First Public Playtest

Last night was the first time that I've taught Affinity to anyone outside of my friends.  I found a group through Meetup.com that meets once a month of aspiring designers and people willing to playtest games in their prototype form and offer constructive feedback.  I got a chance to teach Affinity to 3 other people over the course of two games where I watched people play the game and instructed them along the way.  The reception of the game was very positive, they felt it was very balanced, well-designed, and had a desire to play again.  There were only two negative comments that I recieved, which I'll get to in a bit.

The first thing I realized was holy cow am I rusty at teaching games.  The second run through I was much, much better, but the first time I was jumping all over the place and didn't have a dynamic flow for teaching the game to players who were completely unfamiliar with the mechanics.  Teaching the game to new players is not something that is mentioned much, if at all, by designers and I quickly realized how important this process is.  It's commonly said that first impressions are everything, and I think that is going to hold true for teaching a new game to someone as well.  You'll occasionally hear reviews for games along the lines of "You need a few plays to really understand what's going on" and I now understand how important it is to mitigate that feeling if at all possible.

After each game we played, which took about an hour to teach and play a full game, we did some brainstorming as to what would help a new player approach the game.

• Problem: Remembering the order of the phases, remembering what the keywords on the cards do.
• Solution: Cheat Sheets

This was a suggestion that I completely agree with.  I've played collectible card games for 15 years and these have been in nearly every game I've ever demoed or played.  I overlooked creating one of these before this playtest session, but I will certainly have these prepared for the next one.

• Problem: Not realizing the different nuances of the factions.
• Solution: Faction Blurbs

This was something that game up in the second game because one of the factions is a bit combo-oriented and not necessarily obvious how to play them to their fullest potential at first glance.  I think this can be alleviated by having a few sentences about each factions that explains in a general sense what their strengths and weaknesses are.

• Problem: When playing the game, you need to draft a deck for yourself to play before knowing what the cards do.
• Solution: Splitting the Demo into two parts

This is the biggest thing that I took away from this playtest session.  There are really two parts that you have to learn in Affinity one being the drafting/deckbuilding mechanics and the other being the mechanics in playnig the cards against one another.  Unlike similar games, you're not just buying cards that allow you to draw/buy more cards.  You're buying cards to combat your opponent, and those interactions need to be learned and understood to help you decide what you want to draft in your deck.  The problem arises in the actual game that to play cards to combat your opponent, you need to draft them to build your deck before knowing what they actually do.  In an attempt to solve this, I'm going to work on a setup of cards that can be used to quickly demo the interactions of the cards and display the game mechanics for a few turns which can hopefully be done in 3-5 minutes and then stop that "demo" to start the full game with the drafting mechanics.


All in all, I think the night was very productive and I plan to attend each session if possible.  Outside of teaching and playing the game, I also did a little bit of networking with another designer who let me know of another design group that gets together twice a month that I should be getting an invite to.  Also one of the perople I taught the game to has an artist that they'd like me to get in touch with and a publisher that is located a few hours from where I live that they are in contact with.  Not sure what the future holds, but I like having some potential prospects.

Fun with numbers

So I was laying in bed last night, trying to drift off to sleep and being unable to do so, so I started thinking about numbers.  In my last post, I discussed that the current version of the game had 120 cards in it, not including the Awakened or the starting Aether Surges that players will start with.  On the surface, and up until this point, it seems to have been a fairly good number for the game, but when I began to think about the future possibilities for Affinity, I have been less than happy with it.

Currently there are 36 unique cards in the game that are replicated in different amounts to make a 120 card main deck.  This deck consists of Spells and Creatures.  I have been doing some brainstorming about adding a third card type to the game, and thinking about how that would increase the size of the deck.  In addition to this, I can't predict if the game is going to be a success or not (although of course I hope it will be) so in thinking about how this hobby works and the fact that I should want to produce expansions for it, how that would also inflate the deck.

This is an issue that was encountered quite quickly in the game of Ascension.  The initial game started out with a 100 card center deck.  The first expansion added 65 new cards to this deck.  The third "expansion" is considered a stand-alone game that is not necessarily supposed to be added to the old deck (already at 165 cards) because it has 100 new cards that could potentially be added to the center deck.  265 cards is a lot to shuffle, and the amount of randomness in a game where you usually see 50-60 cards of the deck in a given game would just be too much.

So thinking about this potential problem for Affinity, since there is also a "center deck" mechanic at play, I thought about how quickly the deck would increase in size for the smallest expansion possible.  This isn't to say that I couldn't break away from the numbers that I'm about to lay out, but this is how I currently see it.

