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In this episode, I discuss with Richard Garfield, Skaff Elias and Christian Kudahl about the design process of Mindbug Beyond.

Support our Current Kickstarter Campaign for Mindbug Beyond:

Mindbug Beyond Kickstarter Campaign

 

Hello everyone and happy new year. Today we have January 2nd and I have a special guest today. It is my co-designer and friend Christian Kudahl. Hi Christian and welcome to the show.

Today we’re going to be looking back at the year 2022, and reflecting on our very first Kickstarter campaign for the game, Mindbug.

For those who may not know, Mindbug was a project that was funded on Kickstarter in 2021.

For us, the Kickstarter campaign was a huge success, raising almost $400,000 from more than 10.000 backers all over the world. This was way more than we anticipated and it allowed me to fully realize the vision I had for Nerdlab Games and turn this from a Hobby Podcast into a Games Publishing Company. We spent the entire year 2022 designing, producing, and fulfilling Mindbug.

Unfortunately, this also led to a shift in priorities and I no longer had as much time for the podcast. It always makes me sad because without the podcast the game wouldn’t have happened in the first place and I’m incredibly grateful for all the support from you throughout the journey.

Anyway, that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to review 2022 and talk about the lessons learned from the Kickstarter campaign here on the podcast.

Let’s start with a few things that went well:

• The campaign started very strong with a lot of backers in the first minutes and hours. I think this had some reasons.
  • 1. You, the podcast audience who supported us from the very first second
  • 2. Our Newsletter List
  • 3. The influencers posting their updates about the game 
  • 4. Low barrier of entry (compared to many other Kickstarter campaigns the price of 15 € for the first pledge level was very low. 
  • 5. And of course that being a Richard Garfield Game helped a lot
  • ⇒ As a result we made it to the Kickstarter front page and got featured by them. 
• Interaction with the backers during the campaign
  • Competitions 
  • Proposals for Creature Types 
  • Votings on artworks etc. was very very good
  • Running those competitions and votings on BGG helped us to get into the hotness list there which was also very helpful.
• Communications
  • Overall communication with the backers was very good through all the channels. We answered thousands of messages and tried to help everyone who had questions about the game or the campaign.
  • However, sometimes we missed a message or a comment here and there and we apologize for that. To improve, we have now implemented a ticketing system that will help us to better organize incoming messages.
• The Game itself
  • We are quite happy with how the game itself turned out. It is a lot of fun to play and yet is giving us enough room for future expansions and new game modes to explore.  

 

Things we can improve

• Delivery Time / Fulfillment
  • To be honest, we are quite happy with the timing of our deliveries in Europe. We were a little later than we had hoped, but not far from our announced target. 
  • For the rest of the world, unfortunately, it didn’t look quite so good. We had long waiting times at the ports for customs declarations and some delays in the supply chains. In addition, there were resource bottlenecks, production problems, natural disasters with the hurricane in Florida, and other unforeseen things. All this is difficult to predict and plan for. Overall, in most cases, I am satisfied with how we and our partners have responded to solve those problems. However, we would have liked to be quicker in the worldwide delivery. In the future, we will probably plan for even more buffers and place even more emphasis on proper customs documents. We will also rethink some of our partnerships.
  • We were definitely a bit naïve here because we believed that if we worked with experienced fulfillment partners, we could hand over the topic and no longer have to worry about it. Unfortunately, this was not the case and it is safe to say that we spent most of our working hours in 2022 on fulfillment. This is not something you dream about when you think about becoming a game designer. But it was the most important topic this year to bring Mindbug to you.
• Translation Error
  • Translating into 6 languages was a big challenge and, in retrospect, probably not the right decision. 2 of the 6 languages are probably still rather loss-making businesses today. Overall, the translation from the community went well. The professional agency also played its part, but without the community, it certainly wouldn’t have turned out so well. And yet I think we can improve here to become even more consistent in the wording on the cards and also in the rules. 
  • The biggest annoyance was of course the mistake on the German Kangasaurus Rex. One missing word cost us 1000s of €. And then the replacement card was also a bit bigger than the original. It was all very, very annoying. We have always tried to decide in the interest of our backers, even if it was very painful and expensive for us in the end. 
• Shipping Costs
  • We hate shipping costs. We think the costs were really high in our campaign. But it’s not like we earned anything from it. On the contrary. The actual costs were even higher. We would like to reduce the prices in the future, but the logistics service providers have even increased the prices again in the meantime. Such things as fuel surcharges or high season surcharges were not known to us before. We consider shipping more ourselves in the future to reduce costs. So one recommendation I have is. Be aware of the shipping costs and plan enough buffer. I can imagine that miscalculations and surprises in this area can ruin an entire campaign. In some cases, it makes sense to take the issue into account during product development. 
• Exclusiveness
  • Some backers would have liked a bit more exclusivity. And we can totally understand that. For us, it has always been important that Mindbug is set up in such a way that no one is excluded. That is part of our design philosophy. Every player should be able to get the same game feeling. So we don’t want individual cards to be out of reach for some players or only very expensive to buy on the secondary market. 
  • Nevertheless, we understand the desire of the Kickstarter backers who have supported us from the beginning to get something special. We certainly could have done something more. For example, foil cards, alternative art cards, or something like that. 
  • We have received really good suggestions and feedback on this and will certainly think about something for the future. 
• The black box:
  • And now to our biggest headache. The black box. The box was cursed from the very beginning. Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with the box did go wrong. During the campaign, we wanted to replace the box with a more stable version and give our cheeks a free upgrade. But we didn’t expect how many backers were against it and finally decided to row back and stick to our initial promise to provide the box with a unique number. This was the most critical situation during the campaign and cost us a lot of sleepless nights. We learned two things from this:
  • Don’t make important decisions based on a few user comments
    One should not make important decisions based on the user comments of a few users. You quickly get the impression that all backers are of the same opinion if you receive 5, 10, or 15 comments on a topic. In the end, however, these are just individual opinions of a few backers. I’m not saying that those opinions shouldn’t be taken seriously. Of course, this is direct feedback from your customers. This is very important and they should be answered and taken into account in the decision-making process, but in the end, 10 comments do not reflect the opinion of 10,000 backers. This part is easy to be misled. 
  • Never change the product or the pledge levels during the campaign
    Ultimately, it’s about finding the right balance between incorporating user feedback and staying true to our original concept. But you should never ever take away anything you have promised.
  • But that wasn’t all that went wrong with the box. It was produced incorrectly and thus played a large part in the delay in the project. As a result, we had to send them to the different hubs by express, which cost us a lot of money. And although we chose the best and most stable material that our supplier could offer, the box was and is clearly too unstable and did not meet our quality requirements. We really regret that and we will definitely put more emphasis on it in the future.

However, overall we still think the campaign was a great success. There will always be challenges and unplanned events. One of the most important things we learned is that the vast majority of backers on Kickstarter understand that a project of this size can’t always run smoothly. 

In return, however, they expect a high degree of transparency in your communication. After all, the backers are part of this project and therefore deserve to be informed about all relevant topics. 

We are very happy that we have successfully delivered all products and that with your help we have reached our first milestone for Nerdlab Games in 2022. Now we are working hard on the next milestones for 2023. 

Thanks for tuning in to the Nerdlab Games Podcast. Until next time. Keep shooting for the moon and nerd like a boss!

This week we tackle a very important topic. Last week I talked about why it is important to pput yourself out there and be active in the board game community. This week I am going to talk about why I think it is super important to create a relationship with the people you get in touch with. Personally I think E-Mail is the best way to get into 1-to-1 conversations with your followers and turn them into raving super fans of your future products.

In the past I didn’t put enough effort into building my E-Mail list. That’s what I am going to change now. And I will take you with me on this journey. So if you want to build your own list of raving fans…

Join the List Building Challenge

This week I talked about the importance of being part of the community and why it is so important to give without asking for anything in return.

These are some of the topics we talked about on the show:

 

• Why I started the podcast and the nerdlab community
• What I got back from the community
• Some Tips on what you can do to get recognized in the broader boardgame community
• Why I think it is so important to play an active role in the community The difference of randomness in physical and digital games

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If you want to join our Nerdlab Game Design Mastermind Groups, you can apply here:

 

Join a Mastermind Groups

 

This week I have the honor of hosting one of the best game designers in history. Without overstating, I can say that he and his games are the reason I got interested in game design in the first place. And I know many of you feel the same way. At least, you’ve repeatedly asked me to invite him to the podcast. I hope you enjoy my interview with Richard Garfield, designer of Magic the Gathering, Keyforge, King of Tokyo, Artifact, Bunny Kingdom, Android Netrunner, Robo Rally, Vampire the eternal struggle, and many many more.

 

These are some of the topics we talked about on the show:

 

• The struggles of translating Magic the Gathering into the digital world
• Designing Player Turns and player interaction (with digital implementation in mind)
• What to consider in the early design stage
• Downtime in Games
• Card Effects and Mechanics Richard Garfield always wanted to implement but was never able to because of limitations of the physical world
• The difference of randomness in physical and digital games
• How to present randomness in games
• The importance of replayability of games
• Why are card distribution mechanics so important?
• How to implement multiplayer combat in card games
• Passive Aggressive Games vs. Aggressive Games

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Fantasy Realms on Boardgamegeek Fantasy Realms on Wizkids

Today we have a great guest on the show. One of his earlier games is an industry highlight and has won a Gamers’ Choice Award for the Best Board Game in 2004. One of his newer creations is a super cool fantasy-themed card game with an innovative drafting mechanic. And if you know me and this podcast a little bit you know that this is already enough to get me very very excited. Our guest is or was also an English professor at Virginia Community College. So I am a bit afraid whether I will pass today with my poor English skills and my german accent. But other than that I am very happy to have him on board for today’s episode. Please welcome Bruce Glassco, the designer of Betrayal at House on the Hill and Fantasy Realms.

 

Some of the topics we talked about on the show:

 

• How did Fantasy Realms was created in the first place?
• How to get an idea for an expansion?
• What kind of content should be put into an expansion?
• What is more important for an expansion? New theme or new mechanics?

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This is the second part of me applying the Blue Ocean Strategy to Board Game Design. In this week I go through the methodology step by step and try to explain how to come up with innovative new ideas for the board game industry.

 

Do you want to use the Blue Ocean Strategy for your Game? Check out the Slides I prepared for you

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Do you want to use the Blue Ocean Strategy for your Game? Check out the Slides I prepared for you

 

In today’s episode, I asked myself: Why are new games developed? How does it start? And how do the groundbreaking successes differ from less successful games?

 

I think many games are created because someone is unhappy with aspects of an existing game and thinks they can do better. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that approach. This has resulted in some really good games. But for me, in most cases, it results in incremental improvements rather than completely new genre-defining game concepts. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that either. Even incremental improvements have their justification and produce super successful games. However, the market you are entering is much more competitive than if you have a completely new concept or genre. And as the board games market continues to grow and the supply continues to increase, so of course, does the competition. This is not only the case in the board games market but also in all other saturated markets. That’s why there is a model in economics that helps creators and entrepreneurs to identify new innovative markets. The model I’m referring to is called Blue Ocean Strategy, which I’m sure some people are already familiar with. But I think in the board game environment it is a less known tool. That’s why I wanted to take the opportunity to make a small podcast series out of it and present this model and apply it to the board and card game market.

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Today’s episode will be a bit different from the other episodes. Usually, I interview experienced game designers or do a lot of research about a topic before I cover it here on the show. Today it’s more of a discussion I’d say. But since I’m alone today calling it a discussion is kind of weird isn’t it. it’s more of a monologue. But I would like to make it a discussion. With whom? With all of you guys out there. What I want to say. Today I have more of an idea, but I don’t know if I should go for it or not. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about the pros and cons that come to mind and then get your feedback.

The topic I want to talk about is a potential Kickstarter campaign. But not a standard board game Kickstarter campaign in which you offer a finished board game as a final product. But more like a preliminary campaign for a Print and Play version or a Prototype Tabletop Simulator Module.

I will go through some pros and some doubts about running a preliminary campaign.

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Today’s episode is about point-scoring mechanics. I went through different games like Sushi Go, Cat Lady, Point Salad or Go nuts for donuts. What do those games have in common? They all have some form of card distribution mechanic and a final scoring at the end. Since I am working on an insect-themed point-scoring game with my son (as a hobby project, I was interested to see some examples. Reason enough to go through a list of all those cards and match them into different categories. The categories I was able to distinguish were:

 

• Static Point Scoring
• Variable Point Scoring
• Conditional Point Scoring

 

In this episode, I explain the different scoring mechanics and go over a bunch of examples.

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Please take a look at Radlands on Kickstarter. I honestly think the game looks amazing. And I don’t only mean the astonishing art, but also the gameplay and mechanics. I just backed it myself and am looking forward to adding it to my collection. (and no, I don’t get paid for saying that (unfortunately not )

 

Today we have a very interesting guest in the Nerdlab. He is not only a former winner of the Australian Scrabble Championship. In 2005 he also placed third in the Magic the Gathering Australian National Championship and represented Australia in the World Championship. And while that’s pretty impressive already, that’s not why he’s here on the show today. I invited him to the show because he is also a fellow game designer. He is a former Magic the Gathering external developer and the designer of Radlands, one of the hottest games currently on Kickstarter. At the time we speak, the game has reached almost 240k euros on Kickstarter and I am pretty confident that this number will go up over the next couple of days. I am very happy to have Daniel Piechnick on board for today’s show. So please welcome with me, the Designer of Radlands.

 

Here are some of the topics we talked about in the show:

 

• Why is the game design process so hard? Why isn’t there a blueprint for it?
• Why it took Daniel 17 games until he got published
• The learning curve of a game designer and
• …how to stay motivated even when you get rejected
• The design process of Radlands
• The difference between a game of numbers (like Magic) and a game of combos (like Radlands)
• What it needs to design games in an elegant way

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In today’s episode, I analyze the new keywords and mechanics of the Magic the Gathering set “Kaldheim”. Especially “Foretell” and “Boast” which are very different. One has a lot of clear visible information and asks a very precise and direct question to your opponent, while the other is adding hidden information and keeps your opponent in the dark.

