Week 09 - Shuffle and Repeat

Card games, deceptively simple and deviously complex. The amount of thought put into making an interesting card game goes without saying, but there are several processes that are shared between creators. Richard Garfield’s approach, for example, is the one we’ll compare to our own.

“Establishing the right setting for Magic proved to be a central design challenge” (Garfield, pg. 549). Theme was extremely important for this game. We had to base this around a theme, and all of our mechanics and narrative had to go back to it. In our first version, we used the world of Avatar the Last Airbender, but we didn’t apply many of the show’s core principles into our design. We only had elements to show for it. Garfield had problems designing a cohesive and logical fantasy world, and we had a problem grounding Avatar into our setting. This eventually came with having players master al four elements by having only one of each suit in their hand.

“Homogeneity of card power is the only way to combat the ‘rich kid syndrome’” (Garfield, pg. 541) is one of my favorite quotes from this reading. Though Magic: The Gathering had different values than Avatartok, keeping power balance was extremely important. We wanted each card to have a purpose and feel just as important as another. Even the rarest cards couldn’t function if our base cards weren’t balanced against each other through the element system because then no one would use the base number cards to their advantage. No thought would be put behind using a number card other than to discard. In the same way, this principle also applies to Altice’s views on uniformity. Uniformity in appearance and in value made a more successful game.

“Each playtest set saw the expulsion of certain cards” (Garfield, pg. 543). The same certainly happened for us. This was the most extensively play tested game I made for the class at this point, and it quickly showed the flaws of trying to run with the first idea thinking it was perfect. Between class playtesting and playtesting within out group, we changed the system of how cards can be stacked on top of one another and redacted certain face card abilities. Our winning condition changed, so our cards needed to adapt.

“One thing I knew I wanted to see in the game was a player using multicolor decks” (Garfield, pg. 544) might seem a bit of a stretch to compare, but I have a reason to include this quote. Garfield explains that he created some spell cards to punish certain strategies and players with only one card type. It reminds me of Altice’s idea of a card’s ordinal property. “[Cards] can be grouped into sets, counted, sorted, ranked, indexed, and ordered” (Altice, pg. 42). For Avatartok, we applied this to the system of elements and the condition to win. Each number card can be sorted into a certain suit, an element, and one of each element is needed to win. You must have a multi-element deck, and cards like the Queen who can purge entire elements from your hand, can be a big punishment to anyone who has too many of one element. Much like Garfield, we also wanted our players to constantly change and diversify their hands for the best results.