Art by Jose Pablo Iglesias of Unsplash
So.
When looking at designing a game, what can cards do to improve your game? What can they do to convolute it?
Cards are one of the most versatile game elements that a designer can employ in a game. They can act as a random number generator, represent action options and their limits to players, allow for hidden information, act as numerical trackers or even represent the players themselves.
This versatility comes from the fact that cards tend to carry just enough realestate to contain all manner of text and numbers, and are often used in sets to allow for maximum variety.
Consider Magic The Gathering. In this game cards represent actions players can take, resources players can use, allow for hidden information (from the hand) and funky abilities based on the different zones of play that they can enter and exit (the hand, the field, discard pile, removed from game, etc.) as well as the resources the player currently has on hand.
Every card in this game has its own effects, detailed in a text box on the face of the card. Depending on what is written there players can do all sorts of things, such as playing the card to the field as a summoned monster, casting spells to deal damage to the player or their monsters, sacrificing monsters on the field or spending life points to cast/summon, the list goes on and on. Because the abilities are expressed as text, as long as the player can understand what's written on the card, they can do almost anything within the confines of the game's rules (and sometimes even outside of them)
The hazard here is the risk of too much individuality between cards. because of the amount of cards that are used in the game, it is rare that a player would be familiar with every ability that appears in the game, much less how the abilities interact with each other. This can make the game a little monolithic to new players who are encountering all of these abilities for the first time.
When the cards are implemented as a randomness generator, they add an amount of strategy to the concept, as players can count cards as they are discarded, drawn or used, allowing them to take educated guesses at what numbers are going to come up for them.
Cards are particularly excellent at granting randomly acquired one time use abilities, as there is a universally accepted paradigm of play where a player can take an ability card into their hand, play it, and then discard it. This paradigm of play has been used so much that generally speaking most players will only need things expained to them if the game deviates from this base play methodology.
Consider the game Bang! In this game, players are represented by a card with their character on it, with another card partially tucked underneath it that represents the amount of health they have. it also features a deck of items, that players can collect throughout the game. Because it is a deck of items, whenever players draw, they don't have any idea what their going to get until they've already added it to their hand. Most of the cards activate immediately when they are played directly from the hand. However, one card breaks this rule, instead being placed in front of the player that played it and getting passed around the table as the game moves forward. Depending on what suite of card was drawn during the turn the dynamite may blow up, dealing damage to the player it is in front of.
Because the rest of the cards follow the standard play methodology, the dynamite is allowed some breathing room within the accepted rules of the game, as the player's attention economy isn't taxed by constantly needing to explain how every single card in the game works.
As mentioned before, cards are also very good at presenting hidden information, as they have a front and back face. By playing a card face down or holding cards in your hand such that players can only see the backs of the cards, information is easily and naturally hidden. Moreover, doing this allows for players to set up traps and reactive scenarios, that they can trigger if they remembered they placed them.
Even the position and facing of the cards can be used to create engageable actions and rules. Consider the card game UVS (Universus aka The Universal Fighting System). In this game players can use cards as resources in a myriad of ways. They can do the tried and true method pioneered in Magic The Gathering, where players turn their card sideways in order to pay a cost or cause an effect. They can flip the card such that the back is showing. They can destroy a card, thus sending it to the discard pile. They can even tuck other cards underneath each other, storing them for later use, either as a resource or as a playable action. This grants the designers of the game a ton of freedom when it comes to the designs they implement for playable abilities.
Even with everything I have mentioned here, we've barely scratched the surface of what cards can do. If designers get really creative they can do things like representing rooms in randomly generated dungeons, stacking cards in creative arrays to create unique shapes and pathways, or placing cards on their sides in standies that allow everyone other than the player that owns the card to know what is going on. The possibilities are almost endless for the creative designer.
So what do you think dear reader? Do you like cards as a play element in your games? What's your favorite creative implementation of cards in a game? When was a time that the implementation of cards in a game annoyed you? Comment below, inquiring minds want to know!
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