Heirs of Vent update: Where to Look

I've talked about the card game that I've been making on the side with Mik in previous posts, and its come a long way since I last posted. I just got done posting a design blog on the new official website, www.heirsofvent.com. I'll repost it here for convenience, but you should check out the site, too!

Here it is:

Designing a card game is challenging work.

The toughest part is that if you do it right, the design work looks like it was a piece of cake, because everything falls into place. Ideally, everything should feel natural and easy, and the gameplay should surface very quickly after learning the rules. If done right, everyone playing the game should walk away with a feeling of “that doesn’t seem too hard, I totally would have designed it the same way, too.”

I don’t want to aggrandize our efforts, but we have gone through quite an incredible journey to get to the point of “intuitive” rules, and even those aren’t perfect. The community of board game designers has my undying respect for innovative, creative games that are elegant and complex, and I am more and more impressed with current and previous board games the longer we work on Heirs of Vent. If they don’t have your respect, they should.

During development of Heirs of Vent, we delved deeply not only into our own set of rules and mechanics, but into other successful cooperative card games, as well. One of my personal favorites is Sentinels of the Multiverse, a game that influenced a lot of the decisions that we made early on. About the same time that we were looking at SotM for gameplay ideas, Shut Up & Sit Down did a very interesting review on the game:

http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/v/sentinels-multiverse/

For those who would rather read a wall of text than watch an entertaining, well-done video, let me summarize: while SotM does a lot for bringing interesting, cooperative experiences to newer players who enjoy simple rulesets, the variety of the game seems to take precedence over having a core mechanic and building variety off of that. Shut Up & Sit Down also noted that while the rules are commendably simple, the rules of the game are actually quite complex, and manifest in the near-infinite combinations of cards that may or may not be in play at any given time, some of which are quite complex.

At the time, this was something that Heirs of Vent was struggling with, too, but it was a problem that we couldn’t quite put our finger on until Shut Up & Sit Down pointed it out so well. Under scrutiny, a typical player’s game flow in SotM goes something like this:

1. Read every card on the board and resolve effects.
2. Play a card.
3. Read every card on the board and resolve effects.
4. Resolve effects of just played card.
5. Read every card on the board and resolve effects
6. Use a power.
7. Read every card on the board and resolve effects.
8. Draw a card
9. Read every card on the board and resolve effects.

It’s easy to see how a game like this could get tedious quite quickly, especially when many global effects occur. Frequently, the game becomes more about keeping track of all the different effects on the board at any time than it is about the cards you’re playing. Now, don’t get me wrong, SotM has done awesome things for the board gaming community, and we totally respect them. However, its much easier to solve a problem when you see somebody else falter at it first, and we knew that we could make a few changes that would help alleviate this problem.

In my past life, I was a graphic designer, so don’t get too distracted with how awesome my gameplay graphic is:

We wanted to make sure that players rarely-to-never had to look anywhere else except the next card in sequence to figure out how to resolve enemy card effects. Before your turn, you resolve, in order, the cards in both the staging area, and the cards in front of you. By the time you have reached any card, all the effects on that card will have already occurred (via other cards), and all you have to do is carry out the text on that card. We call this the “Where-to-Look” principle.
Let’s give an example of two different ways to go about it:

1. A card that reads “All enemies gain +1 damage“. With this card, we would have to simply remember that any time an enemy attacks, we have to apply this effect. Combined with multiple effects, e.g. “Whenever an enemy hits for more than 4, discard a card”, or “Whenever 3 or more enemies attack a single target, take 2 additional damage”, this style of Global Effects can become quite cumbersome.
2. A card that reads “Place a one-time +1 attack token on every enemy.” In this case, the exact same effect is applied, with one big difference: by the time we get to each monster, we don’t have to read anything else. We carry out the attack as normal, discard the one-time +1 attack token, and continue on, confident that we don’t have to look anywhere else.

This is only a slightly simpler version than the way we currently go about it in Heirs of Vent. I used attack damage to more easily illustrate the idea, but this same effect could apply to all kinds of status buffs, or scenario-specific events. As you can see in the diagram, each player begins their turn by first resolving the cards in the general staging area (oldest to newest), and then each card in turn in front of them (also oldest to newest). The cards in front of you might read one or several of the following, for instance:

• this card deals 3 damage to the engaged player
• the engaged player must discard cards down to the number of enemy cards in this engagement group
• when this card attacks, play a card from the top of the enemy deck
• when this card attacks, all other cards in this engagement group get a +1 attack token

The important thing is that each card is its own world, and doesn’t care about anything else in the game. When you’re reading a card, you know that it’s not being pointed to by anything else, because any other cards that might change the way this card operates have already done so. That’s not to say that each card can’t point to some crazy instructions, but if it does, it will come in a very methodical order: Staging area, oldest to newest, then your engagement group, oldest to newest.

We’re particularly excited about the way this has played out so far, and equally excited to build upon the awesome foundation that games like SotM have already established. Hopefully, the “Where-to-Look” principle is something that will get people into playing the game faster with fewer user errors from a streamlined game flow.

-Jake