ONE 18-card game design jam, THREE microgames!

18-card game jam

In the KBGames Community discord they just did an 18 card game design jam -- which is an exercise to think about designing a game under certain constraints - much like we used to do with the Game Design Showdown at BGDF.com back in the day. The only restraint on this jam was to use 18 cards and nothing else, but it was made clear that this restriction was more like a guideline, and not a hard and fast rule...

Worker Placement Microgame

I've posted recently about the progress I've made on a Micro Worker Placement game, inspired by an offhand comment I read on Twitter. I haven't really played that game again since that last update (I'm still keen to see how it plays after whittling it down to 16 cards in the deck), but I know that the game works, and isn't terrible, but I'm not sure whether I can claim it's really very fun, though I enjoy it.

I figured I might submit that Micro Worker Placement game to the jam... is that cheating? I came up with it before the jam started, but I didn't spend any more time on it than would have been allotted. The current version only uses 17 "real" cards, but it does use 8 more to track things, so it really comes in at 25 cards, which is over the limit by almost 40%. Maybe that's fine, but the point of the jam is to come up with a new idea. I wasn't particularly interested in making another 18 card game, but lo and behold, an idea came to me...

PYL Microgame

Inspired perhaps by all the Living Forest I'd been playing on BGA (that's a good game, by the way, and recently won the Kennespiel des Jahres!), I thought maybe I could make an 18 card Push Your Luck game with that blackjack mechanism like in Living Forest or Flip City.

So I did that. Of the 18 cards, 2 are for tracking your gems and points (you need 8 tokens, 4 per player, to track those things on these cards), 1 is a double sided "objective" card, and the remaining 15 make up the deck. There are 5 cards each of red, blue, and gold colored cards, and each card has a gem, and some number of letters on it. Originally each card's gem matched the card color, but then I decided to mix it up a bit, so for example, 3 of the 5 red cards have red gems, but 1 has a blue gem and one has a gold gem.

On your turn, you start flipping cards off the deck until you chose to stop, or until you "bust" by getting 6 or more of the same letter (A, B, or C). You are allowed to pay a gold gem to veto a card as its drawn (set it aside by the deck), then either stop drawing or draw again (up to you). This could be used to keep from busting, or to keep a particular color from scoring (see below).

After you stop, you collect gems: all gems of 1 color if you busted, two colors if you didn't. Then you get the opportunity to use the objective card to pay some gems for a star (stars are victory points in the game, it's a race to get 9 of them): 2 red + 1 gold on one side, 2 blue + 1 gold on the other, after using the card, you flip it over. Finally, you discard the cards and check to see if any colors score. 

The discard pile is kept organized - sorted by card color, and splayed so you can see the information on each card. This information allows you to make informed push-your-luck decisions. After each turn, if there are 4 (or all 5) cards of a color in the discard pile, then that color will score. It's possible more than one color will score at a time!

When you score a color, the player with the most gems of that color gets a star, and loses some gems of that color. The colors have a rock-paper-scissors relationship for breaking ties - for example, if tied for red gems, then the player with the most blue gems wins the point for red. Originally the rule was that you lose one gem when scoring a color, but once you started to get a big lead in a color, it felt pretty easy to keep it, and losing just 1 gem didn't close the gap very much. I'm torn between upping that to 2 gems lost, and something even more impactful, like 1/2 your gems (round up), or even all your gems. For my next test I'll try losing 2 gems and see if that feels like enough. Maybe losing 1 gem is fine after all.

I have to say, this game has just worked ever since the first playtest. The only tweak I made was to up the bust threshold to 6. I started with 5, but that led to a lot of turns where you only draw 2-3 cards and they weren't very interesting. 6 is much more dynamic!

Not only does this game work - that is to say it's a fully functional game - but I think it might actually be pretty good. As I've played more and more games I've found there's definitely some subtlety to it - when to stop not just to avoid busting, but to control which colors score, when to hit into a probable bust, when to spend gems to veto a card, and even when and whether to use the objective card.

I figured this might be a better candidate to submit to the 18 card jam, partly because I came up with it in the week between when the jam was announced and when it actually began (so that's closer, right?), and partly because it's 18 cards instead of 25... however it does require 8 tokens to track gems and stars. Still, that's less cheat-y, isn't it?

Lane Combat Microgame - Rift Paper Scissors

Another game I've been playing a lot of (and enjoying!) on BoardGameArena lately is Riftforce. To be honest, I've never been a big fan of lane combat games, I haven't even played very many of them. I liked SolForge I guess, but I don't recall playing any others I really enjoyed much.