I used this interplay of hidden and visible information in this set to dive a bit deeper into the topic of hidden information and what it can add to your game if done correctly.

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It's been over half a year since I recorded the last podcast episode. That's definitely far too long. I hope that I will be able to record new episodes much more often in the future. Because I really missed being able to exchange ideas with other game designers and to delve deeply into specific game design activities in order to prepare for an episode.  So what do I want to talk about today? A lot has changed for me in the last 6 months. I am in the middle of the transition from a wannabe game designer to a small publisher who is releasing and launching his first game. I know that many listeners keep asking themselves whether they should take that step and whether they should publish one of their game ideas themselves or hand it over to a publisher. I would like to address this topic today with my experiences from the last few months.   Therefore, I am taking you with me on a normal working day in my role as a Games Publisher. In the end I will list my pros and cons of self-publishing. Maybe this is helping you to make a decision whether this is path is something for you or not.

In today’s episode, I explain my method of learning the language of my target audience? In order to do so, I asked people over at Reddit about what they like about Dueling Strategy Card Games and identified their answers and especially the words and language they used. The goal is to later adopt their words, their problems, needs, emotions, and experiences to better deliver your marketing message.

Link to the Reddit post:

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Important Links for this episode:
Heart of Cthulhu on Instagram
Heart of Cthulhu Video

Today we have a fellow game designer in the Nerdlab. I can remember that I followed his Instagram profile a time ago because I was impressed by the art of the game. It is hard to explain on a podcast without any visual support, but it looks very natural and hand-drawn and not digitally overpolished like many other art styles. For me, it felt unique and sparked my interest. While reading through the rules of the game on Instagram I became more and more curious (because it had a lot of exploring, discovering, and adventuring aspects) and decided to reach out and ask for an interview. And I mean who doesn’t like a Cthulhu theme. So please welcome with me Patrick Kelleher, the Designer of Heart of Cthulhu.

Topics of the show:

• How to put Art first in your design process?
• The approach of creating the entire art for your game yourself
• How to prepare for a Board Game Kickstarter Campaign?

Important Links for this episode:

• Quixotic Games Website
• Core Worlds on Facebook
• Core Worlds Nemesis (on BGG)

Today I have the honor to talk to a very experienced and very successful game designer. I don’t think I know anyone else who has worked with so many super exciting IPs . This includes brands such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Marvel, Star Trek and X-Men. But he doesn’t just work with IPs in, let’s call them, ” existing universes”. No, he also thinks up his own game worlds. And that’s also something we want to talk about today. The differences between working with an IP and starting from scratch. His own creations include games like Dungeon Alliance and Core Worlds. Core Worlds in particular is a game I’d like to learn a bit more about today. Please join me in welcoming Andrew Parks, designer of Core Worlds.

Some Topics of this Episode:

• The differences of working with an IP or not
• The evolution of Deck Building Games in the last 10 years
• Game Design Process of Core Worlds
• How to add a Solo Mode for your game

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:

• Join the Nerdlab Discord
• Join the Nerdlab Community
• Nerdlab Website
• Nerdlab Facebook Page
• Nerdlab on Twitter
• Nerdlab on Instagram

 

Important Links for this episode:
Crimson Company Website
Upcoming Kickstarter Expansion of Crimson Company

Today we have two special guests in the Nerdlab. And if it weren’t for Corona they might even be physically in the Nerdlab right next to me because we live very close together. But not only do we live very close to each other, but we also have very very similar tastes when it comes to games. They enjoy strategy card games as much as I do and have designed and published their own card game. It relies heavily on skill, is about sellswords, and my all-time favorite mechanic drafting. I am very curious to talk about their game, their journey, and their plans for the future.

Some Topics of this Episode:

• Elegance in Game Design
• Flaws in existing CCGs & TCGs like Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone & Gwent (and how to solve them)
• Game Design Process of Crimson Company
• Successful Kickstarter Process of Dario and Fabian

 

 

Today I would like to talk a bit about the highlights and pitfalls of the past year to derive my new goals for 2021. 
If you haven’t set your own goals for 2021, I recommend you listen to Episode 8 of the Nerdlab about Goalsetting. In this episode, I describe my 4 step approach to setting goals as a game designer. 

Looking back on the past year I have to make a clear distinction between my role as a game designer and as a podcaster.

I will start with the role as a podcaster.

• I’ve recorded 33 episodes
• I’ve learned a lot from this. The deep dive episodes about certain mechanics as well as the interviews helped me to broaden my horizon considerably
• Episodes that I personally enjoyed the most are:
  • Digital Card Game Reviews and Deep Dives
    • Legends of Runeterra (Episode 48)
    • Mythgard (Episode 42)
    • GWENT (Episode 54)
    • Monster Train (Episode 61)
    • I enjoyed those game review episodes probable because they required a lot of actually playing these games
  • How to create a design skeleton (Episode 43)
    • Live Streaming my design on Twitch 
  • Interviews 
    • Brandon Seeger (Battle Babies) (Episode 44)
    • Kevin Ferrone (Starport) (Episode 45)
    • with Jamey Stegmaier (Episode 46)
    • Ed Rodriguez (Animus) (Episode 49)
    • Bernardo Bittencourt (Ambal Tournament) (Simultaneous Action Selection) (Episode 53)
    • Gabriel and Harly (DINN) (Episode 66)
    • Frank Tedeschi (Goblin Teeth) (Episode 69)
  • Why you should join a Mastermind Groups (Episode 50)
    • + Growing the community substantially and helping designers to come together (6 Mastermind Groups on the Nerdlab Discord Channel)
  • Complexity in Strategy Card Games (Episode 51)
  • My Favorite episode:
    Design Diary of our Game Design (Code Word “Duelist”) with co-designer Christian (Episode 68)

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Join the Nerdlab Discord
Join the Nerdlab Community
Nerdlab Website
Nerdlab Facebook Page
Nerdlab on Twitter
Nerdlab on Instagram

For many independent board game designers, licensing their game to a publisher is the best way to see their creation getting out there into the wild. But most aspiring designers and aspiring publishers alike do not have a lot of experience with licensing contracts. The terms can be confusing and many designers are afraid of being taken advantage of. 

As most of you know, I am currently working on a game with the working title “Duelist”. And Christian, my CO-Designer, and I have different interests. While he wants to focus on game design, I’m also very interested in the publishing aspect of games. That’s why we decided that I alone would be the publisher bringing the game to Kickstarter. And in order to do so, we of course also need a Licensing Agreement between Christian as Co-Designer and me.

And since this is also my first publisher contract I’m signing, I’ve spent some time on the subject and wanted to share my findings with you today. 

But I will keep this rather general and not go into the details of our contract. My goal is rather to show which topics should be regulated and which different options exist.

If you have questions like this, the episode is for you:

Questions covered in this Podcast Episode:

• What’s expected of the designer and what can the designer expect of the publisher vice versa? 
• What do fair conditions look like? 
• What are your rights but also your responsibilities as a designer? 
• What do I earn as a designer? What is the industry standard of royalty percentages?
• Do I have any say about the theme or the name of the game? 
• What are pitfalls in game design publishing contracts?

Helpful links for Publishing Contracts:

• Jamey Stegmaier on Publishing Contracts at Stonemaier Games
• Cardboard Edison Study and Infographic about Board Game Licensing Contracts
• League of Gamemakers – Board Game Design Pitfalls
• Flatlinedgames – contract example
• Another Board Game Contract Example

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Join the Nerdlab Discord
Join the Nerdlab Community
Nerdlab Website
Nerdlab Facebook Page
Nerdlab on Twitter
Nerdlab on Instagram

 

Connect with Frank Tedeschi:
Deadbox Games
Instagram Account (<– check this out if you are a DM!)
Adventurers Guild Admissions Office on the DM`s Guild

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Join the Nerdlab Discord
Join the Nerdlab Community
Nerdlab Website
Nerdlab Facebook Page
Nerdlab on Twitter
Nerdlab on Instagram
Nerdlab on Twitch

Today we have a special guest in the Nerdlab. Our guest today is not only a published board game designer but also a former member of the very first Nerdlab Mastermind group. I was very sad when he left our mastermind group because I was really impressed by the flavor of his designs and I think I could have learned quite a bit from him in that regard. He used a lot of his creativity and his gift of creating breathtaking themes and stories to create really really nice D&D content on Instagram and become a publisher of D&D adventures over at the DMsGuild.

 

I have been asked several times which game design projects I am personally working on and I sometimes mention them here on the podcast, but today I would like to take the opportunity to present one of my projects in more detail. And since this is not a solo project, but cooperation with another designer, who is much more talented than me, I thought it would be much better if we presented the project together. That’s why I invited Christian Kudahl, the designer of “Unleash” and my co-designer in the project we currently call “Duelist”. 

In this episode, we talk about the benefits of co-operation, different styles of approaching game design, and about our new creation – “Duelist”, a game we both are very proud of.

If you want to playtest our game, please get in contact via E-Mail or Social Media:

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Join the Nerdlab Discord
Join the Nerdlab Community
Nerdlab Website
Nerdlab Facebook Page
Nerdlab on Twitter
Nerdlab on Instagram
Nerdlab on Twitch

 

 

Get the free Playtesting Questionnaire Template

Join the Nerdlab Discord to get access to Mastermind Groups and monthly playtesting events.

Playtests are helpful in every game design phase, but most of the time you want to get very specific feedback as a game designer. This form of desired feedback can be different in each design phase of course. In the beginning, you may want to look for the elements of the game that are most fun or frustrating for the players. Towards the end of the development phase, it might be just about adjusting values on individual cards. That’s why it’s extremely important to guide the players’ feedback and not just let them talk. Otherwise, the feedback can quickly develop in a different direction than what you as a game designer would like. That’s why today I want to introduce some of the best questions you can ask your testers. 

But before we get started I wanted to do a little advertising. A few weeks ago I started a survey and asked many game designers what their biggest challenges were. First place was finding Playtesters and doing playtests. Especially in times of Corona where many local groups don’t meet, it seems to be more difficult for many game designers to test their games and get the feedback they need. I would like to help you with this. Therefore I would like to initiate 2 things for you.

1. Organize a new wave of mastermind groups 
2. Organize monthly playtest event

Join the Nerdlab Discord to get access to Mastermind Groups and the monthly playtesting events.

In this episode you’ll be introduced to all playtesting questions you’ll ever need.

The questions are divided into the following categories:

• Introduction
• Ease of Learning / Complexity
• Game Length
• Gameplay
• Balance and Specific Components
• Strategy / Tactic
• Theme / Setting
• Conclusion

Get the free Playtesting Questionnaire Template
Join the Nerdlab Discord to get access to Mastermind Groups and monthly playtesting events.

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Join the Nerdlab Discord
Join the Nerdlab Community
Nerdlab Website
Nerdlab Facebook Page
Nerdlab on Twitter
Nerdlab on Instagram
Nerdlab on Twitch

 

Connect with Gabriel and Hayley of Dinn:
Dinn Website
Dinn on Instagram

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Join the Nerdlab Discord
Join the Nerdlab Community
Nerdlab Website
Nerdlab Facebook Page
Nerdlab on Twitter
Nerdlab on Instagram
Nerdlab on Twitch

Today I am not alone in the Nerdlab. Today I will be talking to a fellow game designer who has been working for more than 5 years on Dinn, a game he is about to publish. I came across the game on Instagram because the card layout just was so appealing to me. It was just super clean and very refreshing to look at. And when I got a bit further into the game, I was quite stunned to find out that the game is not only a TCG (which is already right up my ally) but also an alternative reality game. That means every card is a part of a large scale puzzle that guides an interactive, community-driven storyline. Sounds awesome right? Players can solve these puzzles by figuring out custom-built clues on websites, audio-files, blog posts, and videos. And all of that on top of the initial trading card game. When I looked into that I was super curious to learn more about that awesome game hook that immediately got me interested in the game. That’s why I invited Gabriel and Hayley to the show today.

Main Topics of this Podcast Episode

• How to design for multiple audiences?
• How to combine TCGs and ARGs?
• What is an Alternate Reality Game?
• Subscription Model for a TCG
• How to gain attention in the Board Game industry
• How to market a board game

 

 

A lot has happened in the last couple of months in the Nerdlab. Christian and I got the chance to work with industry veterans Richards Garfield and Skaff Elias on our Game Mindbug. In this podcast episode, I talk about the things I have been working on with regards to Game Design, Game Development and Publishing.

I also talk about Mindbug and why I think the game is special. The game got officially announced just recently and will be available at Essen Spiel this year.

If you go to Essen, please visit us at

Nerdlab Games
Booth: 6-G113 

and check out the newest infos about Mindbug:

Mindbug Website 
Mindbug on Instagram
Mindbug on Facebook

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What is the Purpose of a Rulebook

The two main purposes of rulebooks are:

• teaching new players how to play the game 
• guiding experienced players by referencing specific situations  

It is not easy to achieve both of those purposes. The goal is to present the game in a way that makes it easy to learn to new players, while also making it easy to navigate for experienced players looking for very specific corner case rules. Because those two purposes can be very different the publisher Fantasy Flight Games often prints two different sets of rules. E.g. a quick start guide or overview and some kind of reference book. The rules overview is often chronologic of how the game is played while the rules reference is often ordered alphabetical or contains a lot of subheadings to make it easier to navigate for experienced players.

When should I start to write down the rules for my game?

