The Warm Welcome

                Recently, I’ve been on a kick to design a card game. And not just any card game – but the perfect card game. In order to do that, I’ve been looking at different card games, board games and minis games and see what works and what doesn’t. By sitting down and analyzing each of these different games (and each section individually) I’ve come across some pretty interesting things.

                So, this blog is going to cover the creation of a card game. Sitting down at the table, from scratch, the game has one requirement: the game must appeal to a casual crowd while also catering to a competitive scene. This is one of the hardest things to accomplish in game design, especially since both parties want pretty different things.

                Before I dive anymore into the above division I’d like to define both terms. The “casual crowd” are people who often sit at home. They don’t care about tournament rules, they rarely take notice of errata and the amount of work they put into the game outside of playing it is limited. Casual players focus on the amount of “fun” in the game, they want to big plays, have silly combos and laugh their heads off at interactions they didn’t notice before. Casual players fill the bulk of most card game players. The competitive scene is much more socially aware. Competitive players often spend their time on websites, blogs or forums made available to them by either the publisher, developer or other rabid fans.

                They want two different things. One of the more common of my analogies in this blog is going to be to Magic: The Gathering and to Fantasy Flight Games’ various Living Card Games. These two live on two totally separate planes, but both serve a purpose. Magic is the longest running trading card game that still gets played regularly, and it shows no signs of stopping. The Wizards of the Coast published game just celebrated its 20^th anniversary. The game now has over 13,000 published cards and in June it broke a record by having almost 4500 people attend Grand Prix Las Vegas in June of this year. Magic, as you can see, is incredibly popular and has a massive competitive scene. The Living Card Game is a system (a series of games, really) that change the way that card games like this are approached and handled. Every time a product is released for an LCG, it is released in a package with every card in that publication.

                It’s pretty easy to see, then, why the Living Card Game appeals to casual players. When talking about casual games in particular I’ll be referencing Fantasy Flight’s Lord of the Rings LCG. The reason this is because, beyond the marketing and publishing being more casual friendly, it is not a competitive game. In Lord of the Rings you (and your friends if you want) play against the game. Lord of the Rings can be played solo, and when you do play with your friends you work as a time to beat a particular scenario or enemy.

                Now that we know what the game needs I’m going to tell you a little bit about myself, and then jump into what design involves.

                My name is Liam Sobel and I attend Full Sail University – I’m a Game Design major. My brother introduced me to Magic when I was in Junior High. Though I never owned my own Magic cards then, I got really deep into Pokemon with my classmates. In High School I picked up Magic on my own, and several friends of mine dabbled in Yu Gi Oh!, and I played with them. I tried out Duel Masters when it premiered over here. That’s around the time my friends and I wanted to start branching out – we started playing Dungeons and Dragons and over the next few years we picked up and tested several other games to broaden our horizons.

                Eventually we went back to Magic. We played for years in our early years of college. We kept up with it online, went to some events up to six hours away. After a while, we decided to try branching out again, and that’s when we came across the Living Card Game. We picked up Lord of the Rings and instantly fell in love. We’ve played almost all of the Living Card Games now (except Warhammer and Android).

                So, we’ve played a lot of games. But that’s not enough. I entered the Game Design program almost a year ago, and since then have been subject to many of the tools and concepts that designers use. This will be the blog chronicling an amateur designer trying to make a card game that is playable, fun and even so damn good that there are tournaments for it.

                What Is Design?

Image property of
Wizards of the Coast.

                On paper, design is the creative and imaginative process behind making something. There are designers for everything from clothes to video games. Whenever Bruce Wayne decided to become Batman, he designed the Batsuit. Chances are he sat down and sketched out images of what he wanted to suit to look like, went through the materials available to him and put little notations about what each piece of the suit was made of and what function it did.

                That’s a designers job. In games, designers write rules and create whole cards. A lot of that comes from years of experience with design, playing or whatever property they’re working with. If the property is unique to the game then they might use cards and mechanics to personify the setting, or they might use the setting to create the cards. More on this later.

                Whenever cards are designed, they are proto-played. In bigger companies this happens with two different teams to ensure quality. This development team prints out these cards, makes decks, plays, makes different decks, plays, mixes them in with existing cards, plays, makes another deck, etc. A good development team does this with every card that is published to ensure both consistent power levels, flavor and that nothing breaks the game.

                The development team writes down any problems they see (this doesn’t work how you intended, costs too much, too over powered, etc.) and then gives it back to the design team to fix. Once each card from a set has the stamp of approval from both teams the set is given another walk through from development. Companies often hold their own tournaments for employees using the future cards, Magic is notorious for having what they call “Future Future League” which is what their tournament scene will look in the next year or two.

