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.