There are three main reasons you should have a basic rulebook prepared for external playtesting: 

• It highlights places where the game is not yet fully fleshed out. Putting the rules on paper does a great deal to move the design process along.
• You have a reference to go back to so you don’t forget your own rules or the version you are currently testing.
• It helps to keep multiple designers on the same page
• It is necessary for blind playtesting

What is a simple structure of a Rulebook?

Thematic Overview/Intro:
Your introduction should include the background story and explain what the players represent in the game. It is meant to set the scene from a thematic point of view.

​Components:
Describe all the pieces and give them a unique name/phrase as a reference. This will make it easier for you to describe the rules on the following pages. This is important early on for print and plays (PnP) for players to know whether or not they have everything they need to play.

Game Overview & Objective:
Here you describe what the players are trying to accomplish (the objective) and how the players will interact on a very high level (co-op vs. competitive). For example: “If the opponent’s life total is reduced to zero you win the game”.

Setup:
This chapter describes how to get the game ready for play. There shouldn’t be anything in here that mentions what components are used for or why they are important. Just make sure that in this section everything is laid out clearly. Probably a diagram is the best way of doing so.

Gameplay / Game Structure:
This chapter describes the flow of your game, starting with how the core gameplay loop is broken down. E.g. rounds, turns, phases, etc. Additionally, it summarizes what players do in each of those stages. This will be the major chapter of your rules. Chronologically describe the gameplay from start to finish. From general to specific. This is where you explain exactly what happens during each turn, action, round, etc.

Game End Conditions / Determining the winner:
How does the game end? How do players calculate victory points? Etc.

References:
Use this chapter as a glossary of icons or keywords, as rules reference or for FAQ)

Principles of good Rules Writing

• State the general rules first 
• Use consistent language / Terminology
• Cross-reference (especially constraints)
• Do proofreading
• use a lot of images and explain them with labels
• Be inclusive
• Add flavor
• Use simple language
• Imperatives > Decleratives
• Trat the rules as a living document

References:

• Writing a Rulebook (Youtube Video of Geoff Engelstein)
• Mike Selinkers 10 rules of writing rules (Youtube Video)
• Rulebook Writing
• Tips for Rulebook Writing

 

 

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Today I have a list of 10 common mistakes of new and aspiring game designers for you. The goal of this list is to make you aware of these mistakes and hopefully help you to avoid them. I have been guilty of most of those mistakes myself, unfortunately.

My top 10 list of Common Mistakes of new Game Designers

10. Not original

• Clone of an existing game
• I can make that better experience
• It’s not unique (dominion in deckbuilding games) (uniqueness sells) 
• Be inspired but don’t copy directly from other games
• Make sure to match the mechanics and the theme

9. Overcomplicating concepts because they think they need to make it unique 

• Too many components (multiple tools of randomness (cards, dice, bag) 
• Takes too long
• It is not elegant, but clunky
• Not every part of your game needs to be completely unique. So it is ok to use mechanics that have been proven to be effective in other games. 

8. Only working on one game 

• Tunnel vision 
• You get too attached to it and it gets harder to let things go
• Not all ideas have to go into one game (streamline your game)
• Thinking about different problems can broaden your horizon
• Stop fitting everything you can imagine into your design
• As a result, you level up as a game designer
• → Create a list of mechanics you really want to use in the future
• → Create some kind of backlog of keywords and mechanics you want to explore in future expansions of your game.

7. Not fun

• Lacks replayability
• Only one strategy (that wins way too often) (either not balanced or not diverse enough)
• feels like solving a math problem
• working on a spreadsheet
• Doesn’t let the players make interesting choices or decisions ( not enough options for the players) (it must be a meaningful choice)

6. Not focussing on the interplay between mechanics and theme

• Most people I have seen are either good at creating a cool theme or in creating very good mechanics. 
• but what you want is theme and mechanism to go hand in hand. Don’t start with one and add the other on top of it. Let the two things work in tandem. Start with one, put the other one on top, but then go back and rework the first part again.  
• This can be valuable input of a publisher during the development stage of your game

5. Investing in art too early 

• Money and Time
• Some designers think they can do everything themselves 

4. Adding instead of cutting

• Most beginning designers try to solve a problem by adding new stuff. 
• Getting in love with a mechanic
• Hard to kill a baby they have been working on
• More often than not the right way of solving a problem is to get rid of it. 

3. Ignoring the market 

• They do no Market Research
• Do the research (play other games) 
• Otherwise, you will make the same mistakes that have been done in the past. Look at the market. Learn which kind of games are successful and why?

• Not willing to playtest other players games 
• Not Researching publishers (being unprepared if the publishers fit to the game) 
• Expectations ( you only make something like 5% of the wholesaler price)
• Ignoring Marketability 
  • No mass appeal (theme is too specific)
  • Chasing Trends (Everyone hopped on the deck builder market, A legacy game)

2. Losing focus on the core of the game

• What do you want players to feel when they play the game
• What makes the game fun? 
• What is the core engagement of the game? 
• Ask yourself three questions
  • What emotions do I want the players to feel? 
  • What’s the primary decision players are making in your game? Core decision? 
  •  What is the most important mechanic in your game? 

1. Not getting the right feedback

• Designing the game alone 
• Not getting it early enough
  • Fear someone is stealing your idea
  • No one is stealing your idea. Not happening. 
• Not listening to it
• Not playtesting enough
• PLaytesting only with the same group of people
• Not doing blind playtesting 
• Listen to playtesters, but filter their personal opinions. Not all the feedback needs to end up in your product.

 

Upcoming Twitch Game Design Live Stream:
Wednesday at 10pm CEST, that’s 1 PM Pacific and 4 PM Eastern time

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Last week we already discussed different attributes in strategy card games. We discussed the classic attributes like power, toughness, and mana cost. Then we also examined the less common attributes like Armor, HitPoints, Speed, Priority, Range, or Guard. And finally, we talked about some more unusual attributes like Honer, Age, Max Army Size, Combo symbols, or different Weaknesses. And although this already covers a large number of different attribute values, there is even more. Since some of you were so kind to send me additional attributes via email, I don’t want to deny them to the rest of the community and so I thought I’d do a second episode on this topic.    

But before we start on the subject, I wanted to make a brief announcement. I think I mentioned before that I’m currently co-designing a Duelling Card Game with another designer. We’ve finished the rules and done a lot of playtests. We have tested many keywords, triggers, attributes and effects. Now we are at a point where we want to create a set of 50 cards as a final product. And we thought it would be fun if each of us designed a set of 50 cards and then we’ll see which of those cards are the best and then choose the final cards for our product.  

Since many of you have given me feedback that you would like to learn more about my personal process and the games I am working on, I would like to take the opportunity to show you my personal approach of designing a set of cards live. Therefore I will have a small live session on Wednesday, August 5th at 10 pm CEST on Twitch. I will briefly explain the game and then start with a design skeleton and will hopefully end up with 50 finished cards. If any of you are interested to see how this will work I would be very happy if you come by. Start is Wednesday at 10 pm CEST, that’s 1 PM Pacific and 4 PM Eastern time.

Values & Attributes in Strategy Card Games Attack, Thwart and Recovery in Marvel Champions

Marvel Champions is played over a series of rounds, and each round is broken into two phases: the Hero Phase and the Villain Phase.

During the Player Phase, players take turns playing cards from their hands and exhausting their identity card to use one of their basic powers:

Attack: Attack deals damage to the minions or the villain, and helps to bring the players closer to defeating the villain.

Thwart: Thwart is some form of countermeasure to what the villain tries to do. Due to various game effects, the villain puts threat counters on their scheme cards causing bad things to happen when a certain value is reached. By Thwarting, the players have a chance to remove a certain number of threat counters from scheme cards, preventing the villain from winning the game.

Recovery: And recovery heals damage from a player’s identity. 

An interesting twist in Marvel champions also comes from the flip mechanic of the identity card. Each player plays a hero like Spider-Man or Iron Man, but they all have also their alter ego on the back of the card. Peter Parker or Tony Stark has other abilities than their superhero form. In the game, this is represented in the form that Attack and Thwart can only be used in hero form, whereas recovery can only be performed in alter-ego form.

I really like the combination of these stats. One for offense, one for tactical defensive aspects, and one for recovery. All of it is important during a game and it gives the players a chance to fulfill different roles in a game, which is super important in a co-op game.

Willpower in Lord of the Rings LCG

In Lord of the Rings LCG each character has a willpower strength that is used to advance the quest. Each enemy and location has a threat strength that is used to impede a character’s quest progress.

To resolve the quest, each character that is committed to the quest adds its willpower strength together to create a total willpower strength of all committed characters. Then, the threat strength of all enemies and locations in the staging area are added together to create a total threat strength. The players compare the total willpower strength to the total threat strength and determine the progress of their quest as follows:

Successful: The total willpower is greater than the total threat. 
Unsuccessful: The total willpower is less than the total threat. 
Neither: The total willpower is equal to the total threat. 

The quest resolution determines if players gain progress tokens or increase their threat. If the quest resolution is neither successful nor unsuccessful, nothing happens.

If the quest is successful, a number of progress tokens equal to the difference between the total willpower strength and the total threat strength are placed on the currently revealed quest card. Each quest card has a number of quest points. When the number of progress tokens on the quest card is equal to or greater than the number of quest points, the players complete that stage of the quest.

When a quest is unsuccessful, increase each player’s threat dial by an amount equal to the difference between the total threat and the total willpower. If a player’s threat dial reaches “50,” that player is immediately eliminated from the game.

Lightseekers TCG

Stats:

• Hero Cards: 
  • Starting health
  • Elements (which are the resources to play attack cards, defensive cards and buff cards) Some of the elements have silver borders, which means they can only used once a turn and some have the superior gold border which means they can be used as often as a player wants. 
• Buff Cards:
  • Duration (marked in the top left corner of the card) If the corner has a circular rotation symbol the card is rotated during the buff phase. If the rotation symbol is edged, the card only rotates if their effect is triggered. 
  • Either way, if a rotating card either reach an empty corned or returns to its starting position, the buff is expired and is discarded. Corners with Xs mean to ignore the effect of that card this turn. 
  • The card corner stat is extremely interesting as it has a built-in time effect (you mentioned mechanics that would require counters to track a countdown), all while giving access to different effects based on the corner, with each corner being able to have a different effect (e.g., heal, deal damage, draw cards, rotate forward or backward, recover cards from discard, etc.).  It also allows for interesting design where buffs can have 1, 2, 3, or 4 corners to trigger, or even no corners (in which case, they stay in play unless removed by the opponent). 
• Item Cards:
  • item weight: Each hero can only hold items worth up to 2 item weight points. The item points are another stat that is used on the item cards. Items have individual effects and also can come with additional elements that are added to the heroes available resources.  

Master of Will

A second game that has interesting stats is Master of Wills.  The interesting stat in this game is “influence” which describes how certain factions react to your choice of recruiting certain characters. 

In Master of Wills, the setting is a cyberpunk-esque society, with different factions inhabiting the world.  Your goal is to gain more influence than your opponent by recruiting people that belong to these factions.  At the start of each turn, you choose a character to recruit from a central Neutral column and move them to a specified column on your side of the field.  However, recruiting a character comes at a cost: some factions will be pleased with the choice and will be willing to be recruited as well, and others will be displeased and will want to work with your opponent.  This is represented by a list of numbers and colors on the chosen character, each with a + or – sign.  After choosing a character, you must move other characters of the specified colors towards your columns (the + numbers) or towards your opponent (the – numbers), indicating which factions were pleased with your recruitment and those which were not. It is like a track of factions that is influenced by the choices you make.

ExodusTCG

Energy is at the same time this game’s resource as well as the creature’s Power and Health indication.  At the start of your turn, you draw 6 cards: 3 cards from your deck and 3 Energy cards.  The next phase, the Energy phase, lets you place the Energy in piles on your field, with maximum placing size no greater than 3.  You can add to pre-existing piles or create new ones, with no limit to the number of piles you can make.  Once you are happy with the piles, you then proceed to the Main phase, where you can summon Creatures onto the Energy piles.  The amount of Energy piled under the creature is both its Power and Health: when attacking, the creature deals damage to other creatures equal to its Energy, and takes damage equal to the defending Creature’s Energy, upon which you discard that amount of Energy from your Creature.  If your creature has no Energy under it, it is discarded.

Card Stats of TCGs, CCGs and LCGs mentioned in this episode

The following stats and values are mentioned and described in this podcast episode:

• Part 1:
  • Power / Toughness
  • Armor
  • Resource (e.g. Mana, Crystals, etc.)
  • Health Points
  • Speed
  • Priority
  • Initiative
  • Combo Icons
  • Range
  • Honor
  • Weaknesses
  • Elemental Damage
• Part 2:
  • Thwart, Attack and Recovery
  • Willpower
  • Starting Health
  • Elements
  • Duration (in Form of rotating cards)
  • Item Weight
  • Influence
  •  

Link to the Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tabletopgamedesign/comments/hlnvrl/what_are_the_most_innovative_stats_in_strategy/

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

It’s been a while since I recorded the last episode. And because I didn’t have any feeling or estimate about  how long it has been, I just looked it up and was shocked when I realized that I missed 7 weeks. This makes me sad and angry at myself, because I had planned to record one episode per week this year. But that’s how it is. Somehow I was a bit out of energy for some reason. And I didn’t want to produce content just for the sake of it. Producing an episode takes me a lot of time. I would say between 5 and 20 hours depending on the topic. And it is really important to me to produce content that’s of high quality and that is helpful and inspiring for you out there. 

