Card game line design

Riot Games Team. Digital card games. Niniwanted Jenny Lelong. Paintball Challenge App. Vegetables Game App. Fireart Studio Team. Card game design. Dmitry Moiseenko Pro. Elemental Game. RonDesignLab Team. Lucky Orange Pro. Pokemon TCG App. Nicholaus Gilang Pro. Mountain Clan for a boardgame. Koen de Graaf. Umtopfen - Card game. Aylin Mirza. Poker Game. Istiak Ahmed Pro. Since winning is the ultimate goal of the game, making a fair "you win" card will require objectives that are very difficult to achieve, because it essentially circumvents playing the game otherwise.

You Win cards shouldn't be the main objective to winning your CCG. They shouldn't even be a secondary win condition. They should be rare exceptions to the rules of your game that are warranted on a case by case basis. During the course of the game, it is more dramatic if powerful cards get played.

But if you can play some powerful cards, why not have every card in your deck be as powerful? In order to provide exciting gameplay, your CCG must use resource management as part of its mechanics. The most straight forward way to do this is with different costs of cards.

Powerful spells should cost more than weak spells. How this is achieved is with resources. Magic: the Gathering uses lands as a resource. Each of your turns you get to play one land from your hand, if you have one to play, and as turns go on, you can play more powerful cards. One problem with this method is that due to the randomness of your deck, occassionally you will not draw the right kind of card land in this case in order to play the cards you do have.

In Magic, this is refered to as "mana screw" or "land screw". WoW allows you to play any card in your hand face down as a resource. Some cards, "quests", when played as resources, will give you an extra effect.

This eliminates the mana screw that will occassionally frustrate a magic player. However, some people think that the Magic way encourages careful deck construction as a means of avoiding mana screw. Another resource strategy is having stronger cards enter play in a crippled state. Warlords, for example, has very strong units come into play in the back row, and they need to gradually be moved up to the front lines to be effective.

Another resource strategy is having the more powerful cards require certain game states in order to enter play. For example, you need to have a certain life total, number of other units, or some other game element that is hard to obtain. Alternatively, you could employ a simpler one-at-a-time strategy where you can play any card, but only one card each turn. This approach doesn't really mitigate the power level gap between cards, so it will greatly restrict what you can do while still keeping the game balanced.

Capturing resources is another strategy. Suppose that you gain a certain amount of resource points from each location card in play that you captured. As the game goes on, and you steal more locations away from your opponent, you will have a great lead over them.

This is a bad approach because the winner gets an unfair advantage as the game progresses, and the conclusion of the game is inevitable. A fun game is where each player has a chance to win at all times and if you undermine the underdog, the game is less exciting for both players. This same principle is why in many racing games, the people who aren't in first place actually get often hidden speed buffs in order to give them a fighting chance.

A long running card game will die quickly from power creep. Power creep is where the cards in a new set largely make obsolete the cards in a previous set. As sets go on, the effect gets worse and worse. Greedy and shortsighted CCG designers may want to make a new set interesting to new players by attempting to up the power level, but this is perhaps the worst thing you can do to your CCG's longevity as a whole.

Its bad for a number of reasons. For long time players of the game who have amassed a large collection, its a big "screw you, your hard-earned collection is worthless".

It can greatly affect the speed of a game. It can make different deck archetypes obsolete. It can undermine the basic workings of your CCG. It's an awful idea. Stagnation is bad for a CCG, but increasing power level is not the solution.

New design space needs to be invented which is of a similar power level as previous cards. And if you ever release an overpowered set, you need to do damage control ASAP to avoid power creep. This damage control could be in the form of banning certain cards, restricting certain cards, making errata, or making new cards to hose problem cards. It's better to have an under-powered set than an over-powered one.

An under-powered set will merely be a dud. An over-powered set will kill your CCG. Be careful not to try to do too much in your card game. Decipher's Star Wars is a card game which allows you to have space battles, land battles, site controlling, transportation between sites, light-saber battles and a number of other complicated things. On the positive side, once you know how to do everything, you really can feel like you are in the Star Wars universe.

On the negative side, the game is so complicated it is very hard to get into. Don't try to have your game do too much, or else people will be overwhelmed, especially new players.

And remember that everyone is a new player at some point. As the designer of a CCG, what ever you come up with will seem obvious to you. When you design a CCG, remember that you are creating it for other people and not for you.

