【Game Talk】Under the shackles, freedom is on top: Talk about the rules of card game construction

Author: Lin Yancheng, Kuaishou producer, game producer

introduction

Recently, while playing Plant Arena, a tower defense card game, a design caught my eye and was the main reason for writing this article.

Let's start with the game:

• Plant Arena is a 1v1 real-time competitive game with an experience comparable to Clash Royale
• Players choose a faction and build a deck of 9 cards, with the cards available from their own faction and neutral cards
• The game is set up in four factions, each with a passive skill. For example, the passive of the "Royal Knights" is to increase the attack when the follower is ascended, and the "Sun Chamber of Commerce" is to get extra gold coins per turn
• The most distinctive fourth faction, the "Free Federation", is the ability that you can use all factions' minions when building

I was amazed and excited by the capabilities of the Free Federation: as a player, I really liked the very open and exciting rules; As a planner, I would never choose to do this design in my game.

From a player's perspective, I love the "make the rules before you break them" approach: while the Free Federation has lost one of its powerful passive abilities in combat, the allure of being able to build with a full pool of cards is huge, and I can't wait to try the powerful combinations of cards from different factions!

But from a planning point of view, this design can undoubtedly have disastrous consequences:

• As a competitive game, balance between factions is extremely important. The "Freedom Alliance" has gained freedom in construction through the lack of passive skills, and judging from the construction results of different players, it is obvious that it will bring great variance; Thinking about the designer's expectations, I would expect the "Freedom Alliance" to be "slightly weaker than the other three factions (at least not the strongest), and be able to wrestle with the other factions after reaching the optimal build", giving players the feeling that "I can't beat it because my build is not reasonable, not because the faction is not strong".
• On the other hand, the need to balance the strength of the "full card pool with full open construction conditions" and other factions with passive skills is difficult to control and too difficult for designers and testers.
• I dare to assert that if the game had lived long enough and maintained a full card pool without regressing the environment, the "Freedom League" would have been one of the strongest factions. In the long run, the Freedom League will severely limit and compress the design space of subsequent cards, and place a very serious burden on the design team.

At this point, my preliminary conclusion is that "Freedom Alliance" is a very cool piece of content, but it is undoubtedly a very risky and troublesome design for the R&D team.

Thinking about this, as a veteran player who has played card games for more than 20 years, I can't help but think: what were the construction rules of card games in the past? How did the predecessors control the "freedom" and "restriction" of the construction conditions?

The conclusion is pre-emptive

In order to take care of friends who want to see the conclusion first, the intimate author has put the key content in front:

• The original TCG Magic: The Gathering was a model of hard to pick up and master with a rigorous deck building and a high degree of freedom for players. Although it attracted countless fans back then, it was not quite in line with the trend of the times, and the number of players has gradually decreased in recent years
• The follow-up TCG/CCG products represented by Hearthstone have provided a lot of guidance while limiting the player's freedom to build, successfully lowering the threshold for getting started, making the product break the circle and winning praise from the majority of players
• A similar design evolution can be seen in card RPG mobile games, where the mainstream approach has gradually transitioned from defining team ideas with character characteristics to using the same attribute aura as a rule guide, so that players can quickly understand the game
• With the trend of the faster pace of the times, players have more games to choose from and less patience with individual items. When designing rules, it is necessary to lower the threshold for players to get started, give faster and stronger feedback, and make games that are easy to learn and difficult to master, so that they have a better chance of success

OK, friends who don't feel like enjoying the conclusion, welcome to continue reading the author's analysis process.

Go back to the origins

Let's take a look at Magic, the originator of the TCG category.

Released in 1993, Magic: The Gathering is based on Western fantasy culture, where players take on the role of a legendary mage and play against other players using their own decks (Decks). Card types can be divided into "spells" and "lands": the former includes subcategories such as creatures, sorceries, instants, etc., as content that can be summoned after casting spells; The latter provides the "mana" needed to cast the spell. In the game, players can play up to 1 land per turn, and use spells of that color based on the mana they generate.

For example, here are two images: the first is a creature spell that the player needs to pay for the cost marked in the upper left corner (3 colorless mana + 2 white mana, for a total of 5 mana); The second is a two-color land that the player can tap for 1 black or red mana to cast a spell.

Magic has few building rules for players, requiring only a deck of at least 60 cards. As players build their decks, they can choose how many colors of spells to use, and then choose what makes sense.

Here are two sample decks:

• The first is a monocolor deck with spells on the left (both black) and land on the right (which produces black mana)
• The second is a four-color deck with spells on the left (four colors) and lands on the right (lots of varieties and four colors)

Because each of the five colors has its own strengths, players need to make trade-offs when building their decks: the fewer colors you choose, the fewer powerful spells you can use, but the fewer colors you need in lands, the more stable your deck will be; The more colors you choose, the more powerful spells you can use, but you also need to have lands that can produce multiple colors, so the overall stability decreases accordingly. For example, when playing a four-color deck, it's easy to have an AB-colored spell in your hand, but only a CD-colored land.

With a wide variety of cards + a high degree of freedom to build, Magic has garnered great reviews from fans. It's a lot of fun to build your dream deck and play against other players. On the other hand, the high degree of freedom also brings complex game rules and a high barrier to entry, which has also made Magic few new players enter the pit in recent years, and the user base has continued to decline.