If you put so much effort and time into something like I did for this podcast sometimes you just need a break. And that’s what I needed. It was the same last year around that time. In the beginning of summer.  I also took a break of several weeks. I don’t think this is a coincidence. For next year I need to be prepared. Either I need to pre-record a few episodes or I will announce a summer break. We will see. However, now I am back with a lot of energy and a lot to talk about. Because I did take a break from the podcast, but not from game design. Together with Christian, a fellow listener of this podcast and game designer, I have been working on another game for a couple of months now. As usual it is a strategy card game. In the future we will probably talk more about it on this show as well. But what’s important for today’s show is that the game only had 1 stat per card. A power value. Due to various reasons we thought this is not enough and tried to identify innovative and interesting stats used on cards. Today’s episode is the result of our research around that topic. So sit back, relax and listen to the most interesting attributes and stats used in strategy card games

Values & Attributes in Strategy Card Games

The following stats and values are mentioned and described in this podcast episode:

• Power / Toughness
• Armor
• Resource (e.g. Mana, Crystals, etc.)
• Health Points
• Speed
• Priority
• Initiative
• Combo Icons
• Range
• Honor
• Weaknesses
• Elemental Damage

Link to the Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tabletopgamedesign/comments/hlnvrl/what_are_the_most_innovative_stats_in_strategy/

 

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

A few weeks ago I was recommended a new game. The game I’m talking about is called Monster Train. 

The theme of the game is totally crazy. You ride a train through hell and try to prevent angels or other holy creatures from destroying a shard of the last hellfire. The game is a roguelike deck builder, which is very much like Slay the Spire. All this in combination didn’t blow me away and I would have never played the game without the direct recommendation and the very good reviews. 

Since it was recommended to me by a good friend who knows exactly what kind of games I like, I decided to have a look at it. And after only a few rounds I was hooked. And it wasn’t the theme, the story or the graphics that hooked me. It was merely the mechanics of the game. And since I had the same feeling a while ago when I played Slay the Spire, I wanted to take the time to analyze why these kinds of games are so addictive and how they manage to create these fun and challenging experiences.  

That’s why I will analyze today the genre of roguelike deckbuilding games and try to figure out a few lessons we can apply for board games as well. 

Roguelikes usually have three main aspects to them: randomized levels, permadeath, and incremental improvement. All of these effects have mass appeal, which at first glance sounds totally irrational. Why should you have fun dying over and over again because the game is too hard? Why should you have fun playing the same randomized content over and over again instead of following a beautiful story path that has been thought through by a skilled story writer?  Let’s take a look at these 3 concepts in order to find the answers for these questions. 

Randomized Levels

I think people enjoy randomized levels because they enjoy learning how to adapt to new game’s situations via improvisation. The randomized nature of these levels allow for a lot of creativity in how to solve problems, and thus constantly challenges us. Roguelikes create a new feeling with every playthrough. That creates a feeling of exploring the unexplored.

Permadeath

Why do people like permadeath? Well, this is astranger kind of enjoyment, but I believe people enjoy it because it forces you to change up your strategy every playthrough. In addition to that, permadeath can give each playthrough meaning. People enjoy that feeling of tension with games. The best example is the hardcore mode in Diablo 2 and 3. 

So, Permadeath increases tension, but on the other side, it can of course be very frustrating if you die and lose everything that you have been working for. Players can easily get the feeling of not progressing in the game. Although you may find the experience that players gain in the form of: “What monsters are there”, “What abilities do they have”, “What are the dangers in the levels”, etc. are also a form of progression. Simply because you learn how to react better to such situations in the next playthrough. But I think the form of progression or better said the learning curve is not enough for players these days to stick with a game. Especially not with a repetitive game like a roguelike. That’s why both Slay the Spire and Monster Train have a progression system that unlocks more and more content. 

Progression:

With every playthrough you unlock new, stronger, but also more complex cards, artifacts and enchantments. Sometimes you can also unlock completely new characters. 

This kind of persistent progression lasts throughout playthroughs and is achieved even if the players failed to win the game. These persistent progression mechanics instead usually serve to enhance the game experience and helps players feel like they’re making actual progress even through numerous deaths, so that they don’t quit due to sheer frustration.

That is the no 1 thing we can learn from these two games: If you want to create a complex game, please introduce the components step by step to the players. This creates long term motivation and increases replayability and removes a major barrier of entry for newer players. 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Do you like collecting things? I love, love love it!!!! It’s so satisfying to complete a set of something you were looking for by finding that last rare missing piece. I mean there must be a reason so many people are collecting coins or stamps, or whatsoever. 

I thought about why I like collecting things and where my fable for it comes from. First I thought about WoW and Diablo, games where you try to find special items from a set and unlock strong and special effects for your character. Then I thought about collecting Magic cards until you have a complete playset of a certain card (4 of a kind) or even a complete set, that means each card of an expansion edition. But then I realized that I’d been in touch with Set Collection much earlier. Back in elementary school I already collected wrestling cards for example. But even that was not my first contact with the topic. There is a card game that I played with my whole family when I was a really small child. And this game really is set collection at its core. And I still consider it to be one of the best games ever developed. And that is Canasta.

A definition of Set Collection as a Mechanism in Board Games

A set can be understood as a group of things that belong together. A Collection is the result of the process of collecting something. If you out those two together Set Collection is nothing more than the process of collecting things that belong together. Players trying to get a lot of the same things (or a lot of different things) that pair well together.

Every set collection mechanism has the following components:

• Component & Set Definitions (The WHAT to collect)
• Actions (The HOW to collect)
• Results (The WHY to collect)

Other aspects covered in this episode:

• How set collection fosters player interaction
• How hidden information can add an interesting twist to set collection
• How randomness can improve replayability

Games mentioned in this episode:

• Canasta
• World of Warcraft
• Diablo
• Magic the Gathering
• Underlords
• Sushi Go
• Point Salad
  
  

 

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I always make the most progress with the design of my game when I’m about to do a playtest.  Then I have the necessary pressure to change something, to push something forward and to finish something in order to have at least a playable version I can bring to the table. Between two playtest sessions there are always longer phases in which I don’t change anything or not much about my game. Often I think a lot about different possibilities, but most of the time these ideas remain as theoretical concepts in my head or on my whiteboard. Or maybe in some Excel spreadsheet. That’s why I today want to think about how I can improve my process to have less downtime, to get more playtests in and in the end to iterate faster. 

Iteration is something we do in all areas of life. Not just in game design. We try something and then we change based on the feedback we get. 

Everything should work agile these days. Projects want to be agile, companies want to be agile. Time to market should be shortened, fail forward, minimal viable product. All these are descriptions and phrases for the same phenomenon. 

Reduce the time between developing something and using something. This can be a piece of software or a game. It doesn’t matter. You want to get feedback on something as soon as possible.  

Topics of this show:

• What does iteration mean in game design?
• What can we learn from agile project management as game designers?
• How to improve the your card prototyping cycle:
  • Tutorial how to use Cocktail
• What you need in order to get to a bi-weekly sprint cycle:
  • User Stories / Experiences
  • Task Backlog & Most important task identification
  • Super lean prototype creation process
  • Fixed playtesting sessions

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
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Join the Nerdlab Community
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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

In today’s episode, I am going to dive a bit deeper into the topic of game length. The aspect of that topic I am most interested in is how to maximize the experience per time your players gain from playing. I discuss different things you can try to change in your game in order to increase this time value coefficient and find the optimal game length for your game. 

Topics of this show:

• Differences between short and long games
• Setup time
• Instruction time and the impact on replayability
• Increase Gameplay time by decreasin bookkeeping
• Decreasing Downtimes
• Increase game length consistency by adding additional ending conditions

 

 

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
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Episode 40 on Keywords in Strategy Card Games
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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

In today’s episode, I’d like to take up a topic I already published a podcast episode about not too long ago. The basic topic is about keywords in strategy card games. In episode 40 I talked in detail about why I think keywords are very important for the basic structure of a card game. So far in most strategy card games, the keywords are printed as text on the cards directly. But in the new Magic Set: Ikoria, Lair of Behemoth, a new concept has been introduced. Keywords in the form of counters, which can be placed on cards during the game. 

I know, both keywords and counters are basically nothing new or highly innovative. This has been around in card and board games for a long time, but the combination creates an interesting new design space. That’s why I wanted to take a closer look at why the Magic Designers have introduced this new concept and wanted to see whether it makes sense to use it in my own designs in the future as well.

Let me first recap, what keywords in card games actually are: 

A keyword is a word or set of words that acts as a substitute for rules text that explains what the card does. They are typically bolded words that have a special meaning in the context of the game. 

One of the most prominent examples is the keyword “Flying” from Magic the Gathering. Printed on the card is only the word “Flying”, typically very prominent positioned so everyone can see it immediately. But what flying actually means from a rules perspective is: “This creature can’t be blocked except by creatures with flying and/or reach”. But on almost all cards that entire sentence is simple replaced with the keyword “flying”. The goal is that players remember the rules text and associate it with the keyword.

Benefits of Keywords in Strategy Card Games (TCGs, CCGs, LCGs) :

• They take up less space

• They make cards look simpler

•  Keywords increase elegance

• They Make Learning new cards easier

• Make it easier to see that cards act in the same way

• They are easier to be referenced
• They create a shared vocabulary for players

When to use Keywords in Strategy Card Games (TCGs, CCGs, LCGs):

• If you have recurring effects

• If you want to add Flavor
• To highlight certain archetypes
• To reference cards

Benefits of Keyword Counters in Magic (Ikoria)

• More Staying power for spells
• Giving players more choices on cards (Keyword a or b)
• Easy way to combine permanent and temporary effects on a single card
• More meaning for cards that care about keywords (Mentors that bring their own counters) –> Enablers and Benefits in one single card.
• Increased number of possible combinations (Giving player the freedom to combine keywords and creatures in a way they prefer)
• Using counters as markers in order to highlight whether a creature has used a certain ability. (Such as persist or monstrous)
• Balancing tool – Keyword counters as small incremental effects to boost cards (e.g. leaving a trample counter behind)

Ressources:

• https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twinkle-someones-ikoria-2020-04-13

 

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

This week I have been studying quests. Especially the design of quests in card games. How do you get an epic Hero Journey, which is what a quest often is, represented on a single card? How do you get the theme of your game transported on a single quest card and how do you design the quests to be as interesting as possible? What tasks do you set for your players and how do you reward them for the effort they put into the quest. I have asked myself all these questions. Especially because I am currently working on the quest cards for my drafting game. I took a look at some of my favorite games and researched how they have implemented their quest cards. Let’s dive into the topic and start by defining what a quest means for me. 

What is a Quest?

A quest is some form of a task that a player or a group of players may complete in order to gain a reward. Quests are most commonly seen in role-playing games and massively multiplayer online games. For completing a quest, players typically receive some form of loot or reward such as items, currency, Victory Points or access to new levels, locations or areas. Often the reward is also ingrained into the character development system and by completing quests players also increase their character’s experience in order to learn new skills and new abilities.

Oftentimes a quest is also described as a difficult or exciting journey towards a specific goal. 

In literature, the object of a quest requires great exertion on the part of the hero, who must overcome many obstacles, typically including much travel. The aspect of travel allows the storyteller to showcase exotic locations and cultures (an objective of the narrative, not of the character). The object of a quest may also have supernatural properties, often leading the protagonist into other worlds and dimensions. The moral of a quest tale often centers on the changed character of the hero.

Bloodrage

Structure: Quest cards are drafted, then played hiddenly as a free action and grant bonus Victory Points if the requirements are fulfilled during the quest phase.  

Hidden/Revealed: Hidden

Task: x units died before Ragnarok, most power in a specific province.

Reward: Victory Points & 1 clan stat upgrade

One Time vs. Continous effect: one time

Track Process: none → one time yes or no check

Resolution Timing: After all the combat happened during the quest phase

Limit: only limited by the number of quests you drafted 

 

Drafting Quests:

In Bloodrage quests are cards that are drafted together with all the other cards. 

Play Quests as free actions:

Take a Quest card from your hand and commit to it by placing it facedown on your clan sheet, on top of your clan’s animal symbol.

During this phase, try to fulfill the demands of the quests you commit to, reaping the rewards listed on them during the next Quest phase. However, there’s no penalty for failing a quest.

Quest Phase:

Each player reveals all quests they have committed to. If you have met a quest’s demands, you gain the amount of Glory indicated on the card, and may also raise any 1 of your clan stats 1 step.

If you fail to fulfill a quest, you get nothing, but you also lose nothing. Discard all revealed quests, whether successful or not.

Most quests involve having the most STR in a given province. Add together the STR of each of your figures in that province (including the supporting fjord) and compare your total to the total STR of each other clan in that same province.

If your total is greater, you fulfill the quest. If you tie with an enemy, you fail the quest.

Magic the Gathering

In Magic the gathering quest cards have been introduced in the Zendikar expansion in form of enchantment cards. These enchantments gain quest counters as triggered abilities for fulfilling specific quest specific events. After building up enough quest counters, players receive a reward in the form of a strong game effect.

Structure: Gains counters on events specified on the card until a threshold is reached → Reward

Hidden/Revealed: Revealed

One Time vs. Continous effect: both

Track Process: Quest counters on card

Resolution Timing: Immediately once achieve or Activated Ability for the player

Limit: No Limit

Example: Quest for the Gravelord

Whenever a creature dies, you may put a quest counter on Quest for the Gravelord.

Remove three quest counters from Quest for the Gravelord and sacrifice it: Create a 5/5 black Zombie Giant creature token.

This is a very good cost-ratio. A 5/5 creature is something you have to spend 4 or 5 mana for and not just one. But you have to wait until you receive the reward. The interesting thing here is that you can adjust your gameplan. You may be willing to sacrifice creatures more frequently than you would without the quests. 

Some quest have one time effects once the threshhold of quest counters is reached. That means you have to sacrifice them. Others remain on the battlefield and grand a ongoing global effect. 

I really like the implementation but most of the quests have never been really popular. At least in competitive play. Probably because their effect is delayed and not predictable enough for competitive play. You will only be able to reap the rewards in the late game which sometimes is too late and you often cannot afford to play a card that has no immediate effect on the game. As far as I know they are more popular in multiplayer formats such as commander. 

