This project – to create a print-and-play game with 18 cards – already seemed more daunting than the previous one. My key worry is the openness of the brief when compared to the previous: videoconference software provided some extremely rigid limitations, which made ‘following the fun’ of a design quite easy. This card game, on the other hand, could have… any number of mechanics! The sky’s the limit!
So, rather than starting with a narrative hook or strong initial mechanic (as I had done with my early pitches for the videoconference game) I started the week by looking at the things I would 100% have – cards – and what a player could 100% do with them. I bought a pack of erasable cards from the internet, and spent an evening throwing them into different shapes and layouts, because the cards would of course 100% exist in real space.
My hope was that these shapes might suggest some obvious mechanics or aesthetics. From above, you can see I experimented with stacking, arranging (with no borders touching and with borders touching), dividing into hands and shared cards, laying out in rows, and neatly ordering.
The parallel rows reminded me of lines of toy soldiers, and the ‘combat width’ mechanics of Paradox Interactive’s Europa Universalis series, in which army composition can encourage manoeuvres such as advances, volley fire, flanks, cavalry charges and artillery bombardment.
Arranging cards geometrically with borders touching reminded me of many landscape/dungeon generation games I had seen. I wondered whether something more organic might come out of this mechanic, though – a monster building game, with each card representing a different horrible body part? Build-your-own-Godzilla or -Cthulhu?
Placing the cards at different angles all over the table, however, instantly gave me an idea for an easy-to-understand game of strategy – players place their cards face down, anywhere on a table, and when they flip them up – depending on their direction – they can eliminate other players’ cards.
Trying it out myself was quite difficult, as I had to keep both players’ strategic knowledge in my head, but the result was fast-paced and quite fun. The rules need to be finessed, but I will present this as one of my prototypes on Monday.
Slides:
After jamming out some draft mechanics for games that could use cards as ammunition, resources or currency, I chose three of my favourites and knocked a few slides together for my presentation on Monday (using my drawing tablet for the first time). I’m still a good while away from defining specific rules, but I think the pitches for each of the games should be clear enough, and I’m happy that I’ve found a balance between performance games, strategy games and party games.
The first is the parallel lines, army composition card game I came up with during my layout experiments. I’m calling it Gettysburg!, mostly for flavour’s sake, but if other layouts are made possible within the ruleset it could be called Waterloo! or similar.
The second is a development of the dogfighting game I prototyped – thinking about the likely stock of the cards (printer paper), I wondered if flipping cards over and over again would feel a bit flimsy? Paper bends easily, and doesn’t lay flat on surfaces very well when cut to playing card size… From here, it was a simple thought-step to get to paper aeroplanes – cards could be designed into different paper aeroplanes, and actually thrown onto the playing space. The angle they landed would determine their interaction with the other planes in the space. Simple!
And finally, a team-based party game in which the cards are all burger ingredients – buns, lettuce, splodges of mayonnaise and ketchup – and the objective is to stack household objects in between these cards in order to make the tallest burger. I think it needs some more thrashing out, but the idea feels exciting, and I can imagine playing it with friends. Again, though, the worry of card material – this mechanic of stacking would feel better with thick card or plastic, a la Beasts of Balance or similar.
I’m looking forward to learning how to digitally prototype some of these rules – this would seem to be the chief hurdle in designing remotely at the moment.