn, and builds up over time as you play “land” cards from your hand. Mana comes in 5 colors, Green, Red Blue, White, and Black. Each of these colors has a mechanical identity associated with it, called a “Color Identity”. Mana is the primary thing that divides the design space in Magic The Gathering, to create different types of decks.

Of course, there are other things, like card types, and creature types, which have effects that reference one another to create synergies. And there are more broadly playstyles, like Aggro (try to kill the opponent before they can get their good monsters out or reach their win condition), Control (destroy your opponent’s threats and eke out a win) Mid-range (shut down aggro and outclass weak aggro threats, rush the control players), and Combo (dig through your deck to assemble exodia in your hand, then win the game instantly or near-instantly).

Mono-color decks focus entirely on a single type of mana, and usually only play a single “basic” land color. This gives them incredible consistency, because their mana supply goes up every time they play a land, but limits what they have access to in the broader card pool. A mono-color deck may lack “answers” to certain types of “threats” generated by other decks, such as red and black having a tough time getting rid of enchantment cards.

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Tabletop Game Designers Know What’s Up

Celia Wagar1 Comment

This blog has attempted for years to articulate what game design is for video games. It was born out of a frustration in video games discourse that the discourse was so vague and distracted by the narrative, the setting, the immersive illusion created by video games. For the past decade I’ve aimed to discuss the raw mechanics of games and what makes gameplay good, because I’ve gone across the whole range of people talking about video games and no one else has been doing it.

There have always been hints of this raw mechanical talk in competitive video games. I’ve always recommended that people trying to learn game design study competitive games, because the way those communities talk about their games directly addresses the mechanics and doesn’t get lost in the fiction.

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