Belated Rant Tuesday: The Case for Solitaire Board Games

Blarg, late again, but I'm late this time because of this:

I've beat an AI character, one that operates on cards and written rules instead of some smartphone app or Flash program or Steam app. It's as old fashioned as it can be, and yet... something about it feels good. Like, better than computer games. It's absurd, I know. Here's what I've thought up so far that'd justify this far-fetched idea:

1. Physical feels good. It's the same advantage that you get with normal board games. Holding and moving a pawn, slamming down cards... all these can be easily (and maybe better) simulated on the computer but you just don't get the tactile feel of manipulating stuff.
2. More physical space means more information. With screen real estates plateauing at 1080p and actually shrinking for new laptop consumers (what is this 1336x768 nonsense), having physical space to "display" information actually makes information feel more handy. That discard pile to the right? At this size, it's probably easier for me to just dive through actual cards rather than some sort of on screen search interface - this is especially true if the cards are MtG style unique cards.
3. There are just some things the human brain can compute easier. Special abilities are a pain in the neck to program, but all it takes are a couple of well written words for a human to compute all the interactions. Which usually means with designer board games, you get a lot more text heavy special abilities. That's a good thing. It's variety that you don't normally see in computer games.

... and once in a blue moon, I'd pull out a deck of cards to play (Klondike) solitaire. Blasphemy, I know.

Design Diary Monday: Let the Pirating Begin

After the design process for Summoner went badly, I wanted another shot at designing a Magic like game. I dropped the "design a card" mechanic and returned to cards with fixed powers and abilities. Then I introduced two new X-factors: the rock paper scissors combat that is broadside/evade/pursue, and pirates dice with special dice faces. By the time of this writing, I've thrown away and reused the majority of the card sleeves for later iterations of the game, so here's just a tiny sample of how the game used to look like:

The players were pirates trying to control as much treasure (yellow cards) as possible by the end of the game. Each player controlled a hand of pirate crew (white cards) and several pirate ships (blue cards). In the beginning of each round, a set number of treasure was added to each location (green cards) on the board. Players took turns attacking locations by forming a ship and crew where the total rum use of the crew must not exceed the rum supply of the ship (the circled numbers). A ship loaded with treasure was considered sailing at sea and was open to other player's attacks.

Combat mainly revolved around the broadside/evade/pursue strategy cards. Each player chose a strategy and revealed them at the same time, and the general resolution was broadside beat pursue, pursue beat evade, evade beat broadside. Several strategy combinations would require tossing dice equal to the strength numbers (numbers next to cannons and cutlass icons) to resolve, such as a broadside exchange. Almost all cards had special abilities attached: the crew, the ships, and even some treasures could modify some part of the game. Putting the ship and crew together made the game interesting, but ultimately it also made the game too difficult to track.

To be fair, this version of the game was great for two players, with reasonable downtime and a manageable amount of information to track. The game got too complex once it scaled up to three or more players, though, and I personally lost track of my crew abilities while testing a four player game. When that happened, I was convinced that some dramatic pruning of game mechanics was necessary to scale the game up to my goal of six total players.

In fact, the next version had so much change that it felt like the game took a wrecking ball in its face. Next week: what happened? Paper ships and cubes?

Design Report Mondays: In The Beginning

As an experiment, I'm going to try updating each weekday for as long as I can. Each day of the week is going to be based on a different topic, and design reports record the progress of my current card/board game concept. However, since I didn't start doing this from the very beginning, I'll be playing catch up for a few weeks...

Summoner is my first attempt to create card games again after an extremely long hiatus. Its goal is to be a Magic clone; specifically, a Magic clone that retains the deck building aspect of the game without the necessity for an ever expanding list of cards. The game broke down things like power, toughness, and keywords into separate cards, and formed rules around the combination of cards into making creatures and spells.


It was also the first and last time I made a huge effort to produce good looking prototypes. Here was the last iteration of the prototype deck before I gave up on the idea:

The basic premise was to convert mana into element cards. When an offensive and a defensive element was combined, it formed a golem with the attributes determined by the strength of the elements. Most spells worked like Fireball where you substitute elements to generate a specific effect of variable strength. It felt interesting in theory, but the implementation fell apart quickly.


For one thing, the cards were drawn instead of drafted, and despite attempts to make elements with lower strength "faster", bigger numbers were always better. Eventually, I wrote in so many special rules that the game started to become as cramped and as unintuitive as Magic became. For those reasons, I shelved the project, but the idea of forming a group of custom creatures to attack and defend objectives stayed, and it was the seed that was replanted into the idea that I'm still working to this very day.


Next week: pirates!