How Quests in Magic came to be:
Before quests became quests in Magic they were actually called Maps during the design process. They were artifacts that required you to have three things before you were able to sacrifice them to get some effect. 

The idea was that each map had a series of tasks you had to fulfill, and once you did it would lead you to your “treasure”—a spell effect that was much cheaper than it should be.

An example (the predecessor of quest for the gravelord) :

Map to the Scary Graveyard

1 Artifact

T, Sacrifice CARDNAME: Put a 4/4 Zombie token into play. You may only activate CARDNAME if you have an equipment, a zombie, and a cleric in play.

In the end they changed it to quests because they wanted them to be enhancements in the different colors instead of colorless artifacts. That has something to do with the color pie in Magic that restricts the designers to assign certain ability and keywords to colorless cards. 

But they did not only change the card type but also the “how to accomplish a quest”-part. 

They liked the idea of cards that you cannot use until you have done or achieved something. Rather than have each quest require three different things, they instead changed the quests to have you do one thing multiple times. That allowed them to vary the number of times you need to trigger a quest in order to achieve the reward. That helped them balancing the quests. 

Other Magic implementations that feel like quests:

Flip cards are two cards in one. When something is triggered, the card is flipped and becomes the “other” part of the card.

You ignore the information on the bottom half of the card until the creature in play “flips” when certain heroic conditions are met. When you flip a hero, you turn it upside down and play with the other half of the card. All of the flipped versions are legendary and have powerful abilities.

Double-faced cards in Magic have a regular card frame on each side. 

Thematically, double-faced cards represent something that undergoes a major transformation, hence the keyword action. In the Innistrad sets, many are werewolves, vampires or zombies. In Magic Origins and Core Set 2019 they are planeswalkers whose spark is igniting. 

Hearthstone

In hearthstone you have not only quests but also so-called secrets. The difference is that quests are revealed to the opponent while secrets are surprise surprise hidden until you achieve them.

Structure: Quest cards are automatically included in the player’s start hand.  

Hidden/Revealed: Quests Revealed / Secrets hidden

Task: Do something x times

Reward: 1st implementation: Strong Card (ending the game soon after) / 2nd Implementation: New Hero Power

One Time vs. Continous effect: 

Track Process: Counters on Card (digital)

Resolution Timing: Immediately once achieve

Limit: 1 Quest per player. 

Quests:

A Quest is a spell ability and type of spell card which grants a conditional reward. When the condition of the Quest is met, the Quest’s reward is given to the player. 

Only one Quest can be in play on each hero at any given time. Any Quest currently in play must be completed before a second Quest can be played

Peter Whalen, Senior Designer of Hearthstone talked a bit about the design process of Quest Cards.An interesting quote of that text is:

“We quickly realized that the most fun Quests were the ones that asked you to accomplish something over the course of a game.”

In the beginning, they wanted quests to feel as much like normal cards as possible because that would make them easier to understand. There was one card called Quest for Epic loot which said: “When this is the only card in your hand, transform this into epic loot.” 

One of the things they noticed was that quests that transformed in a players hand were very frustrating for the opponent. Because a very strong effect happened out of nowhere and they didn’t really have a chance to interact with them. To fix that, they required quest cards to be played, and allowed both players to see their progress.

Another interesting aspect about quest cards is also mentioned in this article: how are Quests played. They tried having them played automatically from a players deck so they didn’t take up space in the opening hand, but they figured out that this would be too powerful. With no risk involved at all, every single deck would play Quests just in case they happened to satisfy the conditions, or simply to thin the deck by one card. On the other hand, having to draw a Quest felt really bad, because you couldn’t make progress on it until you drew it halfway through the game. That’s why they decided to have quest cards start in your opening hand.

Finally, we needed to decide how much mana Quests would cost, either (0) or (1). When they cost (0), playtesting revealed that players would often hold their Quest and then forget to play it before playing the card that triggered it. Making them cost (1) helped to slow the game down a little—letting the moment you played the quest feel more impactful—and required extra strategy around when to play the Quest.

Secrets:

A Secret is a spell card that is cast normally but has a delayed, hidden effect, which only takes place when a specific event occurs. When a Secret is played, a Secret icon appears on the caster’s portrait, but the name and details of the Secret are not revealed to the opponent until the card is activated by its hidden condition.

Secrets can only be activated on the opponent’s turn, preventing the player from triggering them themselves.

Players cannot have more than one copy of the same Secret active at any one time. Players are unable to play Secret cards which match one of their active Secrets. When played directly from the hand, players can have up to 5 different Secrets active at a time.
Secrets are not always something you can achieve yourself but more a game situation that needs to come up. It is hearthstones way of interacting during your opponents turn without giving the player priority. You can only try to maneuver the game into a direction. 

Carnival of Monster Quest Cards

Carnival of Monsters has two different types of quests. Season goal cards are revealed goals everyone can achieve and secret goals that are cards that are drafted and then played hiddenly so that only the owner can achieve it. 

Season Cards are revealed in the begging of each round and are a mix of a public and private goal. Each player gains some gold coins for playing a monster of a specific color and at the end of the round, the player with the strongest monster in that color receives the season goal card which grants additional Victory Points at the end of the game.

Hidden Goals, however, are not revealed but secretly drafted just like all the other cards in the game. After a player picked one of those they have to pay 1 gold to place it in their hidden pile (I forget the name of the pile). And at the end of the game these secret goals grant additional victory points for specific cards. For example 1 VP for each Monster with strength x or more. Or 1 VP for each employee that you drafted, and so on. 

Gloomhaven 

In Gloomhaven you of course have an overall quest goal per mission. But that goal is not printed on cards but in the campaign book instead. That is not what I want to talk about today. I want to focus on the hidden battle goals every player received per mission. Battle Goals are cards drawn at the start of a scenario, representing targets needed to be achieved in a scenario by each character individually. Each player draws 2 cards at the start of a scenario, from which they choose one and discard the other. Each player keeps their character’s Battle Goal secret from other members of the party.

E.g. 

• Take only Short rests during the Scenarios
• Your current hit point value must be equal to your maximum hit point value at the end of the scenario
• Using no items during the scenario.
• Kill five or more monsters during this scenario.

At the end of the scenario, the hidden goals are revealed and if accomplished the players are allowed to check one or two checkmarks on the character sheet which is used to update their combat modifier deck.  

Why are the goals hidden? It helps with preventing the Alpha player syndrome which I’m often guilty of, but if I don’t have all the information I can’t ‘help’ people with their turns. I

Runeterre Hero Cards

Runeterra does not really come with specific quest cards. Instead each hero card comes with a built in quest. Each hero has a requirement and once this requirement is met the hero card is flipped and the stronger version of the hero with a new ability is available to the player. 

E.g. 

• Fiora: 
  • Quest: I’ve killed 2 enemies
  • Flipped: When I’ve killed 4 enemies and survived, you win the game.
• Vladimir
  • You’ve had 6+ other allies survive damage.
  • Attack: For each other attacking ally, deal 1 to it and 1 to the enemy Nexus. Regeneration: Heals fully at the start of each round.
• Jinx
  • Your hand is empty
  • Start of Round: Draw 1. The first time you empty your hand each round, create a Fleeting Super Mega Death Rocket! in hand.

The combination of heroes and spells is very very nice. Each Hero has a set of cards that help him to level up. This often changes the whole gameplay experience. They are designed in a way that those quests really are the core strategy your gameplan evolves around. 

 

Dungeon Draft

Deal 5 Quest Cards face-down to each player. Then, each player selects 3 of their Quests to keep and returns the remainder facedown to the bottom of the Quest Deck.

To play Quests, players must have Heroes and Weapons of the appropriate class. Quests have no cost other than this requirement. For example, a Quest’s cost could be that you need to have at least 3 Mage and 3 Rogue cards played. Unlike Heroes and Weapons, Quest Cards may have abilities that can be used over multiple rounds

• Some are worth points 
• Others grant unique bonuses (e.g. druids cost 2 less to play)
• All cards cost you 2 less Gold to play.

⇒ Quest Cards: Giving the players some form of direction and guidance to develop their strategy

What I want to achieve with quest cards 

• Give the players guidance to find an appropriate strategy
• GIve players a feeling of satisfaction when they solved a quest (it needs to be somewhat difficult to achieve it and not just a delayed effect that is going to happen anyway. It should also not be some form of no brainer that just gives addition VPs at the end of the game no matter what you did for it.) In my eyes it should be something you really have to work for and to 
• They deliver flavor and tell the narrative of your game

Resources:

• https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/achieving-zendikar-part-ii-2009-09-14
• Implementation of Quests (reddit)
• Heartstone Quests
• Hearthstone Quests 2
• Heartstone Secrets

 

Today we have a great guest on the show and I am really excited to learn more about his game. He is the designer of AracKhan Wars, a strategy card game that just got successfully funded with more than 100k on Kickstarter last month. It’s a highly strategic game about card placement, positioning, and maximizing the potential of card combos. At first glance, it reminded me of Magic mixed with Summoner Wars and Warhammer (all of those are games I really love). In addition, the game also has incredible art and graphic design and therefore looks really really appealing. That’s why I am very excited to talk to Robert Palmer today, the designer of Arackhan Wars.

Some of the topics we discussed:

• AracKhan Wars gameplay
• Importance of constraints in games
• Tracking statistics in playtests and making adjustments based on it
• Preparing for a Kickstarter campaign
• Stretch Goals

If you want to check out AracKhan Wars, please visit their website here: AracKhan Wars Website

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Due to the corona virus pandemic we also had to give up our weekly tabletop round. Therefore we switched to Tabletop Simulator and used the time to play a lot of Bloodrage in the last weeks. I’d like to use today’s episode to reflect a bit about what I learned as a game designer from this great game. 

I had really great games in bloodrage and really frustrating games. From a game design point of view, this is a really good thing, because it allowed me to analyze both the things I liked and the things that were somehow not perfect.

Interesting Design choice 1: Player count specific cards

Some of the cards have a small number printed on them indicating that they are only used if at least that number of players are participating. Before the game starts you go through each pile and return to the box any cards you find with a number greater than the number of players. If you set up a 2 player game, for example, you have to remove all the 3 and 4 numbered cards. This allows you to design cards with a specific player count in mind. If one of these cards would be broken in a lower player count or wouldn’t just work from a rules perspective you can remove it in lower player games. 

Interesting Design choice 2: Removing 2 cards at the end of the draft

This removes 2 “choices” that are actual no real choices for the players. 

Interesting Design choice 3: Start symmetrical and end very asymmetrical

In an interview Eric Lang mentioned he had an asymmetrical version of the game before he changed it to start as a symmetrical game.  

Start symmetrical and go from their resulted in a much better game because people are not drawn into a specific direction. This makes the draft more strategic and more important and in the end more open-ended. 

The draft starts wide open and it narrows down towards the end.

Interesting Design choice 4: Different card types in a draft

Different card types (quests, combat modifier cards and upgrade cards). You need all of those cards in order to win. 

Interesting Design Choice 5: Key Strategy Cards only once in draft

• Key cards are only once in the game. As a result you almost never have players in the same strategy.
• Strategies for me are not “loud enough”. I find it very important to have cards that really explain the players in an easy way what the core strategy of that particular build is. In bloodrage I found some of those builds rather complex and not so easy to understand.  

Interesting Design choice 6: Different Draft Phases

• Different phases to take into account different board states
• If your game is about conflict it can make sense to divide the drafting into different rounds because it asks your player to take new board states and situations into account in every drafting round.
• Comback Mechanic due to different strength of the cards

Interesting Design choice 7: Combat Modifier Cards

Interesting effects, not just static values as it is done in many other games. They are much more ingrained into the tactic. E.g. there are combat modifier cards that actually want you to loose combat.

Interesting Design choice 8: Innovative Tactics and Theme

I like the theme because it is about dying in ragnarok. Death is actually something you look forward to as a wiking and you want to earn as much glory as possible on your way of achieving death. 

That means dying and losing fights is actually something that is playable as a tactic. For me as player who always wants to win this tactic was difficult to digest in the beginning. And it was really mentally challenging for me to figure that tactic out. 

Interesting Design choice 9: Miniature individualization

You put coloured rings onto the base toof the minis to determine to which player they belong.

→ Good for people who want to paint their minis because they have all the same base color

→ Good for boardgamers that want a very clear and precise distincition between the different players. 

Interesting Design Choice 10: The cost of long term strategies

Blood Rage is not about minute-to-minute clever plays. It’s about drafting cards that come together to create a long term plan. It is about playing cards in the correct order to maximize the points you get from them. But for me these long term strategies rarely worked out as planned due to opponents interfering with my plans. The problem is that I often ended up with clan upgrades or quests that were more or less useless for me because my plans didn’t work out. I missed some kind of secondary use for those cards. 

The second problem that comes with long term strategies is the fact that  you need to predict your friends strategies in order to win. Hate drafting is a very important aspect of the game. But also those cards that you hate draft are often useless for your strategy. Another reason why I would have liked to see a secondary use for cards. 

And since you need to know all strategies to be able to effectivly draft your own strategy and to counter your opponents strategy you need to know a lot about the game. That isn’t a problem if all players have the same experience with the game, but if one of the players has more games played or spent a bit of time on the internet researching the dominant strategies, this information advantage cannot be caught up again. This is a problem most drafting games have.

Interesting Design Choice 11: Visible Glory Track 

Blood Rage has a track showing how all players are doing at all times. Why is there a track informing the players who’s in last place and can’t possibly win?

 

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Today I want to analyze a game that has some similarities with the game I am currently working on. At its core, the game is about playing cards to create a higher score value than your opponent. It’s also a game about bluffing with the goal to trick your opponent into overcommitting their cards to the board and leaving them with fewer cards for subsequent rounds. The game I am talking about is Gwent the digital card game. 

