When I design card games, I design them with one particular constraint in my mind when I go in: 50 cards. This number is convenient for a couple of reasons. First, 50 is exactly half of a pack of the card sleeves (KMC brand) that I use to prototype games. Second, 50 is very close to the common number of cards people are used to working with, which is of course 52. It’s also similar to the number of cards in your typical CCG deck, and I can be confident that nobody will not know how to shuffle 50 cards.

When I pitched Mock the Vote and Satori at Origins, I was asked why I stuck with this restriction. After all, wouldn’t it be better to choose the perfect number of cards for the game in question? I responded somewhat lamely that it turned out to be a good, close number for both games. And indeed it is; but upon reflection, I have a better answer.

Designing a game is in many ways an artistic process, like writing a poem. There are so many variables, so many things to change, that it helps to have a structure to fit your work into. It gives you a place to start, a place to end, and a clear look at every part of it . For instance, a sonnet is 14 lines long and has a particular meter and rhyme scheme (iambic pentameter and ABABCDCDEFEFGG, if you don’t remember from English class.).

Speaking of English class, in A Wrinkle in Time Mrs. Whatsit also brings up the form of a sonnet as being liberating, rather than restricting, although in that context it is used as an analogy to a person’s life, not game design!

So why did all of Shakespeare’s sonnets have 14 lines? Is there not one that could have been improved by adding or removing a couplet? Is there something magical about the number 14? Of course not; but by choosing this particular framework to work within, he was able to focus on the rest of the poem, the imagery and wordplay and metaphor, and make it the best it could be. Without that structure, how could he ever know it was done?

Note, of course, that I’m not so bold as to claim my games are as good as Shakespeare’s sonnets! And, alas, they certainly haven’t been as effective at picking up lovers.

So why do Bridge, Poker, Hearts, Spades, Oh Hell, Cribbage, Skat, and a host of other games all use a deck of 52 cards? Is it because 52 cards is the perfect number of cards for each of those games? Not necessarily. But it works fine as a structure that they’re all designed under. Now, some games need fewer cards, like Euchre, or a different deck, like Pinochle. When you play trick-taking games three-handed you need to leave a card out. Likewise, sometimes a line of a poem works better if you fudge the rhyme or meter.

So, 50 cards? It’s convenient, it’s familiar, and because I like it I’m using it for my form and structure. Someday I’ll probably end up with a game that just won’t be right without more cards, or fewer, and then I’ll certainly switch; but I’ll know I have a good reason to fudge the form or choose a different one entirely.

Previous entries in the series here.

Name: Partnership

Problem: You have a game concept that benefits from coordination between two people being part of the challenge. Alternatively, you have a two-player game that doesn’t translate well into a larger number of players, but you’d like it to be playable as a group activity. (In this case, playing with six can sometimes work as well.)

Discussion: The two different kinds of games listed in the Problem description are actually pretty easy to distinguish. Call it Type 1 if the game would be significantly different if one player played both parts, and Type 2 if this is not the case. As the shining example of Epic Duels demonstrates, Type 2 is not worse!

Examples:

• Bridge, a Type 1 partnership game. Clearly there is a large amount of coordination required to make the bidding work well. Even once the play starts, the defenders benefit by playing as a partnership; sending each other signals by card choice, playing to maximize the use of the cards partner likely has based on his bidding and play, etc.
• Sequence, a Type 2 partnership game.  The game works fine with two people. With four separate players, the board would be far too cluttered to make any progress. In two partnerships, the game is basically the same as two-handed; you don’t know what half your cards are, but that information wouldn’t really help anyway.
• Pinochle, a Type 1 partnership game. Although the bidding isn’t as intricate as Bridge, having the cards separated is very important. First, it keeps you from knowing exactly what melds are available to your team. Second, during the play, you have to try to picture what your partner has or might have and adjust your own play accordingly to make the best use of partner’s cards.
• Epic Duels, a Type 2 partnership game. Reader Alatar reminded me about this game recently, and I should probably devote a full article to it at some point; because as a Star Wars licensed game, it’s way more fun than it has any right to be. For the purposes of this discussion: The game is reasonably light, and you’re able to table-talk enough with your partners that being separate people really doesn’t harm your ability to coordinate strategy at all. But the ability to trash-talk people, play in a social environment, and share the inevitable stories (Jango Fett killed three Jedi!) with more people makes the game much better with four people than two..

Related Patterns: There’s a pattern that might be called Cutthroat that turns a four-player game into a three-player game. The idea is that one player becomes the “declarer” (maybe by choosing a trump suit, getting to pick up extra cards, or whatever) and the other two players are temporarily united in a partnership against that player. Success is mixed; it works just fine for Pinochle but falls flat for Euchre.