There are 120 cards in the main deck, 36 unique cards.  These cards are broken into 4 factions.  Each faction has 6 creatures and 3 spells, each of them having a number of copies in the deck based on a "rarity" system of common, uncommon and rare.  There are 5 copies of each common, 3 copies of each uncommon, and 2 copies of each rare.  This is aesthetically pleasing because it makes 30 cards for each faction, and 120 cards in the main deck.  Some nice round numbers.  Now if you assume that whenever I add cards to the deck in the manner for an expansion, I have to add an equal number of cards for each faction, and then keep the distribution of commons/uncommons/rares in the game the same for balance purposes, whenever I'm adding cards to the deck, I have to add 10 cards for each faction, or a minimum expansion size of 40 cards.  This means the first expansion would take the game to 160 cards, the second to 200, etc.

Something about this just doesn't seem acceptable to me.  Shuffling 200+ cards is not really a fun activity for anyone involved.  Not to mention, if I wanted to add a card type into the mix, I could potentially be making the base game at 160 cards before adding any expansion to the game.  Again, not what I would ideally like to be doing.

In thinking what I could do to lower the number of cards in the main deck, but keep the variety, I started with the idea of just lowering the number of copies for each card at the common/uncommon/rare levels.  There isn't a ton of room to go down with here since for a rarity system to be true to itself, you need more uncommons than rares and more commons than uncommons.  With a current 5/3/2 split, the available options are 4/3/2, 5/2/1, 4/2/1, and 3/2/1.  I had played with a 4/3/2 split in the past, and the uncommons felt just like commons and the rares didn't feel that rare.  I think a 5/2/1 split makes the commons too common, and 3/2/1 has the same problem as a 4/3/2 split, so I've decided to start playing with a 4/2/1 split.  It removes the 2nd highest amount of cards from the main deck while keeping the idea of a rarity system that I wanted.

Before deciding on this, I had to take a look at what this would do for the odds of drawing each rarity in 4/2/1 vs. 5/3/2.

4/2/1 Base Set

• Common 4/84 or 1/21 (4.7%)
• Uncommon 2/84 or 1/42 (2.3%)
• Rare 1/84 (1.1%)

5/3/2 Base Set

• Common 5/120 or 1/24 (4.2%)
• Uncommon 3/120 or 1/40 (2.5%)
• Rare 2/120 or 1/60 (1.7%)

4/2/1 One Expansion

• Common 4/112 or 1/28 (3.5%)
• Uncommon 2/112 or 1/56 (1.8%)
• Rare 1/112 (0.9%)

5/3/2 One Expansion

• Common 5/160 or 1/32 (3.1%)
• Uncommon 3/160 or 1/53 (1.9%)
• Rare 2/160 or 1/80 (1.3%)

4/2/1 Two Expansions

• Common 4/140 or 1/35 (2.9%)
• Uncommon 2/140 or 1/70 (1.4%)
• Rare 1/140 (0.7%)

5/3/2 Two Expansions

• Common 5/200 or 1/40 (2.5%)
• Uncommon 3/200 or 1/67 (1.5%)
• Rare 2/200 or 1/100 (1%)

I found it interesting that the commons become slightly more common and the uncommon/rares become slightly less so with a distribution of 4/2/1 over 5/3/2.  I think I can also do some interesting things when you have only one copy of a rare card vs. two without having to worry about what happens when you have two copies of the card in a 20 card deck vs. just one.  In addition, I think it will work out better for potential promotional cards (such as the ones that I'm likely to include when I Kickstart the project) since there will be much less of an impact on distribution in the deck if you add in 4 single copies of cards (assuming 1 for each region) vs. 2 of each.

Playtesting will determine if I'm correct on this theory or not, but looking at it on paper I think I will be quite happy with the change.

Where is Affinity now?

So most of everything that I've posted to this point has been about the previous actions and history in the design of the game.  I've been working on the game quite a bit recently.  More specifically, I've had quite the bit of time in the last few weeks where I've been sitting in hotels and hospital waiting rooms with my laptop and the current playtest copy of Affinity.  The previous posts have gotten most of the bulk of the background story and development thoughts into the interwebs.  It is possible (if not certain) that future posts will reference a past thought process or decision, I would say going forward from here I'm going to be discussing and posting about mainly current development on the game.

Currently, the game of Affinity has the following:

• 4 unique factions based around the classic elements of air, earth, fire and water
• Each faction has 2 different mechanics that they utilize for an advantage and that synergize together
• 12 unique "Awakened" or player character/avatars, 3 for each faction
• 6 creature cards for each faction, broken into different "rarities"
• 3 spell cards for each faction, broken into different "rarities"
• 120 cards total in the main deck
• 1 card that starts the game as your ticket to adding cards to your deck, and ends the game as a card that allows you to swing tempo in your favor.
• An adaptable draft mechanic that I am very happy with.
• A sense of synergy among the cards that I am also very happy with.
• I believe I've even succeeded in beating the "draft the most powerful card" instead of "draft the best card for my deck" that I had set as a goal.  More playtesting will confirm this.