In short, as the great game that pioneered the TCG genre, Magic: The Gathering laid the foundation for deck-building games, so that subsequent products will more or less use it as a prototype and make their own characteristics on the basis.

Comer

Since Magic, there have been a number of physical TCGs, including Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokémon, Duel Master, and World of Warcraft TCG.

With the development of the times, mobile games have become increasingly popular, and many manufacturers have also tried to digitize the TCG category. Due to the shift to virtual platforms, most vendors choose to retain the collection feature and remove the trading attribute and change to CCG (Collectible Card Game).

In 2013, Hearthstone was released and became the most successful electronic CCG game to date.

Hearthstone is based on World of Warcraft TCG, with a further simplification of its rules: players first choose a hero when building a deck, and then choose from the corresponding class cards and neutral cards to form a set of 30 cards.

Compared to the old-timers of Magic, Hearthstone has simplified the rules in all aspects, and added a lot of restrictions on the build: removing the mana color from the rules to automatically increasing crystals every turn, so that the card type is only spells, making the single-card selection more pure. Heroes provide a clear direction for building and allowing players to choose from a pool of class and neutral cards to choose a single card that fits their mind, without having to go through the trouble of conceiving tactics from the full deck.

The streamlined rules + more building "restrictions" greatly reduce the threshold for players to get started, and also retain enough building fun and in-battle strategy game space, making Hearthstone the most popular CCG game.

After that, Hearthstone further digs into the building rules, adding "restrictions" to the player's construction conditions from multiple dimensions, such as:

• Renault · Jackson requires the player not to have the same cards in their library, while providing a powerful effect that restores all health to the player's hero (what if you run out of blood?). Don't panic, old man and Jackson! ）
• "Baku the Mooneater" and "Jean · Greymane" require players to have only odd/even cards in their decks, which will give a huge boost to the hero's skills if the conditions are met

Will players be very repulsed by this kind of approach, which is contrary to "free construction"?

On the contrary, "Cosmic Flow" and "Parity Flow" are two of the most popular systems in Hearthstone history, especially the former that has received very enthusiastic feedback from players. As a result, the team has made more single cards that put forward higher requirements for player construction in the future, but will also give greater benefits.

Hearthstone explores more than just the player's build conditions, with designs that add extra restrictions to build conditions, as well as content that opens up more build space, such as:

• "Band Manager Elite Minotaur Chieftain" allows players to pick three additional cards to stuff into when building, and choose one of them to start after playing the chieftain, which is a disguised "sideboard" mechanic
• "Kilias Deluxe Edition Type 3000" requires players to select two of the eight components in the construction deck and combine them into a special form of card
• The "Tourist" mechanic in the latest series is even more interesting, allowing players to use a single card from the same series as another class when building with a legendary card with the keyword "Tourist" (for example, the "Demon Hunter Tourist" of the Shaman class can be added to the Shaman's deck to use the Demon Hunter class card of the same series)

As you can see, whether it's restricting the player's builds, or increasing the degree of freedom, as long as you can manage the risks and provide the benefits and fun to match, it's a great design that's been well received!

Category expansion

From TCG to CCG, let's change the direction now and look at another "card game: card RPG."

From the early years, large numerical cards, such as the famous "Big Boss", "Put Three" and "Young Three" series, there are no rules for players to form a team, but the character skills will have a strong faction association, and even the teams of each faction have standard answers. If players forcibly form teams across factions, they will lose a lot of attributes and skill gains, which is a choice that outweighs the losses.

Similar to the CCG evolution process above, subsequent high-value card products will be more inclined to limit the benefits of teaming up to card skills, but to make the guidelines more explicit. For example, the masterpiece of placing cards, "Placement Surprise", has set up many kinds of team aura, which are placed in a conspicuous position on the team interface, forming an effective guide for the player's BD; The different benefits of different types of auras are also convenient for players to find pursuits at all stages, and it is also convenient to make different values for light and dark and four-series heroes in terms of content delivery. This classic premise has also been emulated by many subsequent products such as Sword and Expedition.

Under the general trend of the times, it seems not surprising that different categories of products have the same iteration direction.

Final remarks

Let's go back to the days of Magic, when players were slow to flow information and had few game choices, so they cherished a game they liked and studied it patiently. With each new set, players are slow to "hack the environment", and even after a set has passed, some hidden ideas have not yet been discovered.

In the era of information explosion on the Internet, the efficiency of information transmission is even more than it used to be. For example, the championship table for a game in the morning of Hearthstone will be all over the ladder after noon. Therefore, more players prefer to go directly to the online card reading table than to do their own research (so the "cost performance" is obviously much higher).

After all, with the development of the times, there are more games and more choices, so the time and patience that players allocate to a single game gradually decreases. What's more, many people think that it is easier to watch short videos or "cloud games" than to play games by themselves.

As a game practitioner, I believe that designing products in this fast-paced era has to lower the barrier to entry and give players faster and stronger feedback. Games that are easy to play and difficult to master have a better chance of success.

But as a gamer, I still miss the days when a game could be played for a holiday......