Make it easy to learn and challenging to master. Try to keep the complexity on cards themselves down too. Consider the example to the left. That is a lot to read, a lot to forget, and a lot to keep track of. And you have to squint to read it. Really try to make a card's text as succint as possible and don't try to do too much in one card. The card on the right is flavorful, but not too cluttered.

It even has enough room for flavor text. There is no harm in having a card with no rules text. A simple unit card, which just has the essential stats inherent in the card's type, is perfectly fine.

A card with no special rules text is often called a "vanilla" card. Just because a card doesn't do something fancy doesn't mean that it isn't an important part of the game. New CCG designers often overlook this. You can get a lot of complex strategy from simple parts. Consider the volumes of chess strategy books while the complete rules of chess can be summed up in a paragraph. The dot to the left of the card title means you can only have one in play at a time. You can use a different symbol, or a symbol to indicate that you can only have one in your entire deck.

Just be consistent. The stats on the card are color coded, standing for Strength, Vitality, Mind, and Energy. Note that there is a little letter to help players especially new players remember what each stands for. You can also use a symbol, or have a big symbol and put the number over the symbol. You might also want a symbol to designate which expansion it comes from, or its rarity. You may also want to print the card's collector number. Fonts Resist the urge to use funky and cool fonts.

They may look cool, but in the long run they are just not worth it. If you ever need to use a lot of text and decrease the font size, weird fonts can be very hard to read. And you don't want to be using one font on one card and another font on a different card.

Things would quickly start looking mismatched. Look at the card to the right: Trevor, the Zappy. That is a cool font, but altogether a bad choice for a CCG card. Magic: The Gathering has been around for over 10 years now. It was the first CCG, and they got a lot right, but they also made a few misteps. Eigth edition and the new card design of magic cards since eigth edition try to correct some of these problems. The new cards have a larger picture and a less funky font. But some things were just too late to do anything about.

For example, what the heck is "the gathering" anyway? When you design a card back, make sure you are really happy with it, because there is no going back. With LackeyCCG, it doesn't so much matter because you can easily update the card back image, but if you are going to print your cards, you want your new card backs to match the initial one so the cards can be mixed and modular. When CCG designers make cards, they often design them as large versions.

This tends to make designers make the fonts the wrong size relative to a printed card. I suggest you design a template, and then temporarily shrink it down to a width of pixels. If the font is too small to read at that size, you should rethink your font size. It is very handy to have different types of cards look different, but standardized in a way too. You can have a different template theme for each color, or affiliation, or culture, or race, or however your card game is divided.

Each of those groups will probably have the same card types, like event, action, item, enchantment, or some other card type within a faction. The cards to the left and right are clearly from the same faction in this case purple. And clearly one is a character, like the blue character cards above. The one to the left is clearly not a character. Uniformity of design allows people to clearly see what is and is not the same on cards. Keywords A keyword is a word or short phrase that acts as a short cut for a lot of rules.

There are active and passive keywords. Active keywords have an immediate effect on the game, like the ones I just mentioned. A passive keyword has no direct effect on the game, but other cards reference them. In magic, creature types are passive keywords. Card types are implicit keywords because they are there anyway and can always be referenced. Your game might have a passive keyword " Heroic ", or " Marksman ", or " Hacker " or what ever. Another card may reference a passive keyword like "This card does X damage where X is the number of Hacker's you control.

And whenever possible, try to include reminder text to explain active keywords. Reminder text is explanation text as to what active keywords mean, often in parentheses and in italics.

Reminder text is a great way to teach new rules and abilities to new players or to refresh the memory of old players. You may wonder "What's the purpose of making an active keyword if I use reminder text anyway? First, sometimes there just isn't room to write down all the reminder text on the card.

Also, by giving an ability a uniform name, gameplay is easier. For example, with Magic, rather than say "My creature can deals damage during the first strike damage step" you can say "my creature has first strike".

Try to make gameplay as smooth as possible. Gameplay mechanics should allow cool things to happen, not get in the way of it.

Try to minimize the number of keywords in your CCG, or at least active keywords. Warlords has so many keywords that it is difficult to remember them all, especially for new players. Put reminder text as often as you can to help new players. Flavor Text Flavor text is words or phrases on cards to help convey the story of the card. Flavor text makes players more immersed in the game by making the fanatasy world more rich.

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