What I still need to do from a design standpoint:

• Balance the cards - This is always at the forefront of my mind, but I need to get the balance changes from near-complete faction overhauls to minor tweaks in card text.
• Playtest, playtest, playtest.
• Flesh out a story for the game - I understand that, if I were to pitch this to a publisher, they would work on this developmental piece.  However, the odds are that I am going to be Kickstarting this project because I don't think I could give up the control for the sake of just seeing the mechanics published.  To me, a game is a complete experience, which includes tying the story of the game into the mechanics to really get an in-depth experience.  I'm not a fan of pasted on themes.  Either I will be able to complete the project from start to finish, or I wont.
• Find an artist - I have someone in mind for this job, and I've talked to him about the project, the trick now is to get him some free time to be able to do the work.

Outside of tweaks and copious amounts of playtesting, I believe the mechanics for the game are going to be set from this point out.  That itself is a huge relief because that means that I have something unchanging that I can make other decisions around.  It's quite challenging when you have the ability to change the story, the card text, and the game mechanics when you encounter an issue that needs fixing because you have to hope that you're making the correct adjustment.

My real struggle is going to be the story.  I'm not exactly the best writer, I used to do quite a bit of creative writing "back in the day", but that's quite a long time ago for me.  This is unfortunately a sticking point for me, because I often make mechanical design decisions around what would or would not make sense in the story of the game.  One of the easiest examples of this was when I was designing a game around modern military units and trying to come up with abilities for those units.  Some of my initial notes had some units with the ability to heal other units, but how is that going to make sense in a modern sense?  We don't have magic, and healing certainly doesn't take place on the battlefield, so that was something that I had to remove.  Affinity needs the story for the game to be fleshed out at this point, and that's going to be my biggest focus going forward.

So that's where I am in the design.  If anyone reading this has anything specific that they want to know about the process or the game up until this points, or any suggestions or questions, feel free to post a comment.

What makes a deckbuilding game?

I've been having some thoughts cross my mind during some brainstorming sessions lately, and that's wondering if Affinity is really a deckbuilding game or not.  When looking into what other deckbuilding games have to offer, I read through countless discussions about games that deviated from the apparent "holy grail" that is Dominion, and the responses were surprising.

The two camps seemed to be the side that loved the game because of it's differences from Dominion, and the other side of the fence disliked the game because it wasn't like Dominion.  Then you would have the same people who disliked games that were different from Dominion who bash games that are also too similar to it.  I think it's perplexing, but I guess that isn't really the point I was trying to get to.

From what I can tell from the camp of "Dominion is the definitive deckbuilding game" and it's accepted derivitives, here is what I can pinpoint what "qualifies" a game as a deckbuilding game:

1. Have a small starting deck of weak cards.
2. Use a card-driven monetary system to purchase additional cards to add to your deck.
3. Create an "engine" with the cards in your deck.
4. End the game when a specific condition is met.
5. Have more (or fewer) points than all of the other players to win the game.

Well... Affinity doesn't exactly meet those conditions.

1. You (currently) start with 3 cards in your "starting deck".  The first turn of the game is then using these cards to add additional cards to your deck.
2. You technically use the starting cards to "purchase" additional cards to add to your deck, but it doesn't end up being the crux of the game.
3. The "engine" you create is with the interaction of the cards in your deck, and not just drawing more cards to play more cards in a single turn to earn more victory points.
4. I suppose the end of the game is a specific condition, but that condition is player elimination and not a specific trigger like buying all of the cards in a certain stack or running out of tokens in a pile.
5. There are no victory points in Affinity.

So I'm not sure if I should keep calling this a deck building game and suffer the criticisms of certain players who say that my game is nothing like Dominion, or if I should call it a deck drafting game, which is a format from the CCG world that I've modeled quite a few things after.   I'm inclined to start calling it a deck drafting game from here on out, because you're not really purchasing the cards for your deck, instead each card has a value associated to it that is only relevant for the purposes of adding it to your deck.  This used to be a mechanic of adding just one card to your deck at a time, but has since adapted to have values to balance out more powerful cards than others since the frequency at which cards show up are random.

After talking it out here, it makes sense to me, so Affinity is no longer going to be referred to as a deck building game, but instead will be referred to as a deck drafting game.  Hopefully this prevents criticisms in the future, but it likely wont.  <3 Gamers.