When I first heard about Gwent, it was presented to me with the following pitch:

In Gwent each player has 2 lanes, a melee and a ranged one and you can play your cards into one of the two lanes. And then the player with the most points wins. 

And that’s it, was my first reaction. What about combat, what about attacking your opponent? 

When you play a lot of different strategy card games like I do, this pitch sounds super super boring at first. There’s virtually no combat between the players and I was wondering how to interact with each other in a meaningful way at all. But let me assure you, the game has much more to offer than it sounds. 

Gwent was initially introduced as a mini game within the Witcher 3 PC Game. But due to its great popularity, it was made into standalone online card game. As far as I know players started developing their own PvP versions of the Witcher 3 MiniGame (which was against the AI only). And this is what you do as publishing company. You listen to your players and develop the games they want. It is similar with Magics commander format. Also invented by the players and now hugely polular. 

In 2019 Gwent was also released as a narrative driven storytelling game as Thronebreaker the Witcher Tales which I really enjoyed. The game has undergone major reworks during this time but one thing didn’t change. It plays nothing like other strategy card games. And that’s the reason why I wanted to take a closer look at it. I mean one goal of many game designers is to make something completely new. That’s why I wanted to identify what makes Gwent special? How did they innovate the genre and what can we learn from them as game designers? 

Interesting Design choice 1: Winning 2 out of 3 rounds with a limited known pool of cards

This doesn’t sound too innovative, does it? But the fact that you have to decide how many resources in form of cards you are going to spend in round one before you pass is one of the major decisions you have to make in the game. And this can lead to some very tense dynamics. Whoever passes first can potentially obtain a card advantage for the future, even though that might mean giving up the current round.

Interesting Design choice 2: The Lanes

• Areas / Lanes: You can play cards into two different lanes. This provides options and limitations at once. 

   

  • Different effect on cards based on which lane you play the card to
  • Limitation of spots on each lane 
  • Effects affecting the entire lane

Interesting Design Choice 3: First Player “Strategem”

• • Because of its structure, going first is not an advantage in Gwent. Hence, players who have to go first get a a so-called Strategem
  • Stratagem: “A single-use Immune card, which only spawns for the player who goes first, can only be used in the first round, and is Banished from the game upon use, or if it is unused at the end of the first round. Each faction has its own Stratagem with different effects, and there are also neutral Stratagems usable in any faction.”

Interesting Design Choice 4: Minimize the role of luck

While matches do always play out a little differently, there is way more consistency overall compared to other games of the genre.

• • Reasons: Mostly deterministic card effects and special abilities. ⇒  The course of a match will generally be shaped by well-planned actions and not by luck (top-decks).

Interesting Design Choice 5: Factions

Each faction has its own identity. These identities emerge through different archetypes, which encourage different playstyles.

 

 

Connect with Ambal Tournament (Bernardo Bittencourt):
Ambal Tournament Website
Ambal Tournament Article about Faction/Archetype Design
Ambal Tournament on Instagram
Ambal Tournament on Discord

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Nerdlab Website
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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

In Episode 53 of the Nerdlab, we are going to talk about action selection in card and board games. 

Most games in the area of strategy card games like Magic, Keyforge and most of the others as well are sequential games. That means players choose their action one at a time before the other players do. But what I’ve always been interested in, is exploring games where players select their actions at the same time. Instead of sequential action selection, we now talk about simultaneous action selection. Luckily for me and for you, I am following an expert for simultaneous action selection on Instagram. He is a game designer creating exactly that kind of game. A strategy duelling card game with simultaneous action selection. And let me tell you: This is one of the most promising games I have seen in a while. The design looks very very clean and when I read the individual cards I instantly want to play with them because I can imagine how to build nice strategies and combos with them. So overall the game looks very very promising to me with regards to game mechanism and artwork as well.  

So I am very very proud that Bernardo accepted my invitation to be part of the show today to tell us a bit more about his experiences with simultaneous action selection and the design process of his game Ambal Tournament.

Topics we covered during the interview:

• Challenges during the design process of Ambal Tournament
• Definition of simultaneous action selection
• Advantages and disadvantages of simultaneous action selection in games
• Design challenges that come with simultaneous action selection
• Tools and process of designing different factions and how these can guide the design of individual cards (please take a look at the following illustration how Bernardo designed his different factions)

 

 

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Join the Nerdlab Community
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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

As some of you already know, I’m currently working on a drafting game where the battle between two players is done automatically. This automatic battle has been a conscious design decision of mine, because I wanted to focus on the other aspects of the game. The drafting, the team composition and the positioning of the heroes on the board. But every time I play the game, I feel like I’m missing some form of interaction during the battle. Probably also because I mostly play games like Magic, where there is a very high degree of interaction. And exactly because of that, because I have the feeling that my game lacks some interaction, I wanted to look at all the possible forms of interaction in board games. And that’s what this episode is about today. 

Interaction in Board Games:

We play board games with our family our spouse or with friends. Most Board games are inherently social. And when we are in a social environment we as humans happen to interact. And we also do so in board games. I mean the fun during our game nights does not come from all sitting next to each other doing their own thing. That’s why I want to take a closer look at what player interaction adds to board games today.

Interaction adds Tension and counters Determinism

For me, this is the most important reason why I enjoy interactions in board games. Because Interactions add Tension. Tension comes up when there is uncertainty about a desired outcome. And this uncertainty can be achieved or increased by having limited influence over the outcome. If decisions of an opponent influence your desired outcome then this is for me a form of interaction that adds a lot of tension to the game. This can be a counterspell in Magic that negates your spells effect or a decision whether or not to block one of your attacks.

Examples of Interactivity in Games

• Attacking and Blocking
• Trading
• Negotiating
• Auctions
• Fighting for Limited Resources
• Reactions
• Delayed Actions aka Presenting Puzzles
• Triggers
•  

Resources:

http://makethemplay.com/index.php/2017/05/05/7-forms-of-player-interaction/ http://www.leagueofgamemakers.com/game-elements-interaction/

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Today I want to dedicate myself to the topic of complexity in board games. The motivation for this topic today is that I recently had the feeling that my Autobattler game is a bit too complex. Therefore I have thought about where the complexity in my game, but also in board games, in general, comes from and how players perceive this complexity. I also want to talk about the difference between complexity and depth in board games. And of course, I want to discuss some measures I could take to reduce the complexity in my game.

Complexity in Card Games and Board Games

There are several scientific articles that deal with mathematical or computational complexity in board games. To calculate the complexity mathematically most of the time the number of possible decisions is calculated. This is then displayed in a decision tree. But I do not want to talk about mathematical complexity today. Because I probably don’t understand all of it and because I think it is not very helpful for us as game designers. I’m more interested in the perceived complexity of players and how we as designers can influence and manage this complexity.

Card games, in particular, can quickly degenerate into complex monsters. Especially during the design process, because you want to try out many interesting sounding ideas. And on each card can hold its own rules text that then somehow interacts with other cards. 

Depth vs. Complexity in Strategy Card Games

A lot of people will interchange depth and complexity. But they are not the same thing. It is the designer’s job to get the maximum amount of depth out of the minimum amount of complexity.

Depth:
Depth is the number of different possibilities or meaningful choices a player has within the ruleset of the game. 
Meaningful choices in that sense can be very different from individual to individual. Because players must recognize the different choices they have. As a result, depth is also dependent on a player’s mental capacity to recognize and process different options. If players can’t think around their possibilities and come up with a meaningful choice, it is no depth.  

Another very important aspect of depth is that players should be able to learn from the outcome of those choices. 

Complexity:
Complexity by itself isn’t a good thing. It is the mental burden put on the player by the rules of the game.

• Data a player has to store
• Rules a player to process
• Calculations a player has to make in order to make meaningful decisions
• It creates barriers of entries for newer players 

Different forms of Complexity in Card Games

Mark Rosewater defines three types of complexity in a game:

1. Comprehension Complexity
2. Board Complexity
3. Strategic Complexity

Comprehension Complexity

• Understanding the card
• Are the rules clearly explained
• Do the players have the complete context to understand the card, or do they need other cards, rules or resources to understand the cards?

Board Complexity

• How much interaction does this card have with other cards?
• Does having this one card make you have to reevaluate every other card on the battlefield?

Strategic Complexity

• understanding how best to use your cards

How to reduce complexity?

• Hide Complexity in Variety
• Hide Complexity in Rarity
• User Interface
• Tutorials

Resources:
Article about Complexity in Magic 1
Article about Complexity in Magic 2
Geeklist on Games – Complexity vs. Depth

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Today you are listening to the 50th episode of the Nerdlab podcast. When I wrote that number into my manuscript I had to pause for a moment. 50. That doesn’t sound too much, does it? I mean there are podcasters with hundreds of or even thousands of shows under their belt. But while I was sitting there in front of my manuscript thinking about the number 50 I realized one thing. And that was how grateful I am to be at the point where I currently am. I put so much effort into the production of this show. And when I see how it is developing over the last year, I have to say it makes me proud. I am proud that I am consistently creating content that is helpful for some of you out there. 

I thought about what I most grateful for. I thought about inviting a very special guest to the show. A very successful game designer for example. Because I am really thankful to have the chance to talk to successful designers. But then, I realized that the core of this show is not about the guests. It is about you, the listeners. That is what I am most grateful for. To get in touch with so many people that share the same goals. And it became clear to me what I want to talk about in my 50th episode: I want to talk to you how valuable it is to get in contact with other game designers. And I want to encourage you to do that on a regular basis.   

That means: Today will not be a typical episode. It will not be about a specific game design topic as usual but more about the benefits of social interaction in our industry. We recently had a very nice development in our Mastermind Group which I think delivers huge value to a lot of game designers. But people participating in it mainly came via Reddit and I want to give you the chance to participate and benefit from it as well.

Reasons to join the Nerdlab Mastermind Group for Game Designers

We are a group of game designers who meet once a week for about an hour via discord to share our game design progress and keep each other accountable on our journey to develop great games.

If you don’t know what a mastermind group is, here is a short introduction of what we do, what we stand for and why you should join us:

• The overall goal of this mastermind group is to grow as a game designer and achieve success. And we strongly believe that we can help each other on this journey.
• We do brainstorming sessions
• We playtest our games
• We share educational content (interesting articles, podcasts, videos and other insights. Often as a response on a specific design question of someone)
• We keep each other accountable
• We support each other (e.g. to build momentum for Kickstarter, social media, etc.)
• We challenge each other to set strong goals, and more importantly, to accomplish them.
• We keep things confident in this mastermind group

And the most important thing: We know the games other group members are working on and care about their goals. As a result, you will get feedback that is very different compared to the one you get from huge but anonymous social media groups. Because we are willing to spend more than a few seconds to think about your design challenges.

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Animus – The Draft Building Game:
Animus Website
Animus on Facebook
Animus on Tabletop Simulator (Version not fully up to date)

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

In today’s episode, I have the chance to talk to Ed Rodriguez, a great game designer with whom I think I have a lot in common. We both seem to be into strategy card games a lot. Especially drafting as a mechanism is something we both love. We are also both part of the same social media groups. We use Tabletop Simulator to digitize our ideas. But our most important commonality, at least for today’s show is that we both set very clear goals at the beginning of our design journey. Especially with regards to limitations and constraints. However, there are also some major differences between us. First of all, his tabletop simulator implementations look a thousand times more professional than mine and secondly, he somehow manages to keep the limitations he sets himself. And this is exactly what we want to discuss today: How to design a game with very strict limitations. 

Topics we talked about during our interview:

• What is Animus the Draft Building Game and how was its design process?
• When do you set constraints during your design process?
• Why do you set constraints as a game designer?
• What is the advantage of strict limitations for a game design project?
• Do you adjust your constraints during the design process?
• What are Examples of typical Game Design Constraints?
• How does the Process of Setting Constraints look like?

 

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

If this isn’t the first episode you hear from the Nerdlab Podcast, you probably know by now that I’m not only interested in board and card games, but also in digital card games of all kind. I look at most of the games and think about why the designers made which design decisions. And I also try to figure out if the game concepts, keywords, and mechanisms could work in the non-digital world as well. Today I’ll take a closer look at Legends of Runeterra, the new strategy card game from the League of Legends universe. 

I remember when I first heard about Runeterra in October. It was in the Strategy Card Games Facebook group. And I must admit, my first impression after watching the initial trailer was not very good. 

Here is my comment, which I wrote in the group: 

“I am definitely curious to check this out. But to be honest the video on the website really turned me down. I cannot see any kind of innovation that speaks to me. The most interesting part is maybe the fact that it alternates between attack and defense phase. The reactions for me just sounded like the stack of magic. Maybe the video just wasn’t very good, but I am kind of disappointed. However, the lvl up mechanic of the heroes in Runterra looks nice though.”

Boy have I been wrong. The game does so many things better than its competitors, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the game becomes the next big player in the digital card market. But let’s look at it step by step. 

Here comes my game design review of Legends of Runeterra.

Legends of Runetera – Rules and Core Gameplay

Before I go into more detail about how Runeterra does these things and whether Riot was successful, I’ll briefly explain the rough rules of the game without evaluating them too much. 

If you’ve played Magic, Hearthstone or Artifact, you’ll immediately get most of the Runeterra rules as well. The goal is to use your mana each turn to cast heroes, allies and spells to deal damage to your opponent’s nexus. Each player’s nexus starts with 20 health points and when that’s reduced to zero, they lose.

At the beginning of the match, each player draws four cards with the option to mulligan any number of them. At the beginning of each round, each player draws a new card. To play cards you have to spend mana which increases automatically by one each turn, allowing players to use more powerful cards or cast multiple cards in a turn.

Allies are also very similar to Hearthstone and Magic. They have attack and health values and can be used to attack or defend. However, attacking and defending works a bit differently than in Magic. Spells come with different effects such as buffing allies, dealing damage to enemy allies, or using special keywords like stun. Spells are either fast or slow. Fast spells work like instants in Magic as you can use them to respond to enemy actions while slow spells are more like sorceries in Magic that you cannot use as a reaction. 