But Riftforce is very cool. You start by drafting a team of 4 guilds, and they encourage different teams by (a) removing 1 team from the draft each game, and (b) dealing you a random guild to start off with - so you can't be sure to get your favorite team. Though truth be told, a lot of the combinations don't feel terribly different from each other, and in any given game I feel like I effectively ignore one of the guilds in my deck, so I'm not sure the games feel all that different to me. I look forward to playing with the expansion some day, which adds a bunch more guilds... and I even had a little fun thinking up custom guilds, something this game lends itself to easily for anyone so inclined. Maybe I'll make a new blog post to share those. But I digress...

Since I was thinking of 18 card games for this game jam, my mind ran through a few main mechanisms to see if anything jumped out at me as a way to do them in a small deck game. So of course, my mind quickly jumped to the idea of a small deck lane combat game, like a mini-version of Riftforce. Since I didn't have the componentry to track damage on all the cards like in Riftforce, I thought maybe I could use a Rock Paper Scissors relationship to resolve little combats.

A long time ago, after Brainfreeze became an iPad app, I had some thoughts about a follow up game - specifically for digital implementation - in which you would have cavalry, archers, and footmen cards in a deck, and you would place them in different lanes (probably 3), or else send them to train, which would occupy the card for a few seconds, then level it up. Every so often (maybe every second for example), the computer would "resolve" each lane, comparing the bottommost cards and removing the loser - where a level 2 card would beat a level 1 card, but if both cards are the same level, then there'd be a rock-paper-scissors relationship to determine who wins (in the case of a tie, like two level 1 archers against each other, maybe they're both removed). If you had cards on a lane when it resolved and the opponent did not, then you would get a point. Come to think of it, that decade old idea had some similarities with Riftforce!

So in my lane combat microgame (affectionately known as Rift Paper Scissors, due to the RPS combat resolution and the Riftforce inspiration), I figured there could be 3 battlefields, and you would have a small hand of cards that are either Rock, Paper, or Scissors. On your turn you would play 2 cards of the same type (rock, rock), play any 1 card and activate it, or discard a card to activate 2 cards of that type on the board. Activating a card meant attacking an opponent's card in the same lane. A 4th option you had on your turn was to resolve 1 lane and refill your hand. When resolving a lane, which was represented by a face don card from the deck, the player with the most cards in it would score it, which would give you some kind of effect, as well as some stars (vp). When there were no longer enough cards to refill the lanes, the game would be over, and the player with the most stars would win.

This first draft of the game did not work at all - it was far to common that you simply had the right card to dominate any card your opponent played ("you played Scissors there? I'll play Rock there and activate it"). And the effects I chose for winning a lane didn't even make sense - I had put "draw a card," but by definition you'd be filling your hand when you score it, so that wasn't great.

I made a 2nd attempt, expanding the cards to a sort of 6-way RPS... I gave each card a letter (A-F), and each letter had 1 letter it was really good against (deal 2 damage), one letter it was terrible against (deal 0 damage), and 4 letters it was evenly matched with (deal 1 damage). The 1st damage on a card would turn it sideways, the 2nd damage would remove it from the game. 

When I made the prototype for this, I started from the file that had red borders for rock, blue for paper, and yellow for scissors, so I ended up with 3 copies of each card, one with each colored border. I figured maybe the way to go was again, like Riftforce, to say you could play or activate 2 cards of the same letter, or the same color, or play 1 card and activate it. In general, this felt a little better with respect to game flow - the cards started to build up in play, but there was still something very wrong with the format..

In discussing this with a friend, Mohan suggested drawing 3 cards and simultaneously playing all 3 of them, 1 to each lane. That sounds potentially promising, so I might try something like that next. Perhaps after 3 rounds of placing the cards in their respective lanes, each lane could resolve by comparing the front-most cards head-to-head over and over (like my old iPad game idea), until only 1 side has cards remaining, and that side wins the lane.

With only 18 cards, at that point I think you'd have to shuffle everything up and begin again, maybe keep doing that until someone has won X lanes? Most of these ideas would work better with a larger deck, but with a larger deck, I might as well just play Riftforce!

ANYWAY... back to the game jam

The lane combat idea seemed like the best candidate to submit to the game jam, since I thought of it during the actual timeframe of the jam, and because it conforms to the actual rules of the jam (18 cards, nothing else), BUT I haven't been able to get it working, so I went ahead and submitted the Push-Your-Luck game instead.

So that's what I've been thinking about the last few weeks!