The Player Character

The idea of representing one's self in a game by an avatar, or a player character is something that has been used in hundreds of games, and many successful CCG's to boot.  It was done in Magi-Nation, it's used in WoW:TCG, it was used in Highlander and many games you represent yourself with an entire faction or clan behind you like in Legend of the Five Rings or practically any game ever designed by AEG.

There is a psychological aspect to playing a game where you are able to choose and possibly relate to a specific character and when you are not.  That's not to say you can't have a successful game with an abstract character (just look at Magic the Gathering), but it's much easier in today's gaming environment to attract players to your game psychologically if you have characters that they are able to relate to or have as a favorite.

I'll be honest in saying that I wasn't thinking about any of this when for the first attempt at trying to develop a player's character or an avatar for Affinity.  In fact, my first avatar, which I still think was an interesting mechanic, was going to be same for every player.

When you're playing any of the current crop of deck building games, you're not restricted into a faction or a style until you restrict yourself.  This game is obviously different in that there are different factions to choose from, and I want the players to differentiate themselves throughout the game.  However, you can't have the players choose the faction that they're going to be before the start of the game due to the random nature of the  availability of cards throughout the game.  If you choose faction A, and you see hardly any cards from faction A, then you're going to be hamstringing yourself before you even start the game, which is just a horrible design.

Instead, what I decided to try initially, was have an avatar that was just like Morphling, in that the avatar changed what powers it had throughout the game based on the factions of the creatures that you had in play.  So there were 5 powers listed, one power for each faction, and each power would only be active if you had the majority of creatures from that faction in play.


Even in playtest, it was a very neat mechanic, I'd probably say that the biggest problem was tied into Morphlings.  With Morphlings, it was quite easy to manipulate what power the avatar had.  This was intentional, but it turned out to be boring.  Each player was usually doing the same thing on the first turn, using the most powerful proactive power that they could, which was just to gain more essence on one of their creatures.  Sometimes the player going second would use the power to remove essence from an opposing creature, but either way, it was always boring for the first few turns of the game.

After realizing that I didn't need to place vanilla creatures or Morphlings into the player's starting deck, and that the starting decks were going to be dynamic based on the first round of drafting, I realized that I could have the players choose a faction that they wanted to represent after that first round of drafting was completed.  This is what other games that have a draft format, like WoW:TCG will do.  This also allowed me to open up to dozens of other powers that I couldn't otherwise place on the single avatar, which of course opens up more depth to the game.

In addition, I realized after the fact that creating different characters for each faction would allow people to make a psychological connection to those characters, which would in turn be a perk to the marketing of the game.

The issue with Morphlings

So the starting cards that each player had, as I explained before were 5 copies of Syphon Stone, which allowed you to add more cards to your deck, and 5 copies of a universal creature.  At it's base, the Universal creature was just a 3 cost creature with no real energy-gaining or removal powers.  But in an attempt to have it be more than a weak card at the start of the game, and a useless card in the later game, I decided to give it a power to make it a creature of any faction you wanted until the beginning of your next turn.  We nick-named it "Morphling."

This probably wouldn't have been that bad, but since I was using Magi-Nation as a jumping off point, I hadn't really figured out what I was going to do about "Magi" or the characters that you're representing who are casting these spells and summoning these creatures and otherwise battling it out among one another.  My "awesome" idea, which I still think is a decent idea and I may try to implement something along these lines in the future, was to have a "Morphling" character as well.  That is, to have a character that you played whose powers would change based on the creatures that you have in play.  So if you have more creatures from faction A in play, you'd have Power A, if you have more creatures from faction B in play, you'd have Power B.  The concept is still neat in my opinion, but what we quickly found in playtesting was that I couldn't balance the powers on him when you had the ability to essentially choose any one of them that you wanted from the start of the game and generally the first 5 turns of the game when you had morphlings in your deck.  Both players would play Morphlings, choose the same region, and use the same powers.  It was quite dull.

This was largely disappointing to me, but it did allow me to progress to the point that I am currently at for Affinity.  Morphling creatures needed to be removed from the deck, they made the factions not really matter for anything.  They were generally the only ways that we were triggering faction-restricted spells in the deck and allowed you really splash anything into your deck without caring what faction it needed.  They also put the first two turns of the game into auto-pilot mode, where no player really gained or lost energy in access of what the other player could also gain or remove, so the game didn't really start until after you had added some unique cards to your deck and started to see those in your hand.

That's when I realized that I didn't need creatures in the starting deck, I could have a "pre-game" phase of the game where players both started with a hand full of 5 Syphon Stones and would alternate choosing cards for their deck by playing a Syphon Stone and then each player would start the game with a unique "starting deck."  This is currently the system that Affinity is using, and it has proven to add a unique experience to the game that other deck building games don't really create.  Then again this game is doing a lot of things that other deck building games don't, mainly because there isn't a victory point in sight.