If you hear that, you might understand why I wasn’t super hyped after I watched the initial trailer. It doesn’t really sound like there’s much innovation in the game compared to the big players in the market. 

So what’s different about Legends of Runeterra you might ask? 

Don’t worry, there is more.

10 exceptional design choices of Legends of Runeterra (LoR) 

Here are my top 10 exceptional design choices and what we can learn from them. Or in other words: What makes Runeterra special.

1. Spellmana to reduce variance (Resources)
2. Action Reaction system
3. Reducing Combat Decision Complexity (Attack and Defence System)
4. Heroes and their influence on the tactic
5. Support / Battle Line
6. Gameplay State as Trigger on Cards
7. Reduced Time for Tutor Cards
8. RNG
9. Meta Game Patching
10. “Color” depending Drafting

 

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

This week I am talking about a situation most of us have already experienced more than once. Let me give you an example: Your opponent just sits there, quietly, almost paralyzed staring at the board. Seconds go by, minutes go by and you start looking at your phone because there is just nothing else to do. The situation I talk about is analysis paralysis. And although analysis paralysis depends to a large extent on a player’s experience with the game and his or her skill to process information, it is also strongly dependent on whether a game tends to cause complex situations that lead to analysis paralysis or not. And since it is certainly no fun to watch your opponent pondering, I want to explore where analysis paralysis comes from and show you 15 possibilities you can consider when designing a game to reduce this effect as much as possible.

Topics of the show:

• What is analysis paralysis?
• Who is responsible for analysis paralysis? Player or Designer?
• How to reduce analysis paralysis?

15 Ways to reduce analysis paralysis

1. Remove game elements
2. Remove resources
3. Remove choices by adding constraints
4. Remove choices by adding randomness
5. Reduce player interaction
6. Hide information
7. Make changes of the board state incremental
8. Reduce Math
9. Be consistent and clear with mechanics and the goal of your game
10. The obvious choice
11. Reduce the impact of an action
12. Reduce interaction between elements
13. Make it too difficult to foresee the consequences
14. Add a timer
15. Simultaneous Action Selection

 

 

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Stonemaier Games:
Stonemaier Games Website
12 Tenets of Board Game Design by Stonemaier Games

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Today I have a very special guest for you. If you are a game designer, I’m sure you already know him. Why? Because he produces an incredible amount of outstanding content in which he shares his game design knowledge with us. This way he is creating immense value for the entire game design community and therefore enjoys a very high reputation. 

But the extraordinary thing about our guest today is that he combines so many different roles under one hat. He is not only a successful content producer but also one of the most successful game designers of all time. And as if that were not enough, he is also a super successful businessman leading his own publishing company Stonemaier Games. He raised millions of dollars on kickstarter for his games like Scythe, Viticulture, Euphoria or Charterstone. For me it is an absolute mystery how he accomplishes all of this. And that is why I invited Jamey Stegmaier as a special guest to ask him exactly that. 

Topics we covered during the interview:

• How does the Game Design process of Jamey Stegmaier look like from start to finish?
• What are the most important steps in each game design stage?
• What are some important questions to ask yourself during the playtesting phase?
• How to get into the game design industry?
• How to build an audience and be consistent as a game designer and content producer?

Today we have a great guest on the show. Gary Dworetsky is the designer and publisher of the very successful game Imperium: The Contention. The game has an incredible 8.1 rating on board game geek and is a 4-X card game about deploying fleets, moving ships into the right position, and then crushing your opponent in space combat.

In addition, he is also currently working on a title that is desired by many many people. Most of you know Slay the Spire as the pioneer of roguelike deckbuilding games. Gary is currently working on a board game implementation of the game. Personally, I also played the digital game quite a bit and am very curious to learn more about the board game version today.

During the show, we talked about Gary’s Game Design approach, his favorite game mechanics of Imperium and Slay the Spire, and how he was able to get his hands on such an exciting License.

If you want to keep up with all the news around Slay the Spire you can visit Gary`s website here: Contention Games

 

Starport:
Starport Website
Starport on Twitter
Starport on Instagram

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

 

Today I want to focus on a topic that is very important to me. At the moment my kids ask me every night before they go to bed if I can tell them a story. In the past, each kid chose a book and we read those books together. But since some days it is more and more important to them that I come up with the stories myself. Mostly because they want to influence the flow of the story. This can mean the ghost of my story has to be friendly and help the protagonists instead of playing a trick on them. That means I have to come up with new ideas and stories on the fly of how the story could progress. When I thought about that situation a bit more I realized that what my kids actually want to do is playing an RPG. And that is exactly the topic I want to discuss today. Designing and playing RPGs for and with kids. 

Since my kids are still a bit young and I am just at the beginning of the journey of playing RPGs with them I am very glad to have a guest for today’s show. He has a lot more experience in both, playing and designing RPGs for kids. He is the not only the owner of the very cool domain RPGforKids.com, but he is also the designer of Starport a fun, educational and non-violent tabletop RPG for Kids.  And of course he is also a father. But there is one thing he is not. He is not the art director of his game Starport. Because that job was taken over by his 8 year old boys. I am super excited to hear how this came to be and learn more about the design process of Starport. 

Topics we covered during the interview:

• How to design games for kids?
• How to include kids into the game design process?
• What components and rules should be used in RPG for kids?
• What are the rules of Starport?

 

 

Battle Babies:
Kickstarter Campaign for Battle Babies
Stuffed Horse Games Website
Stuffed Horse Games on FB
Stuffed Horse Games on Instagram

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

The topic of today’s episode is one that affects every game designer sooner or later. It’s a topic that heavily influences the success of your game. Because today we are going to talk about board game marketing. 

One advantage of big publishers is that they already have a loyal fanbase that they can target with their new products and releases. In addition, they already have existing distribution channels, already a high media interest and oftentimes a large marketing budget. All those things are extremely important for a successful market launch. And all those things are typically not available for first-time self-publishers. Nevertheless, there are many designers who still want to self-publish their own games and compete with large publishers. And I know that many of you also dream of publishing their own games. But how do you do that if you don’t have easy access to all those success factors I just mentioned. This is the question we want to talk about today. And even though I have a bit of a background in the marketing industry myself, I’ve invited a guest for today who can tell us first-hand. He is not only a business marketing major himself and the owner of the publishing company Stuffed Horse Games, but also right in the middle of publishing his game “Battle Babies” via Kickstarter. I am looking forward to interesting experiences and helpful guidance from our guest Brandon Seeger.

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Today’s show is about a “skeleton”. Before you panic and start looking for your weapons right now, be calm. We’re not talking about undead. We are talking about a design skeleton. Some form of blueprint for your game design.   

If you are able to execute the process of creating a “design skeleton” from front to back, then you are well on the way to creating a good game. I first saw this process model in an article by Mark Rosewater, Lead Designer of Magic, and I have been using it for all my designs ever since. Today I will show you how to create a design skeleton for your game in 7 steps. As an example I will use the creation of a Magic the Gathering Set today.

Definition: What is a design skeleton?

Some form of undead version of your game? 

• A design skeleton is a rough and preliminary plan of how your set of cards (or other components) will look like.  
• It is a blueprint for your future work from a meta perspective. 
• The purpose of a design skeleton is to identify what kind of cards you will need in your set without describing those cards in detail. 
• In the end, the design skeleton is a tool that helps you to get a big picture of all the aspects you want to put into your set of cards. It helps to start figuring out what the set is going to need design-wise both on color or faction level and card level.
• Because a design skeleton spells out what is needed for each slot, it’s very easy to just want to fill it in and be done with it, but that’s not what a design skeleton is for. A design skeleton is a tool a designer uses to give him a general sense of what the overall set is going to look like. I compare it to a sketch because it’s used in much the same way an artist uses a sketch.

 

First Step: Preliminary thoughts

Before we can actually create our “Design Skeleton”, we need to be clear about a few basic things:

• How do cards differ
  • Alliances, colors, card types
• How many cards do I need in total
• How many cards do I need per distinguishing criterion 

 

This does not mean that all these questions have to be finally answered, but you have to have at least a rough idea of what they are. Otherwise, it probably makes no sense to create a “Design Skeleton”. In terms of timing, I would say you create a Design Skeleton after you have an idea of the scope of the game. That means after you have thought about the goal of the game, the required components, constraints and your gameplay loop.  But before you start with the actual card design.

Second Step: Definition of Card Slots 

The second step when creating a design skeleton is to set up a spreadsheet and create one line per card slot. 

But what is a card slot you may ask? That is actually something you need to create exactly now if you don’t have it already. 

• For existing games, people are using card names and titles to refer to a card. That works because printed cards are constants. But during the design process and playtesting cards can change rapidly. And I do not only mean simple values on cards that change from 1 to 2, but also entire cards. Also, the theme and title of your card could change often so you might not be able to determine which card this final card represented in the beginning of your design. Card Slots are typically way more consistent. But they can also change of course.  
• But what is a card slot. It all comes down to your distinguishing factors and the questions we already asked ourselves during step 1. Let’s take Magic as an example:
• Magic has quite a few design constraints and distinguishing factors. The two most important ones for designing a new set are rarity and color. In Magic a typical set as a fixed amount of commons, uncommons, rares and mythics. Since Magic sets are typically almost symmetrical when it comes to color distribution that means that each color has a fixed amount of slots per rarity. In the actual magic set “Theros Beyond Death” are 108 commons. 19 or 20 per color + some artifacts and lands. 
• If you then add additional distinguishing factors like card type you get very particular slots. For example, you need 10 to 12 creatures in the common slot per color. That means you already have these slots fixed. Then they probably want some instant tricks per color, some removal, some enchantments and so on. At the end of these considerations, you end up with a list of card slots. But where do you start if you don’t have constraints like x amount of cards per faction and best practices like 10 creatures per color? Do your research and look how other games are doing it. Make assumptions and use math to create constraints and rules of thumb. Consider probabilities. How likely will a player see a card of tpye x when he draws y cards? Is this chance enough or do not?  
• Once you have your rule of thumbs write them down and work on your Card Slots. 

Unique Identifier per Card Slot

What also belongs to the second step is give each slot a unique identifier. Magic uses the term Card Code for that. 

In Magic this code is alphanumeric:

First Letter determines rarity: 

• C – common
• U – uncommon
• R – rare
• M – mythic rare
• L – land (This refers only to basic lands; all other lands fit into one of the above four rarities.)
• T – token
• S – special

Second letter represents the card frame which is similar but not exactly the color of the card: 

• W – white
• U – blue
• B – black
• R – red
• G – green
• Z – multicolor
• X – split cards (That’s split cards that aren’t monocolored; the mono-red ones in Planar Chaos, for example, just used R.)
• A – artifact (This is for traditional colorless artifacts; colored artifacts, except for Transguild Courier and Reaper King, use the appropriate color code.)
• L – land

Two-Digit Numbers represent a consecutive number per slot type. If they have 20 green common slots those slots would get the codes C – for common – G for green – and then 01 to 20 for those 20 slots. Then the same happens for all the other colors and other rarities. 

Magic R&D uses those Two-Digit Slot also for some other information. If they remove a card from the set but are not sure it might not get back in, it gets assigned the number 99. If they are working on a card but it is not yet assigned to a slot it gets assigned the number 88. There are more number codes they use to assign cards to team members working on them, to add notes and so on. But the main purpose really is to retain a list of slots and assign cards to that slots. 

Third Step: How many cards for your most important card type

Once you have your rough slots, you need to go into a little more detail. First of all, think about which card types are most important for the robustness of your game. In the case of Magic, these are definitely creatures. In the case of my drafting game, these are the Heroes. 

• That means the first thing Magic designers do when they design a new set is to think about how many creatures they want in that set. The answer is often something around 50% for a regular set and the common slot. 
• But in Magic this number is not equal for all colors. White and green tend to have more creatures than blue, black or red. The reason for this is the different playstyle of each color. That means when you have 100 slots available and think you need 50% creatures for your game to work best, you can distribute 50 creatures to the different colors. In Magic this would be 10 per color. But then you could argue that white is the color that goes wide with creatures and take one creature away from blue to add it to white and so on. At the end a set might end up with 7 blue creatures but 10 white creatures and so on. 
• Once you have assigned your most important card type to the slots you add a new column to your spreadsheet and put that type in. That means the first 10 white common slots would be assigned to “type” creature but only 7 blue slots would be assigned at that point.
• If you also have factions in your game and the goal that these factions have different playstyles because they utilize different card types more or less, this is the perfect time to consider this in your design skeleton.  

Fourth Step: Super rough card design of your most important card type

At that point of the skeleton, it can already make sense to create a super rough card design. By that I mean two things. Core Values (in Magic Power and Toughness) and Keywords. I am pretty sure that one blue Card Slot in Magic is always – Blue common creature 2/2 flying. The set specific twist comes later. For example by adding a set specific keyword or additional unique rules text. But at that point you don’t even need to be that specific. It could be enough to distinguish between small – medium – large creatures. Or by distinguishing between tank – damage – dealer – healer or whatever is appropriate for your game. The goal is to bring your color or faction identity to life. Step by Step. And you can do that best by getting more and more specific which each step. 

Fifth Step: Adding slots for the other Card Types

Once you have a rough idea of your most important card type you can fill up the rest of the slots with the other card types. But think about your choices and create assumptions and rules again. Here are some example rules of Magic. Each color gets an aura, but global enchantments can typically not be found in the common slot. All colors gain instants but white and blue get more than the rest. All colors get sorceries but black and green tend to have more than the rest. Artifacts tend to be utility cards. 

While you are filling the remaining card slots you will probably also make changes to the existing slots you already entered. Let’s say you realize you do not have enough slots for instants in a color, but you want to have that surprise moment you could add the keyword flash to one creature to make up for that. 