Image property of
Fantasy Flight Games.

                How Do You Start Design?

                You can tackle design one of two ways. The first is called “top down” design. I first heard this term from Mark Rosewater, who is the lead Designer for Magic right now. Top down design is also called “flavor design”. Top down design begins with a concept or an idea within the universe you’re designing. Imagine designing a science-fiction card game, one of the things you might want to do is make a card about species communicating with one another, which might be hard to do.

                So you start with that idea and you say “How do they communicate with each other?” Based on that idea you make what the card does. Top-down is an essential part of casual play and is an essential part of marketing. You might have a great game, but without knowing anything about what you’re doing or where you’re playing it can get kind of dull.

Image property of
Fantasy Flight Games

                Top-down design allows you to create rich characters and settings that fill your world with interesting back stories and plots that make your world come to life. Having a full world like that means you’re going to have an easier time talking about your cards and bringing logic into the equation.

                The other major design avenue is, appropriately enough, called “bottom up” design, and it works exactly the opposite of top-down. With bottom up design you come up with a mechanic, or a function for a card, and you create it and give it flavor later.

                Most designers understand the necessity of having certain mechanics and cards in each set. For example, every set in Magic has creatures and ways to deal with creatures. Most sets also have ways to draw cards and ways to have you opponents discard cards. These are two major interactions that make the game fun to play.

Image property of
Fantasy Flight Games

                Whenever you begin designing an expansion, it’s not unlikely for a designer to block off a portion of their cards to say “These are going to be staples.” Or “These are going to be creatures.” It’s refreshing to have new designs, for sure, but many mechanics need several different avenues. Look at Lord of the Rings, even in the Core Set there are a handful of cards that do the same or similar things – but in different forms and at different costs.

                Repeating these necessary functions allows players to create decks that maintain a level of consistency. A deck that is considered aggressive (or “aggro”) has a lot of creatures. But on top of that he needs a way to play these creatures, or perhaps to protect his investments.

                A good game doesn’t restrict to one or the other, though. Good games utilize both top-down and bottom-up design and finds places for both to be prominent. Finding where each design type belongs is the label of a great designer.

                What Is It That We’re Designing?

                The rest of this blog is going to be dedicated to finding and designing a great card game. Now that we’ve defined “design” and given the two approaches to design, I’ll be breaking down different mechanics and functions in card games in order to sort out how the game will look.

                So, like any good creation we need to break this down a bit further. Above, I outlined one of the needs of this game. It needs to cater to both casual and competitive audiences. That’s my primary goal – to reach everyone. But there are some other needs and wants that I’m going to outline to give people a more clear idea of my aim in the coming weeks.

                This game also needs to be complex, yet elegant. I know that sounds kind of like an oxymoron but there are a lot of complex concepts that people just “get” nowadays. If you’re familiar with card and board games, you’re likely familiar with the concept of resources and spending to gain cards or abilities. There are also complex concepts like Magic’s “the stack” that, at first, seem daunting but in reality are fairly simple. These are just a few examples of what I’m aiming for.

                Interactivity is also pretty high on my priority list. Games that feel like you’re really effecting your opponent seem to generate the most fun because people often get together to play games for social reasons (apart from the fun). What I want to avoid are games that seem like you’re playing solitaire, and there happens to be another person playing next to you.

                Flavor. Highest on my want list is the integration of flavor into the game. I don’t want this to feel like some generic card game – I want players to understand what they’re doing and what role they play in the world. One of the things I’ve always felt was great was when I had friends playing Legend of the Five Rings. During their tournaments, the victor would determine the outcome of a particular storyline - which would slightly alter the atmosphere and setting for the following year’s releases. That level of immersion is my goal.

                Each of these functions and mechanics will be looked at in depth, and some of them might even have to come out over the course of two or three weeks. This blog will go live every Saturday. Pre-production will last for about six weeks, and we’ll wrap that up with the entry that goes live on October 26^th. During that period we will pick a universe, design the rules, design combat and look at different “types” of cards and how they interact with one another. After that, we’re going to dive into actual production where we begin designing the first “core” set. We’ll develop different card types, look at mechanics and even create individual cards. This section should last for another eight weeks or so and conclude around the time of the entry on December 21^st.

                Then comes the fun part. Around that time I will be looking for play testers. Several people on campus have already agreed to help, and I will be taking the game to two or three of my local game shops to play in earnest. But, I will also be looking for other people that I can send a PDF of the cards to and have them playtest it with their friends.

                Next week, we’ll be looking at the universe that we’ll be designing in. This will set up the future flavor, setting and characters that are involved with our game. I’ll talk about the merits of creating a new IP and using an existing one.