So in the end, I'd like to say "Thank you!" to Morphling, for being an amazing failure that helped me find one path that Affinity really needed.

The issue of synergy

The (current and most likely permanent) name of Affinity wasn't what I had started with.  The name of the eventual game was completely unimportant within the design process.  At least to a point.  I do believe that placing constraints on your design at some point actually assists you in developing creative ways to introduce problems to your players and solutions to said problems. Regardless, that's not what I'm really here to talk about today.

Today I'd like to address the big problem that I had after my first playtest, and that was the problem where I didn't feel there was a decision to choose a less powerful card that worked better for your deck over the card with the most raw power available to you at the time.

My initial concept had been to have cards that assisted the other cards with restrictions on how they could be used.  So there were spells that could only target creatures of a certain faction for you to be able to benefit from that spell.  There were also less-powerful cards in raw power that didn't have restrictions like this.  So for an example, there would be a spell that cost 1 essence that added 2 essence to any creature in play, and there would also be a card that cost 1 essence that added 4 essence to a creature of a specific faction.  The second card was only good once you already had creatures of that faction in your deck, but if you didn't, it was a completely useless card to you.  This was exactly what I thought I wanted, but in practice it just didn't work out as well as I had planned.

If I had to pin-point the biggest problem with it, I suppose it would be the random nature of the shuffle.  If these cards were seen before their respective creatures could have been added to your deck, then you could either take the gamble of adding them to your deck and hope that those creatures show up in a timely manner for them to become useful.  In practice, this gamble just wasn't an exciting or strategic part of the overall game.  You were always better off taking the "safe" choice of something that you would guarantee the power level of, even if the overall effect was weaker.

It's not to say that none of these cards worked.  There were some that were much more effective than others and well sought-out in spite of their regional restrictions, but that wasn't really a result of the overall game, that was a result of the starting cards, which I'll address next.

First Playtest

I invited my good friend and long time collaborator over to give the game a go.  He and I are both experienced card players and were responsible for loads of powerful winning decks in our past.  If anyone was going to be able to put this game through the rounds it needed, it would be the two of us.

The game was simple enough to be able to pick it up right away, the gameplay was smooth and the mechanics made sense.  There were, however, some problems with the game that I could see right away.  I didn't really expect to have the winning formula on the first shot, and after some extensive playtesting, I already knew some things I needed to change.

1. Difference in power levels between the cards.  This was to be expected, and much of this was just shaking the rust off of my old card-playing chops.  This is also the most detailed part about designing any game in my opinion.  The game needs to be balanced, and the only way to really figure that out is by trying to break it.  You're not going to know what's broken until you abuse the hell out of it.  I had forgotten some basic  principles of competitive card games that came flooding back to me with crystal clarity after just a few plays.
2. "Monsters" didn't play the way that I wanted them to, the player that was ahead would generally defeat them to put themselves even more ahead.  This was really a complicated problem that I hasn't fully thought through, but when the issue surfaced it made complete sense.  We tried a few variations on how the monsters impacted the game, the players, their rewards, etc.  But about halfway through the playtest, after at least a dozen games I removed all the monsters from the deck to put them on the back burner and focus on the rest of the game.
3. The synergies that I wanted to exist between the cards to make the choices interesting and not just obvious just weren't there.  This was probably the most disappointing thing that I encountered, because this was the biggest focus of the game that I wanted to develop, and I found that I wasn't anywhere near where I wanted to be.

Deckbuilding Mechanic

You see, in the deckbuilding games I've played, each player will start with a set of starting cards that they use to purchase more cards for their deck, which in turn allows them to purchase more cards and more cards until the end of game trigger is hit and then everyone counts up the points in their deck to see who wins.  That system is a fun system to play, but not at all what I was trying to design because it's already been done.  I wasn't trying to create another victory point deck building game.  I wanted interaction and player vs. player conflict.  I wanted to be able to battle head to head in a deckbuilding game.

Working within the limits of Magi Nation, I wasn't too sure what I was going to do for a starting deck.  Going with what I knew of 10 cards in the starting deck, I initially created a set of 10 cards that included 5 creatures from 5 different regions, and 5 universal cards.  I knew that this wasn't perfect from the start, but I wasn't too sure how to approach the problem.  The issue here, is that creatures are the main focus of the game and you need them to battle with your opponent.  In a normal deck of Magi Nation, you'll generally have over half of your deck as creatures, sometimes as much as 80% of your deck will be creatures.  This is to ensure that you always have a steady supply.  If you only start out with half of your deck as creatures, and draw half of your deck on the first turn, it's very possible (and probable) that you're only going to draw 1-2 of those creatures.  If you only draw 1 creature and your opponent draws 4, then you're going to be quite far behind in tempo.  The original game had tried to solve this with the use of "starting cards" which were cards that would start the game in your hand, although they were generally weak in comparison to cards you wanted to have in your deck.  Because I knew that players were going to be adding cards from multiple regions into their deck due to the need to do so based on card availability, I hadn't planned on creating characters from different regions so this wasn't really a viable solution.

