Making Games: The Beginnings Of A Card Game, Part 3

I return, this time with news from the front! Planes flying everywhere! Dogfights breaking out in the skies above London, Berlin, and…Toronto? Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch. But there’s more to the game!

Based on play testing with fellow students and faculty, a few issues arose. One of the main things was that the game finished too quickly. Being able to dish out 10 damage, four times in a row if you got the right cards was a bit insane. The game could be over in a matter of a couple of minutes if someone got really lucky (or just shuffled like a jerk). Despite the low probability, some handiwork with counting cards or adding up card loss totals for each player in a round made it a bit unfair having that big of a power unbalance. The point is that the balance of power in the game is too great on both sides. To fix this, I have to alter one of two things: either change how the higher numbered cards affect the game, or add a mechanic to increase the playtime. Since I don’t want to bog down the simplicity of the core game, I’m opting for changing the cards, but I’ll touch on that in a bit.

I’ve been puzzling how to use the face cards, and based on another card game idea I have (which I’ll develop later on), I decided to make the face cards into special abilities. Doing this adds a bit of variety and complexity to the game. It doesn’t get crazy and add or change any existing elements; the “ability” cards would simple speed up or slow down the pace of the game, and provide those come-from-behind scenarios that are so deliciously satisfying in card games. Ever had a moment in poker where you laid down your royal flush and felt victory breeze across your face? Or how about in Magic: The Gathering, when it all seems hopeless, and then you draw that one bloody card you need, and suddenly, you’ve just won? I want moments like that, moments where it all seems hopeless, and suddenly you come from behind to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Really dramatic imagery here, but it’s a key point of play: I want victory to be satisfying, but I don’t want it to cause complexity. So, face cards are abilities that affect the game. Makes sense; good, workable idea. So I spent the morning just hammering stuff out, floating ideas that, hey, why the heck not, let’s try it out!

Before I throw up the revised rules, I want to touch on the “altering high value cards” point. This was actually a really genius (if I do say so myself) and simple way to lower the balance of power for both players, keep the pace of the game reasonable, keep it fun, and provide those satisfying moments. It occurred to me that since players are using cards of equal or greater value to block, and 10’s don’t have a card with a higher numeric value, why not make them only usable as a blocking card? Does this does two key things: it lowers the balance of power, because now it would take (theoretically) an extra turn of consistent round victories to win the game; and it provides a very simple way to protect against the now-highest value of 9 without feeling like a really powerful attack was wasted. This effectively means that the highest value card that’s still efficient is lowered even further to 8, which has 3 possible cards to block it. 8 to 52 seems like a much better damage to health ratio, meaning 7 turns of consecutive round victories in order to win.

So, here’s the revisions, and I’ll be posting a link to the beta rules in a few weeks.:

10’s are now block-only cards, capable of blocking 9 or lower.