OK, so “rest” is my excuse for “laziness.”

A couple of overdue links:

David Sirlin keeps a really neat blog about video game design. The articles, in particular, are well worth reading.

The folks at the Ziggurat of Doom have many fascinating things to say, and sometimes even games. They were kind enough to link here, so the least I can do is return the favor.

After several lighter articles, I’m back to something a little heavier, third and probably not last in an ongoing series.

Name: Trick-taking

Problem: All players have an equal number of cards with two attributes, suit (or some other category) and rank. (Ordinary playing cards are by far the most common example.) The play is to take place in turns, with high cards more able to influence the flow of the hand. Also, you would like to take advantage of a common mechanic that makes your game easier to learn.

Discussion: Somehow, one player is chosen to lead to the first trick. For subsequent tricks, the winner of each trick gets to (alternatively, is forced to) lead to the next trick. Other players must play a card of the same suit, if possible, but usually may play any card if this is not possible. This proceeds until all cards have been played.

The variance in quality of hands tends to be very high in trick-taking games, so many hands are usually played as part of a single game. This smoothes out scoring differences and gives the players the chance to play many different kinds of hands.

Examples: From this basic model of game flow, the diversity of games that can arise is astounding. First, just look at the ways the first player can be chosen:

• Position relative to the dealer (Euchre, Oh Hell)
• Holder of a specific card (Hearts—and the holder has to play that card)
• Winner of the auction (Pinochle)
• Opponent of the auction winner (Bridge)

Even more remarkable is the wide variety of objectives:

• Take as many tricks as possible. (Euchre, Bridge)
• Take as many of a set of specific cards as possible. Pinochle follows this model, as do games like Skat and Schafkopf. (It seems to be common to German games.)
• Take exactly the number of tricks bid. (Oh Hell, and Spades, to a lesser extent.) Shooting for a higher number of tricks may or may not be scored higher.
• Avoid taking tricks, or avoid taking certain cards. (Hearts)

Within the “winner leads the next trick” model, a large variety of options is also available in the flow of play. Following suit is almost always required, but some games have a trump suit that automatically wins the trick if it can be played because that player is void in the suit led. Pinochle adds the restriction that a player must play above the card led or must trump if following suit is impossible. The commercial game Wizard adds to an ordinary 52-card deck special cards which are exempt from suit-following rules and can be played at any time.

Today, straight after work, I spent 4.5 hours after work in a soundproofed room with a white noise generator blaring at 70 dB, judging the quality of the amplifiers on firefighters’ masks by trying to distinguish between soundalike words. It’s for science! Well, technology anyway.

What this means for you is that I don’t have anything even remotely resembling the intellectual capability for, say, a Design Patterns article. What you do get is the meanderings of my brain in between words.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a game with the following theme and parameters:

One player controls a hero of legend, either real, mythical, or fantastic. He or she is pitted against a huge army of foes (monsters, thugs, or whatever) that are controlled by the other player or players. The hero is expected to fall in the end! The hero’s score is determined by either the amount of time he lasts, or the number of foes he takes down with him. On the other hand, it should be possible for the hero to squeak through—a memorable experience when it does. So the balancing should be tight—or at least it should be able to be balanced tightly.

If you are playing in a two-player game, switch roles after the first game and see who does better. To expand to more than two players, I would like to see the forces of evil allied, but competitive. Each one is trying to do more damage or in some other way outdo the others. If all of the evil forces worked together, they would be easily able to overcome the hero—but the temptation to backstab just a little to get a bunch more points should be so very strong…

I would tend to implement the hero’s and enemies’ resources in terms of cards that are drawn and played on a turn-by-turn basis, but that’s just because I find cards an easy medium to work with, and there’s no particular necessity for it. A dice mechanic might also be very useful, and certainly a series of well-timed rolls would be necessary for the rare hero victory.

I’ve played two collectible card games in my day: Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) and Magic. I enjoyed them both at the time, although I don’t play either one actively any more; and predictably, I’ve toyed with the idea of developing one.

The CCG market has some issues that ordinary board games don’t. The games are much more potentially lucrative (hundreds or thousands of dollars per player, as opposed to $20 or $40). But you need a critical mass of players to get anyone interested, and the extreme expense means that people typically play only one CCG, whereas a board gamer might own dozens of board games. They’re also more difficult to share with non-players. As a result, the CCG market is a very tight one, and I have much less hope of having a CCG of my design see production some day than an ordinary board game.

Pretty much every CCG has the concept of rarity: some cards are easier to come across than others. The standard system is something like 10 common cards, 4 uncommons, and 1 rare in a pack of 15. (There are about the same number of cards of each rarity.) Back at the dawn of Magic, when it was the only CCG out there, they thought it would be OK to use rarity to balance cards: if a card were hard to get, it would be fine if it were more powerful, because a player would only have access to one or two. Right? It was a happy revelation for the industry that people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars to get those powerful cards.