The second issue that I had to solve was how to actually get the cards from the center row that they were revealed in, to being placed into your deck.  I had initially considered needing to purchase the cards with the energy that you get every turn, but quickly realized that this would devolve into "buy a few good cards, never buy anything else" because energy is what the entire system is based around.  You use it to fight, and to survive, and running out of it loses you the game, so spending it on something that doesn't impact the current game state is going to turn out to be terrible.  So then I thought about using 2 seperate energy pools, one that was used for adding cards to your deck, and one that was used for playing cards.  This second design is what I had decided I was going to be using in my mind for quite some time because I couldn't think of anything else, but I had a feeling this would be much too "fiddly" for real practical use.  You already move enough dice/tokens around in the normal game, adding more of that wasn't going to be a good thing.

As I said before, I initially began this project trying to fit the cards from a dead CCG into a deckbuilding game.  The revelation for the current system didn't come until months after the initial concept.  I had even shelved the project because I wasn't happy with the actual deckbuilding portion of it, I knew it wasn't going to be an elegant design.  I'm not really sure what caused it, but something caused me to realize that the cards aren't going to be balanced based off of energy costs, so why use that resource as the scale in which to add cards to your deck?  You can build a deck in a CCG with all 1 cost cards, or all 5 cost cards, but the single unifying thing within all CCGs is that each player has a limit (literal or realistic-imposed) of the number of cards that can be in your deck.  You make decisions when building a deck to add one card over another based on the power level or effect of the card and what you're trying to add to your deck.  Cards also have a restriction as to the number of copies you're allowed in your deck to prevent abuse and force variety.  I should be developing a system around numbers of cards added, not the costs of those cards in the game.  Adding 3 cards that cost 1 should be the same as adding 3 cards that cost 5 if those cards share the same relative power level.  For anyone experienced with M:tG, Swords to Plowshares and Serra Angel were both powerful cards (when I played Magic), but both were powerful in completely different ways, and adding one to your deck had the same pre-game cost as adding the other.  The pre-game cost is the equivilent of what I am trying to replicate while also playing the game.

This brought me around to creating what was initially known as "Syphon Stone".  It was known as that, because that's the name of the card that I used to proxy it!  The function of the card, in game, was to be a free card that you could play from your hand to choose a card in the center row and add it to your discard (the common way of adding cards to your deck in other deck building games is to add them to your discard.)  It was too easy!  I created a starting 10 card deck with 5 of these cards, 5 universal creatures that were all identical, and now I was really ready to playtest.  I solved what was the bigger problem of the two issues, the balance issue of how many creatures were drawn in the initial hand I planned on solving at a later date, assuming that this system worked.

Designing Cards

I started with the base of 5 factions.  I figure if works for Magic and it's what Magi-Nation initially released with, it's probably not a bad starting point.  After that, I tried to apply different themes for each faction.  I'm quite the logical thinker, so my initial concepts are fairly uniform to keep things theoretically balanced, and this is what I first started out with:

• Air - Remove Energy from Magi
• Earth - Add Energy to creatures 
• Fire - Remove Energy from creatures
• Water - Add Energy to Magi
• Void - Prevent Energy Loss

It's boring, but I needed to start somewhere, so I ran with it.  I also decided to try and keep some of the air of a rarity system in the game, so it wasn't just 4 copies of every card, and instead have more copies of less powerful cards (commons), and fewer copies of more powerful cards (rares).  I wanted to keep the deck around 100-150 cards which I felt was a managable number to work with, but enough to give variety to the game every time you would play.  I knew there would be spells and creatures as the base of the game, and any other card types I could work on later if I wanted to add them.

With 5 factions, and armed with the above knowledge, I decided upon a breakdown within each region as follows:

• 6 - 2 Cost Common Creatures
• 4 - 4 cost Uncommon Creatures
• 2 - 6 cost Rare Creatures
• 4 - 1 cost Uncommon Spells
• 2 - 3 cost Rare Spells

This brought me to 18 cards per faction, and 90 cards in the deck.  This was perfect for another reason that hasn't been mentioned yet, and that reason was MONSTERS.

