Adventurers! Update

Quite a while ago, I wrote a post about a co-operative card game that me and an avid game enthusiast Mikael Fehlberg were developing. It's come quite a long way since that post, and is just reaching the physical prototype phase. The theme--we've decided--is going to be steam punk, and while the name of the game is still up for debate, the blog is currently at http://gearsandsteam.blogspot.com.

Gears and Steam is a Co-operative card game, spawned primarily out of Mik's and my shared desire to play games with the non-game-playing people we love. Co-operation is a much easier way to accomplish a fun, shared experience than a competitive game, and Mik and I are developing a game that is not only accessible to people who aren't hard-core into tabletop gaming, but also making it interesting for people who are.

Our game focuses on deck building, with simplified options that allow you to progress your ready-made, streamlined deck in one of three directions, depending on what your team of heroes needs. As the players, you fight your way through various scenarios, each of which call upon smaller, re-usable villain decks which occasionally compound with each other to make each scenario difficult in different ways. These scenarios can be played in a sequential order of difficulty, and the choices that each hero made in the previous scenarios will carry over from game to game, giving each player different starting abilities and benefits.

For those of you too busy to click links, I'll probably end up double-posting many of those posts to my blog here, and I'll start right now:

Changing gears from conceptual design to a physical prototype brings challenges that you might not initially think about. With a card game specifically, you're essentially creating the entire game before you can playtest anything. That means that you're going to have to spend a lot of time writing things out on cardstock, or spend time on a formatting program to work on printing out the cards.

Today, Mik and I spent more time than we anticipated just trying to get the physical prototype in order. Having done all the work and everything laid out in spreadsheets made this process easier, but didn't remove all the gruntwork that stood between us and our first playthrough.

Not surprisingly, we're both anxious to start. We're at the point in design where nearly every conversation ends with something along the lines of "well, we won't be able to tell which is better until we play test it", and being at that point is really exciting. So far, we have decks completed for vanilla ADC, Support, and Tank characters, even with roughly cohesive deck themes (Raymund the Electronaut, Temper the Boilerman, and the Gentleman, respectively). With the last few minutes of development today, we printed out a slightly unfinished version of the campaign one/game one villain deck, the Spiderlings.

Recently, we've also been surprised at how much effort creating a unified and cohesive villain has been. Making heroes was relatively easy because its everything that we've wanted in a co-operative deck building game. The villain, however, has proved particularly challenging because it's essentially the entire game. We can't make the villain too easy or the game won't be fun, but if we make it too hard the game won't be winnable, which is even less fun. On top of that balance, we have to give the players interesting choices to reward them for optimizing their hero's abilities, but not restrict them to such a narrow set of plays that they have no choice in what to play. It's quite the line we have to walk.

For now, we're just anxious to start playtesting. We both expect a large amount of rule-changes after playing, and we're hoping that those rule changes won't have to include axing some of our favorite aspects of the game.