“This demonstrates the point of the skeleton. The skeleton isn’t there to lock the designer in but to make the designer aware of what things they need to allocate. When something isn’t working, the designer then has to re-adjust the skeleton to get what they need.” 

Sixth Step: Faction Specific effects 

In this step you go a bit deeper on your factions and how you want them to play out. If we stick with Magic the gathering, this would be the step in which you add the typical effects colors are famous for. Green gets a +3+3 pump spell at instant speed, blue gets a counter spell, red gets some form of lightning bolt, black some form of destroy effect and so on. But this is not only one card, this is typically an entire set of abilities and card effects. White gets something with lifegain, enchantment removal, and creature removal (often as enchantment), a combat trick and a spell that pumps the entire team. Sounds familiar to any magic set. Yes because it is. It is a proven structure that is reused over and over again with little twists and new flavor. And there is nothing wrong with it. As long as it does not feel repetitive for the players. If we design a new game we, unfortunately, don’t have this recipe for success. Nevertheless, I think it is the best way to distinguish between the different playstyles in your game and consider them at this state of the skeleton. 

Seventh Step: Adding set specific effects and mechanics you want to test 

Magic also adds their set-specific keywords and effects at that point of time. 

Typically the most common design issue is having too much to fit in. Too many card types. Too many keywords, too many effects, etc. Think about adding some of your desired effects on other card types. If you don’t have space for another sorcery or instant effect, add it as an enter the battlefield effect or on death effect on one of your creatures. 

When you work on your skeleton you will be forced to think about things like how often do I want to use this keyword. In which color do I use this keyword and what flavor and play type comes with it. This is the birds-eye view you can get from a good design skeleton. If you are working on individual cards, or spreadsheets with all the information we can sometimes lose the ability to see the big picture because we are too much in the details. 

That’s why I often go back to my design skeleton and see how my set of cards is coming together and what is missing. Treat the design skeleton as a starting point but also as a living document that helps you to see the big picture.

 

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Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 
My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.
For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

Mythgard is a digital collectible card game developed by Rhino Games. The open beta of the game was released in fall last year. So it’s actually still pretty new. 

The setting of the game is urban fantasy. That means a modern world in which mythology, magic, and monsters are real. I played the game on PC but I think it is also available on iOS and Android. 

The initial game comes with round about 400 cards and consists of 6 different factions each with its own color identity and strategy. 

Goal of the Game

The goal of the Game is not very innovative. You have to reduce the life totals to zero. That’s it. Of course, this is nothing special like the goal of crafting 3 keys in keyforge or winning two of three lanes in Artifact, but for me this not a problem. For a duelling game this is still a valid goal. 

Colors & Card Types

Card types

Cards represent the following type of entity depending on their type:

Minions: Beings or constructs that fight on your side and are deployed to lanes.

Spells: Cards that have a one time effect as soon as they are played. 

Lane enchantments: Cards that add a persistent effect to a lane.

Artifacts: Items that have wide-scale effects while they are in play.

 

Card colors

Cards are available in six colors:

Blue cards: Viking and motorcycle themed cards.

Yellow cards: Maya, Aztec, and high technology-themed cards.

Red cards: Greek underword and vampire-themed cards.

Green cards: Witchcraft themed cards.

Orange cards: Middle-eastern desert themed cards.

Purple cards: Anime, Cyber Ninjas

For me the setting and the theme is a bit weird, but that is not what I want to talk about today. 

Rarity

The cards are divided into the typical rarities. Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic. But those rarities do not only effect how often you will see those cards in packs and drafts, but they also determine how often you can play those cards in your deck. 

Exceptional Design Decision 1: How many cards per type? 

Another important question for all strategy card games that involve deckbuilding is: How many copies of each card should you allow players to add to their deck? Mythgard links the limitation of how many cards can be played with their rarity. Commons can be played 4 of, uncommons 3 of, rares 2 of and mythics only 1 of. By implementing this rule the designers have an easy way to balance cards. If it turns out the win percentage of a card is too high it can be upgraded from uncommon to mythic and can be played only once instead of three times. Still that is nothing you want to do, because it might upset your player base, but it is still better than all those bans that happen in Magic for example. 

The Battlefield

What is much more innovative about the game is the battlefield. Because there are seven lanes. All the people who played Artifact might be intimidated at this point. One criticism of Artifact was that the complexity of 3 different lanes was too big. I can’t understand the criticism, but that’s not what this show is about today. The lanes in Mythgard are completely different compared to Artifact. Actually, they are not even real lanes, but rather creature slots. The lanes are not separated in any kind as they are in Artifact. And it is not relevant if you win on one lane or another. To each of the 7 lanes, you can deploy a creature. Only 1 creature. That means there is also a maximum of 7 creatures that you can have on the board at any given time. Each creature can attack the three lanes in front of it. The developers called this system a trident attack.

Meaning, your minions can only attack the space directly in front of them, and its two adjacent spaces. What’s important is that In order to attack your opponent directly, you have to remove all enemies from the trident in front of the creature you want to attack with. Your creatures can also move by using an action to try to get around enemies they cannot defeat.

Exceptional Design Decision 2: The Trident

The trident based combat allows for blocking and dodging mechanics that manage to streamline the game, without over complicating it. 

• AGILE: May attack any threatened lane, ignoring blocking minions
• BREACH: Occurs when dealing combat damage to a player
• DEFENDER: Cannot attack. Must be attacked before other blocking minions without DEFENDER
• LURKER: Cannot be attacked before other blocking minions without LURKER
• IMMOBILE: Cannot move
• SWIFT: Gains an extra move per turn
• TELEPORT: May move to any lane

As you can see. Game mechanics influence the keywords you can use or create. The Trident combat mechanic and the corresponding keywords help to eliminate phases but keeps fast-paced, strategic combat.

Interesting Choice: Attacking, Moving or Skipping

Due to the trident attack system it can sometimes be beneficial to not attack or move and just skip an action. Let’s say you have a 1/1 creature and your opponent has a 3/3 creature in front of it. There are no other creatures on the battlefield. If you attack the creature it would suffer 1 damage and your creature would die. Meaning the 2/2 creature of your opponent could then attack you directly in the next turn because there is no blocker left in its trident. If you skip the attack with your 1/1 instead, your opponent would need to spend their action to kill your 1/1. I find that interesting because there is no intentional blocking in the game like it is in Magic, but yet you sometimes make similar decisions. It feels a bit like the decision you make in magic when you decide for a creature whether you want to attack with it or keep for blocking. But the decision is way simpler and takes a lot less time usually. 

Interesting Choice: Positioning

You wonder where to place your creatures. For example, if you have creatures that benefit from which neighbors they have, for example +1+1 for each adjacent creature of the same type, you will place them more in the middle. If you have creatures that have little synergy and that have more long term effects, you will place them on the far side of the field, because they only have 2 fields that threaten them. (e.g. Volkov Pointman)

Exceptional Design Decision 3: Reactions yes or no? 

As a designer you often ask yourself. Do I want a system where every player can react to everything the opponent does. Like instants and the stack in magic? With all the complexity that comes with it and the extra playtime it requires? Many modern games choose no. But then you ask yourself at the same time, how can you design the game in such a way that you can react to the actions of the opponent?  

Magic is highly interactive, which can force players to wait while the opponent decides how to react. Like most digital CCGs, Mythgard takes a more back-and-forth approach to gameplay. The entire game feels more like a combat in magic after blockers have been defined. That is because you know which minions threaten each other and will probably fight in the next turn.

Resources

Instead of “tapping” special cards for mana, you have the option to discard a card from your hand each round to increase your mana pool. That is called burning a card.  A similar mechanic has been used in the games Aventuria and Dualmaster. But in Mythgard it is a bit different. Whenever you burn a card that gives you two things: One generic mana, plus a colored gem from the respective faction. That means when you discard a card of the red faction you get 1 mana and a red gem. In order to cast a spell, you always need the amount of mana that is universal and the number of gems that represent the power of a certain alliance. Another difference is that the card you discard is not lost forever as it is in Aventuria. It is shuffled back into your deck. If you draw a card that has been burned before, it cannot be burned again. However, it is almost impossible to get mana flooded or mana screwed in this game. Yet it has a complex color and factions system allowing for multicolored decks and a lot of variety in deckbuilding.

Resources are always an important topic when it comes to discussing a CCG. Many people would say the mana system in Magic is the biggest weakness of the game. I wouldn’t completely agree with that though. If you want to learn more about my opinion on resources and other restrictions in card games go back to Episode 23 of the Nerdlab Podcast. I dedicated an entire episode to that topic. 

But I agree with one thing about Magic’s Mana system. It is not very well suited to be transferred to a digital game. Why? Because it cannot be easily automated. That is one of the reasons why all its digital-only competitors use other mechanics.  

Magic is based on a system that requires players to play and tap specific lands, and digital systems have struggled with how they automatically choose which ones to use. The result is that players often have to click on each land card individually when they are choosing their resources. That is the reason why most other digital CCGs got rid of Mana completely or drastically reduced the system to one mana that can easily be picked automatically.

Mythgard’s resource system fuses elements of both MTG and Hearthstone, with players choosing to “burn” cards and shuffle them back in their digital deck to get mana corresponding to the card’s color. The mana refreshes each turn, allowing players to cast cards of the corresponding color and faction. This also lets players build multicolor decks, which are common in MTG and require careful consideration to ensure you have the right mix.

Mythgard manages to implement a system much like MTG, while making it simpler to use, without negatively effecting the difficulty or strategy of the game.

Exceptional Design Decision 4: Burning Cards for Multiple Resources 

You always have a great choices to make between cards becoming resources and cards you want to use for their effect. Each card is essentialy a multi use card. Therefore playing and discarding cards takes a bit of forethought which I like a lot. 

Paths

Paths are passive effects that grant bonuses independently of the cards in the deck. You have to choose exactly one path per deck. They give players additional powers, typically some form of global effect that supports certain playstyles. Consider it an enchantment that is always active from the beginning of the game. I am actually not sure if you can interact with the path of your opponent, but I don’t think you can. They feel a bit like a commander in magic as they influence the way you build your deck, but they are way less impactful. 

Exceptional Design Decision 5: Pursuit Keywords on Paths

A special keyword that can only be found on Paths is “Pursuit”. Pursuit comes into effect when your are going second as a player. It is meant to give the second player a bit of an advantage to mitigate the benefit from going first. 

Powers

Powers can be used once per turn and cost you mana to do so. The effect is typically not super strong.

Example: Once per turn, banish the bottom 2 cards of your boneyard to create a 1/1 Cobblejack in one of your lanes.

2: Once per turn, give a minion +1/+1 until end of turn.

Exceptional Design Decision 6: Permanent Powers to mitigate mana flood

Using most of your available resources each turn is often one of the best ways of getting an advantage over an opponent in CCGs. I really like the addition of Powers in Mythgard and other games. By having an optional mana sink that is always available you can mitigate the turns in which you cannot use your entire mana. From a designer’s perspective, I find it clever to make those effects minor from a power level because you want your players to primarily use their cards. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need a random mechanic of a deck full of shuffled cards right?

Exceptional Design Decision 7: Making Lanes Matter with Permanent Enchantments 

Mythgard does a very good job in making lanes matter in their individual card designs:

Especially with their lane Enchantments. They are a great way to create synergies: Lane enhancements can the stregths of minions or improve their weaknesses. 

Let’s take my favorite card “Serpent Den”. It is an enchantment that creates a 1/1 snake in the lane that you enchant at the beginning of every turn. But due to the restriction that only 1 creature per lane ins allowed that means it only triggers again when you moved the snake away or it died. That means it often only triggers every other turn unless your opponent is very aggressively killing the snakes. A lot of interesting deckbuilding decisions and gameplay decisions come with those kinds of cards for which you have to put in some work to make them great.  

Draft Exceptional Design Decision 8: Influence Color percentages during Draft

Drafting works a bit different compared to Magic. It is more like a draft in hearthstone. Let me explain how it works: 

First you randomly get 3 Paths and 3 Powers. all of them are added to your draft collection. At the end of the draft during deckbuilding you have to choose 1 path and 1 power for your deck. 

During the actual draft you pick 2 cards out of 6 random cards and repeat this process 25 times until you have 50 cards total out of which you build a 40 card deck. That means the choices you make do not impact the choices of your opponents. That is something I really dislike because it takes away so much from what a draft could offer. Signaling, Hate Picking, Identifing the underpicked colors and so on.

• Too restrictive
  2 out 6 is a bit too restrictive. You see too few cards total and pick too many of them. Decisions come down to picking the cards in your color.
• Deckbuilding.
  You make a 40 card deck out of 50 card pool. There is no room to make choices during deckbuilding. 
  Just compare it to magic: you draft 42 card pool but an average deck plays only 23 of them, and that’s 55% vs 80% in Mythgard!
• Boost and Cull cards.
  During the draft you will see some Boost and cull cards that allow you to curate your card colors yourself. That means you can spend a pick to make sure the upcoming picks are more likely in the colors you want to play. The first boost card increases the chances of a color by 100% and the second increases the chances of that color by 200%. The first cull card reduces the chances of a color by 50% and the second reduces it to 0%. This is a good step into the right direction of increasing the choices players have during a draft.

Conclusion:

That’s it for today’s design review. I hope you were able to take something for your own designs and maybe you got a little bit interested in testing the game. I’m having a lot of fun with it and we really want to test the 2vs2 multiplayer mode. 

If you enjoyed this episode please subscribe to the Nerdlab Podcast on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you are listening at the moment. If you want to connect with me, you can find all the relevant links in the shownotes. 

Until next week: keep shooting for the moon and nerd like a boss. 

Ressources:

Culture of Gaming – Mythgard Review

Keywords in Mythgard