Something that I had in the back of my mind, which was a concept that is sort of a part of Ascension, but it doesn't really feel that way is Monsters.  Monsters in this context would be bad guys that are shuffled into the deck and would pop up randomly throughout the game that the players would need to fight back, while also fighting each other.  The concept sounds like a lot of fun, and with only 90 cards, this allowed me to add 30 monsters to the deck to try the concept out.  I made it easy on myself and just put 5 copies of 6 different monsters into the deck, and now I was ready to playtest!

Or was I?

Initial Design

In reality, when I initially began to design this game, I didn't have any intentions of creating something new from the ground up.  At first all I was trying to do was to adapt a set of cards from Magi-Nation into a deckbuilding game to be able to play with my friends and possibly share the rules/card lists publically so other fans of Magi-Nation could also enjoy this variant of the game.  When creating the lists of the cards that I was going to include in the game, I began to encounter a slew of issues.

You see, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to take the cards designed for one game design and port them into another similar, yet completely different game design.  There are about 1200 cards that were created for Magi-Nation, and 12 different regions.  Simple logic should let you see that if you wanted a game with a play style that had any coherence with one another that I couldn't have 12 regions in a fixed game, so I had decided just to use the inital 5 regions that Magi-Nation started with.  This cut my available pool of cards down to around 500, which was a little easier to manage, but enough to give me some variety to work with.

My first job was to select the cards that would be in the game from within the 5 regions.  Since I was using the purchase/selection model from Ascension, the idea was that I would have a pool of cards for each region, all shuffled together and then you'd have a limited number of the random cards face-up at any given time to be able to select from and add cards to your deck.  This wasn't too difficult in and of itself, however it quickly became apparent that there were certain cards that would be purchased above all others, no matter what region(s) you had previously added to your deck.

Something about that concept really irked me.  There was no real choice to be made.  Each player would just purchase the most powerful available card, followed by the next and the next and the next until their deck would just be Pile_of_most_powerful_available_cards.deck.  The conclusion I reached was that I wanted a reason to draft "Moderate Power card from Region A" for your deck full of Region A instead of "High Power card from Region B".  This difference in card power is usually easy to differentiate when it comes to a standard CCG, because there are only so many cards that have a specific amount of raw power to have their inclusion into your deck be a no-brainer.  Then you start picking cards that are less powerful, but go along with the theme of your deck to create synergy.

There it was... the THEME of the deck.  That's what I needed to create.  But how do you do that when you're looking at a random pile of 100+ cards over 5 different factions?  I couldn't just make it so you pick a region and can only purchase cards of that region, that would be too limiting.  Also, what happens when you choose a region and the random shuffle places the majority of that region in the bottom of the deck?  I needed players to be able to play cards from any region, but give them a reason to purchase cards specifically to match the theme of what they've already drafted.

This entire thought process is what caused me to move away from the existing Magi-Nation cards that were already printed and instead create new cards that had matching themes and synergies that would allow them to be used much better within this system.  Isn't it wonderful how any project can quickly grow to a size that you didn't expect it to?

The resource system

I previously referenced a resource system that I was using from the game Magi-Nation: Duel.  I should probably explain this in more detail to the people who are not familiar with that game.

The system should be able to work for a variety of games, but in this context, you would be controlling a main character who would have an amount of resources to be able to spend to cast spells, summon creatures, or use abilities.  Anyone who is familiar with Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, Yugi-Oh, or any number of other games should be familair with a similar concept of controlling a main character that battles against another character controlled by an opponent through the use of creatures, spells and abilities.

You start with a number of resources represented by tokens or dice.  In Magi-Nation, this was called energy and the main characters that you controlled were called Magi.  So your Magi would have an amount of energy that they started with, and gain a fixed amount of energy at the start of each turn.  This energy would be spent to cast spells, summon creatures and use abilities.  When you cast a spell or used an ability, the energy would be discarded, completely lost.  When you summoned a creature, the energy would be moved onto that creature and act as both it's attack value and it's remaining health.  So if I spent 5 energy on summoning a creature, I would move 5 energy from my Magi to that creature card and it would have 5 attack and 5 health.

The combat system for the game would work that both creatures involved in an attack would remove energy from one another simultaniously.  So if my 5 energy creature attacked your 3 energy creature, I would remove 5 energy from your creature and you would remove 3 energy from my creature.  Your creature would be left with zero energy, and be discarded from play, while my creature would be left with 2 energy and be able to continue to fight, although in a much weaker state.

To my knowledge, this system hasn't been used in another game as of yet, and it's somewhat original in the sense that it has yet to be used by another game, but it's not really unique in the sense that similar systems have not been used before.  The idea where you move the resource from your character to the creature that you summon is a unique idea I believe, but gaining a fixed amount of resources each turn is not.