Modern CCG designers have to strike a balance. On the one hand, they want to make to get people excited about opening booster packs with the possibility of good cards; and they want people to buy lots of packs, in the search for the good cards. On the other hand, they don’t want to be seen as trying to squeeze money from the players, and they don’t want their game to be thought of as one that you have to blow a lot of money for to do well. If you can build a decent deck with no rares or only a couple, that can draw players who would otherwise be anxious about a large investment.

(L5R tried a flat rarity system at one point. Nobody bought it; I got unsold boosters from a flat-rarity expansion as a random promotion years later. My theory is that there was nothing to look forward to opening the packs.)

In my ideal world, here’s how I’d like rarity to work:

• Common cards are staples and utility cards. Every deck needs some, but they have no particular synergy with anything. You’ll want to have a box of them lying around, though, because when you want to build a new deck you’ll need to include a bunch of them no matter what.
• Uncommon cards add the distinctiveness to a deck. They have flavorful mechanics that you make work together in a useful way to build a good deck. Ideally, I would like be able to look at the list of only the uncommons in a deck and get a good idea of the way that deck is supposed to work.
• Rare cards are those that work only with very specific strategies or that you only need one of in a deck. The danger (depending on your point of view) is that if the rare cards contribute to a very powerful specific strategy, they suddenly become very in-demand. My favorite rare cards are L5R’s Uniques, which you can only have one of in a deck. They get played, so you see them in many decks, but because there’s only one per deck, you don’t necessarily see them every game. Therefore, like in the old days of Magic, it’s still neat when they hit the table.

Inspired by the popularity of design patterns in computer science, a couple of authors recently wrote a book entitled “AntiPatterns.” The antithesis of a design pattern, an AntiPattern is a commonly made mistake, an easy trap to fall into that might seem like a good idea at the time but turns out to have negative consequences.

It’s a good idea that didn’t turn out to have the massive impact of design patterns. But I’ve certainly seen games that make the same mistakes that have been made many times before, so here you go.

Name: Elimination, or Last One Alive Wins

Problem: You have three or more players. Every player has the opportunity to attack any other player in some way.

AntiPattern Resolution: After undergoing a certain amount of abuse, players are eliminated. The last person remaining at the end wins.

Issues: There are several. First and foremost, players who are eliminated have nothing left to do. In an online computer game, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—these players can just start the next game. Civilization 4 and Warcraft 3, for instance, have online free-for-all matches that don’t suffer from this problem. In a board game, though, the players have to look around for something else to do. Not so bad in a big party, but if you just want to gather the players to play a particular game, it makes it tough.

Second, usually, attacking taxes your resources. This creates an incentive to stall and hope someone else attacks and does your work for you—which causes the game to stall.

Examples:

• In Lunch Money, you have a hand full of attacks that you can unload on whoever you want. The game has theme but little in the way of strategy. You lose when you can no longer convince people to stop hitting you, and they decide to just finish you off. If you’re lucky, everyone else will be finished soon as well and you can get on to something else.

• In the board game Titan, you form legions of creatures that roam around an battle other players’ legions. The goal is to eliminate all other Titans, which are unique and fairly powerful creatures. The designers had some good ideas for of ways to mitigate the second problem. As you win battles, your Titan games experience, which makes it increasingly difficult to assassinate and eventually a powerful fighter in its own right. Also, winning fights earns you Angels, powerful creatures that can be summoned into other fights; bolstering your ranks with Angels helps make up for losing your other creatures in hard-fought battles. However, the first problem is pretty much insurmountable, in my opinion. The game is so massively complicated that it’s completely unsuitable for a party game; you’d have to gather a group of people specifically to play it. And if one player gets an unlucky break and gets killed off early, does that player just sit and watch TV for the next 3 hours?

• As I mentioned before, WarCraft 3 has a free-for-all mode. The first problem is mitigated because if you get eliminated, there’s no big deal; you can start another game right away. The second problem is mitigated in a fascinating way. You have “hero” units that can gain experience as you kill enemy units. With little experience, hero units are expensive and not particularly powerful; but with experience, they are overwhelmingly powerful. It’s important to fight a series of small engagements as the game goes on to build experience; but not so much that you are vulnerable to an overwhelming attack by someone else. If you do see someone in a weakened state and can finish them off, you are in a good position to take their resources for your own.

This is the second in a series. I want to talk about this one because I was thinking about a common “AntiPattern,” Elimination, and writing this would set the groundwork for talking about it. Coming Thursday!

