Week 08 - Plants Vs. Zombies

The familiarity of a 52-card deck has opened the door for so many forms of play. There are plenty of other card games that exist out of that standardization, though, and today I’ll touch on two of them—Zombie Fluxx and Village Green—with the help of Altice's platform characteristics of card game design.

Zombie Fluxx is a spin on the original Fluxx where the rules and goals are constantly changing. It’s most unique quality, of course, is the content set on each card’s surface. “The card’s planar surface also excels as a support for text, color, pattern, icons, and many other forms of art and design” (Altice pg. 38). Many of the cards printed with images of zombies and survival gear, supplemented with both a description of its purpose and flavor text unique to this post-apocalypse world. The back of each cards are uniformly black with the title printed in white.

“Touching implies proximity and proximity demands a shared space” (Altice pg. 50). Zombie Fluxx relies heavily on the structure of the play space. Cards are constantly moved in and out of play, and multiple cards can be drawn and played at once. The active cards and the discard pile are both constantly used. Some cards require direct player interaction like taking cards from everyone’s hands or giving away cards that the player chose.

“Card arrangements can describe metaphorical, narrative, representational, geographic, and other hybrid spaces” (Altice pg. 47). Working off of the heavy player interaction, the assortment of cards in play is essential to understanding goals. The position of the draw/play cards are always on top of the basic rules card, but the position of everything else is up to the players. All cards are used, and discarded cards can come back into play or be reshuffled, and the amount of cards a player holds can fluctuate.

“Since cards are planar and uniform, they can be grouped into sets, counted, sorted, ranked, indexed, and ordered” (Altice pg. 42). The game is comprised of six card types. There are the basic rules, action cards, goal cards, and rule cards that determine the conditions of play, ever changing as they are stacked over one another and interchanged. The other two types are collectible cards known as Keepers or Creepers that can both help and hurt players in completing the current goal.

Compared to Zombie Fluxx, Village Green is a much lighter story set around winning points for having great gardens. Most of the cards have uniform floral patterning on the back but are separated into three colors, green for gardens, purple for awards, and blue for the start card. The other type of cards are village cards which serve as property. The number of cards used is even determined by the number of players in the game. Each award card has instructions and flower icons that correspond to icons on green cards. Green cards and village cards also have depictions of landscapes on them.

Each card has a particular place on an imagined grid in front of the players with award cards and the village card bordering the green cards. The arrangement of cards must also be regulated by the color and type of flower icons on the green cards. Flowers that do not have the same typing or color cannot be placed together. Players take turns buildings this grid with the option to replace and over cover previous cards so long as they stay within their card type’s boundaries. Though, each round only one card can be drawn from either the green or purple stack at a time.

The objective is to earn the most victory points from the award cards by lining up green cards on the grid. The instructions on the award card determine if a player gets positive or negative points, and the one with the most points at the end game scoring is considered the winner. Players rarely interact with each other except when drawing from shared piles, and no cards are re-used.