Comeback Mechanics

When designing a game, part of the challenge of being a designer is ensuring that the first player to gain an advantage over other players in a given system is not guaranteed to win the game.  That would make for a very boring experience for the players involved, and generally speaking a very fast resolution to your game.  There are many games out there that include Comeback Mechanisms in their game.  There are many places that a designer may place them to ensure that the players have access to them when needed.

Here are some examples of Comeback Mechanisms in other games:

In Magic the Gathering, the Comeback Mechanism has been explained by the designers as the ability to build up your lands over time.  The assumption being that as you have access to a larger mana pool, you will have the ability to cast more powerful spells and creatures than the ones that your opponent was able to play for lesser mana costs.  Obviously this system has worked well enough, looking at the current lifespan of the game, but it introduces an interesting negative feedback loop into the game as well.  If the assumption is that Creatures and Spells that cost more are exponentially more powerful than those that cost less, then if you are able to circumvent or reduce those costs in some way, then you're able to abuse something that was designed with the ability to shift the tides of battle as a way to continue your early edge in the game.    It also brings with it the assumption that a single, high-cost card is able to swing the game into your favor, which is also not always the case.  There are many low-cost counters to high-cost cards that allow an early aggressive edge to keep their edge, continue their tempo, and win the game.

In Summoner Wars, there are different event cards that have been dubbed as "Catch up Events" or CUE that are included as a Comeback Mechanism.  These events generally require that your opponent have more of a specific resource than you have, either Magic or Units or both, and then allow you to circumvent costs of summoning or shift Magic from your opponent to yourself.   This is not a bad system, but it is abusable in being able to hold back your ability to play cards on purpose to be able to activate a CUE while not expending resources that you would otherwise be expected to have spent.  I think a better alternative may have been a # of cards in your discard pile, or a # of cards remaining in your deck.  No system is foolproof, however, and both of those could also be abused in other ways.

In Power Grid and many Eurogames, a very common Comeback Mechanism is changing player order based on victory points.  Since you track your victory points along the way, it's easy to dictate who is "ahead" and who is "behind."  In Power Grid, the person who is in last place will get to act first in the auctions as well as purchase their resources first and therefore purchase them cheapest.  The issue with doing this is the public knowledge of who is "ahead" and who is "behind", and the fact that players are able to game this system to their advantage.  Most often, the player who will be able to win in Power Grid will be the person who stayed behind or in the middle of the pack for the majority of the game, and used the last turn to jump ahead of everyone else.  It's actually an interesting problem where taking actions to move yourself forward to victory actually sets you up to lose the game.

So when designing Affinity, I had thoughts of Comeback Mechanisms in mind, I knew that there was a great point at which to determine when someone was "behind" in the game.  Since two opposing Awakened need to be defeated to win the game, at some point there will be one player with 2 Awakened in their Awakened stack, and one player with 1 Awakened remaining in their Awakened stack.  At that point, the player with only 1 Awakened left is generally going to be "behind" in the game, unless the other face-up Awakened has very little Essence remaining in play.

So the first Comeback Mechanism that I put into the game was something to regain tempo to the person who was behind.  Allow them to use Aether Surge, a card that up until that point was only used to add more cards to your deck, to be able to gain a tempo advantage.  I did this by giving Aether Surge the ability to allow a Construct to attack the turn it was manifested (which it normally is unable to do.)  This is how the game was playtested and balanced for months, and it seemed to work out okay, but the reality was that I wasn't paying attention to the results as much as I should have been.  You see, I didn't automatically realize that after Player A's first Awakened was defeated, he would use his Aether Surge cards to be able to defeat Player B's first Awakened, who would then be able to use their Aether Surge cards to be able to defeat Player A's second Awakened.  It didn't happen this way every single time, which is why I didn't catch on to this happening as quickly as I would have liked, but the percentage was probably close to 80% of the time.

I have since scrapped that ability on Aether Surge, as well as added some more tactical options for the game in Combat, making it a very decision-rich game from turn to turn and allowing someone to use tactical advantages to bring themselves back from behind.  For the last few months, there haven't been any official comeback mechanisms in place, but I've noticed that the percentage that the person who loses their first Awakened also being the person who loses the game to be around 60%-65%, which is higher than I would like to see.  I've recently been testing a new mechanism called "Blessing of the Aether."  This is a mechanism that comes into play for the first person to have an Awakened defeated.  It's simply a modifier to the player's hand size, which causes them to refill their hand to 8 cards instead of 7 for a new Awakened, as well as increasing the Innervate of their last Awakened by 2.  These two small changes allow the benefit to compound over time, where your second Awakened has more raw Essence to work with each turn, giving you a better chance of overcoming the advantage that your opponent started with.  In addition, when the other player's first Awakened is defeated, they won't gain the same advantage, making it a better comeback mechanic than the original Aether Surge solution.