Name: Victory Points, or just Points

Problem: You want to encourage strong or strategic play throughout the game while minimizing a “snowball effect” in which early winners cannot be defeated. Or, you want multiple paths to victory that can quite possibly be mixed and matched. You want all players to be able to play through the end of the game.

Discussion: The idea of using points to score a game is nothing particularly novel, of course. Most card games score using points of some kind. The principal difference between VPs, as I think of them in most board games, versus points in (say) Euchre,  Rummy, or a hundred other card games, is that in most card games, points are used only to keep track of cumulative score over a series of many otherwise-identical rounds; whereas in most board games VPs are accumulated over the course of a dynamic game.

Bridge is a sort of middle area because the scoring does affect the play of the game, in terms of vulnerability and willingness to bid a part score, and its strong influence over bidding conventions. If Bridge were regularly played to a certain number of hands or a certain score (instead of duplicate scoring, which is much more common) I’d be very inclined to describe its scoring as a VP system.

Victory may be decided either by the first player to a certain VP total or the player with the highest VP total when a certain landmark is reached. For instance, Settlers of Catan is won by the first player to 10 VP, while El Grande goes to the player with the most VP at the end of round 9.

Examples:

• In Settlers of Catan, VPs are tied quite closely to your progress in settlement and city development. It’s very difficult to win without building a decent-sized urban base. On the other hand, Longest Road and Largest Army provide VPs that don’t help much toward production, but are relatively cheap to pick up. Most games go to a player that manages to build a good base for resources and uses it to snag one of these.
• In Puerto Rico, you get lots of VP for shipping goods back to the Old World, which otherwise gives you no other benefit. Buildings also grant VP, but even if you optimize to buy the cheapest possible, they probably won’t be enough to beat a dedicated goods-shipping player. A mixed strategy which attempts to buy many useful buildings while shipping as many goods as is convenient is a very playable strategy (that I happen to play myself, when possible.)
• In Carcassone, you get VP as the game goes on for finishing the roads, cities, and cloisters that your “meeples” patrol. The longer they hang out on the board, the more points they have a chance to bring you, but if you run out, you may not be able to take advantage of excellent opportunities that present themselves. VP are also available at the end of the game from farmer meeples, which can be difficult to play and are a gamelong investment, but which can give you big points if you get your fields and farmers connected to enough cities (and can get more power than your opponents!).

My current hopes for a game to be picked up by a publisher rest mostly with one that’s about a year and a half old. I’ve rethemed it from its original, abstract theme (”Equinox”) to the one it was really meant to have anyway: the electoral system. It’s codenamed “Mock the Vote.”

I commissioned a cartoonist friend, Dave Blair, to come up with some sample art. It turned out great! Here’s one of the cards (a nod to the old RPG, Paranoia).

I only remember my dreams in two cases. First, if they’re terrible nightmares, and second, if I’m too hot. I wasn’t exactly feverish when I went to bed on Sunday—in fact, I was too cold, so I think I overdressed and overcovered for bed. I woke up a little less sick, and covered in sweat…

The point of all this is to share the game I was thinking about when I woke up. It’s a racing game… of sorts.

Title: Racing Fever, I guess.

Objective: OK, you watch it for the wrecks, but driving is all about the hot babes/dudes, right? Well, if I drove race cars, that’d be why, and you should too. To this end, you must acquire the most Fame.

Setup: You start with a small amount of money and a basic, unequipped car.

Core Mechanic: The game takes place in two phases. In the first phase, you bid or spend money on various kinds of upgrades. In the second phase, you race; winning races (or placing well) gives both Fame and money.

Phase 1: First, the next racetrack is revealed. (There might be a random selection of racetracks; or it might be assembled from different pieces.) This lets players choose the most advantageous upgrades for the next track.

Then, a series of potential upgrades are revealed, with varying costs. The costs are not directly linked to the power of the cards. Rather, they are assigned at random, and the player in last place gets the first pick. Players who are already doing well have to pay top dollar for whatever’s left, or just wait for the next turn.

Phase 2: The race itself. It takes place in sections of track. Some are benefited more by certain upgrades (straight track by engine upgrades, turns by tire upgrades, etc.) There may also be special one-shot upgrades that give you a greater benefit, but are used for only one race and used up. As the race goes on, players jockey for position—there’s some kind of die roll with a bonus based on the upgrades you have for that section. Being ahead in one leg gives you an advantage in the next, but only being ahead at the very end counts.

There’s another upgrade, Glamour, that provides no direct benefit in the race, but does give bonus Fame and money whether or not you win the race.

Duration: Probably a certain number of races, rather than a given Fame threshold.

I plan to finish prototyping Invasion first and I also have some plans this summer for some of my existing card games, but we’ll see if I can also get Racing Frenzy put together.