What I really like about the system is the simplicity.  You don't need to create attack and defense values to balance vs. a casting cost of the creature, which enevitable causes a power creeep that you can't really do anything about.  It's easy for people to understand and easy to track combat.  It also promotes some basic math skills, which is always a plus when you're thinking about a younger audience.  I have changed the reference names for the resource (Essence) and the main characters (Awakened) for Affinity to fit the world that I'm designing for the game, but the rest of the general mechanics as explained are still intact.

Origins

Since I'm not exactly a professional designer or anything, most of my designs are inspired by another game, and then slightly modified again and again and again until it's been twisted enough to be considered something of my own creation.  It's hard to separate this in your own mind sometimes, knowing that there are bits of your designs that were really "borrowed" or "stolen" from another game.  It's hard to be sure if what you're creating is truly original, or if you're just re-hashing something that has been done before.

From a legal standpoint, at least you're generally safe in that you can't actually copyright a game mechanic.  You can put a patent on it, but even that is hard to defend.  The patent is generally a scare tactic to prevent anyone else from creating a game like yours.

As I said before, my background is in competitive CCG play.  One of those games was a game called Magi-Nation: Duel.  It was a game that only lasted about 3 years before going under for numerous reasons, but one of those reasons was not the game play.  It employed a really great energy system that eliminated the need to have resource cards in your deck which also prevented any concept of "resource screw" or "resource flood". I really loved to play this game, but since it is a dead game (almost a decade gone now) and outside of a freakish miracle where the current cartoon with the IP of the game takes off like gangbusters, the game will never be reprinted.  So this is the system that I decided to start with to try and make a deckbuilding game.

The second game that I used for a little bit of inspiration for my game is from the game Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer.  I'm not sure if the mechanic is used in any other games, because it's not a very unique mechanic or anything, but it is the way that the selection of cards that you have available to purchase for your deck is chosen.  In some games, you have piles that are chosen before the start of the game, and you're limited to just the piles that are chosen to purchase cards from.  In Ascension, all of the cards are shuffled together, and there is a preview row of sorts where there is a limited number of cards that are available to purchase, but when one is bought, another is filled in from the top of the random pile.

So that's where I started,  the energy mechanic from Magi Nation and the preview/purchase mechanic from Ascension.  I'd like to say that they went together quite seamlessly, but I'm usually not in the habit of lying.

What is Affinity?

af·fin·i·ty

noun /əˈfinitē/  affinities, plural A spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something A similarity of characteristics suggesting a relationship, esp. a resemblance in structure between animals, plants, or languages Relationship, esp. by marriage as opposed to blood ties The degree to which a substance tends to combine with another

That's the definition according to Google.  (<3 Google)

What Affinity is in this blog, is going to be a reference to a game that I am currently designing, with plans of self-publication.  The game is a card game, and more specifically a deck building card game.  See, game design is a hobby of mine that I spend quite a fair bit of my free time on.  I like to analyze systems and sets of data, and I found that when I grew tired of analyzing the systems that other people have created, I find a lot of enjoyment and challenge in designing my own.

I was initially inspired to design a deckbuilding card game when I felt that the current designs that are available for purchase and play were lacking in major conflict between players.  My background for playing games is playing Collectible Card Games.  I should add that I didn't just play them, but I competed in tournaments at the highest level for basically every game I've ever played.  But, as life goes on, I have less time and money to spend on playing games at the competitive level, but I still have the drive in me to do so.  When I came across the deck building card game genre, I was fascinated by it.  The games had certain similarities to CCGs, however the more I played them, the more that I felt I was just playing multiplayer solitaire.

So what I wanted to do was create a deck building card game that was much closer to the CCGs that I have played over the years.  I had a few goals in my initial design.

• Multple factions in the game for players to choose between
• Players draft a deck to play as the game continues
• A reason for a player to choose the best cards for their deck, not just the "best" cards.
• Quick to play
• Simple to learn
• Head to head competition
• No Negative Play Experiences (NPE)

Since then, I think I've managed to include all of the points in the design, the biggest being "A reason for a player to choose the best cards for their deck, not just the 'best' cards."  This is something that's always bothered me about limited formats in card games.  Even if there were different factions in the game, you were often better off just choosing the most powerful card that was available to you instead of the card that best fit your deck based upon strategy or faction.

First Post

So you might be wondering what this is all about.  Well, this is going to be a blog where I chronicle the processes and ideas that I go through for a game that I'm designing called Affinity.  There has already been a fair amount of work done on this game, and I plan on making posts with that history as well.  This is both to collect and organize my thoughts, as well as let anyone read through this process for whatever reason they have to do so.