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.