[board game jam] Rogue Like Card Game
I hadn't posted this here yet cos we were gonna do a board game jam compilation but ideas everyone's busy :)
This is a transcript (with additions) from my blog: http://www.thesteventu.com/my-rouge-like-card-game-the-fruit-of-my-wits-board-game-jam-weekend/
This weekend, there was a Board Game Jam at the Wits Game Design Lab – open to all and sundry who wanted to try their hand at creating a game with not code and pixels, but pencil and paper. I was there, along with a few members from makegamesSA, and had an amazing time inventing, musing, playing, and re-inventing
I had gone into this jam with certain expectations, having a game in my head that I wanted to make already. The first half of the Saturday was consumed by this one – A deck-building game about advertising where you are an agency morgul, amassing fortunes, hiring employees and pitched for clients. We prototyped it up quickly and had many arguments over it – in the end it was deemed too complex and too similar to existing mechanics (Thunderstone) for a short jam and I abandoned it. Ernest picked it up and turned it into another game.
But then I made something else! Everyone worked on a couple prototypes, but in the end this one grabbed my imagination and interest the most: The Rogue-Like Card Game (RLCG)
Oh yes thanks to @Besonance for organizing, and @edg3, @rigormortis and everyone for play testing with me :)
Introduction: How Cool BGJ Was
Before I tell you about RLCG, I just have to give a big shout out to the Wits Game Design peeps, who organised the Board Game Jam. They had a cool lab, complete with all kinds of cool stuff – tiles, counters, dice, tokens, a guillotine with which I cut my cards, and all kinds of little bits, which really drove home the essence of game making – it’s not about the code or the graphics, but the game – the set of considered, defined, and tested rules which make an interaction fun.
It’s about challenging people and creating tension between players, and creating choices which turn into opportunities for everyone involved to feel thrilled and invested. This post on the Board Game Designers Forum describes it very well, and you do it with naught but writing some stuff down on bits of paper and some more bits to keep count of something, and then it’s all in the rules of the game, followed by a lot of playing and testing and tuning.
So if you wanna make games, give it a shot. Try it, stop imagining that it’s hard, imagine instead what you want to show people!
Introducing The Rogue-Like Card Game:
In brief:
RLCG is an asymmetrical card game that pits an Adventurer against the Dungeon Master (with multiplayer to come!).
The asymmetrical play means that the two players play differently. The Dungeon master lays out the dungeon for the adventurer to move in. There is a certain ratio of boons and banes in the Dungeon Deck (following deck construction rules), so the adventurer is never completely overwhelmed. The dungeon builds Power over time, and its master can make use of the stockpile of Power to wake slumbering evils, or he may choose to save his power to assault the hero in another way. Power tokens can be taken into the dungeon’s power stockpile, or be invested on the board, over face-down cards. When an adventurer slays a minion, the dungeon loses power from its stockpile equal to the cost of the monster. This creates an interesting choice for the dungeon – does he hang onto the power, where it could be lost, or does it invest it on the board, where it’s safe from the adventurer’s attack? The dungeon may also create disinformation by investing power onto cards that aren’t monsters, creating the illusion that they are indeed monsters.
Each turn, the Adventurer moves through the rooms of the dungeon. If the dungeon has enough Power in hand and on the hidden room, it may spring the room’s evils on the Adventurer… Or it may choose not to. The Adventurer may then choose search the room: if it’s something bad, the dungeon need not to pay Power to wake it, but if its a boon, the adventurer claims it. If it’s a monster, a battle ensues.
The game is one of bluffing and calculating risks, for the adventurer knows not what is in his surrounding, but must discover the treasures and slay lesser monsters to build up skills to tackle the bigger fiends, before the dungeon gathers enough power and overwhelms the adventurer.
The hero’s task is to steel himself in the dungeon and defeat enough minions, before assaulting and destroying the Heart Of The Dungeon. The Dungeon seeks to defend itself and kill the intruder.
A varied mix of character cards, dungeon features (monsters, traps, treasures, etc) and skills round off the game by making each combination a unique experience, with some features being stronger against some than others.
Eventually, this will have multiplayer – with multiple adventurers competing to be the first to slay the dungeon heart – but the dungeon may just slay them all first!
Further exploration
I've play tested it several more times since and I've had some very interesting discoveries:
1. The blind exploration of a rogue-like doesn't translate directly into a board game, specifically a versus game. The hero needs more of a goal to move towards, or it just becomes a case of randomly searching some rooms and not others. Am addressing that with special dungeon destinations in the dungeon deck that have a different card back.
2. Resource management: dungeon side has resource management, while hero side has very little. I didn't want to make it too similar on either side, but it feels like I need to assign costs to hero cards so there is a reasonable amount of resource management and card cycling going on for the hero.
3. Not sure if I want to/should make the cards pure and lite and make it a limited game like citadels, or insert hooks and abilities to make it expandable like magic or other CCG/LCGs.
I’ve still got a lot of polishing and testing and tuning to do, but the game is making me very excited So hopefully this will get a name as well – I’m not sure what I wanna call this, if you have suggestions please let me know! All suggestions welcome!
This is a transcript (with additions) from my blog: http://www.thesteventu.com/my-rouge-like-card-game-the-fruit-of-my-wits-board-game-jam-weekend/
This weekend, there was a Board Game Jam at the Wits Game Design Lab – open to all and sundry who wanted to try their hand at creating a game with not code and pixels, but pencil and paper. I was there, along with a few members from makegamesSA, and had an amazing time inventing, musing, playing, and re-inventing
I had gone into this jam with certain expectations, having a game in my head that I wanted to make already. The first half of the Saturday was consumed by this one – A deck-building game about advertising where you are an agency morgul, amassing fortunes, hiring employees and pitched for clients. We prototyped it up quickly and had many arguments over it – in the end it was deemed too complex and too similar to existing mechanics (Thunderstone) for a short jam and I abandoned it. Ernest picked it up and turned it into another game.
But then I made something else! Everyone worked on a couple prototypes, but in the end this one grabbed my imagination and interest the most: The Rogue-Like Card Game (RLCG)
Oh yes thanks to @Besonance for organizing, and @edg3, @rigormortis and everyone for play testing with me :)
Introduction: How Cool BGJ Was
Before I tell you about RLCG, I just have to give a big shout out to the Wits Game Design peeps, who organised the Board Game Jam. They had a cool lab, complete with all kinds of cool stuff – tiles, counters, dice, tokens, a guillotine with which I cut my cards, and all kinds of little bits, which really drove home the essence of game making – it’s not about the code or the graphics, but the game – the set of considered, defined, and tested rules which make an interaction fun.
It’s about challenging people and creating tension between players, and creating choices which turn into opportunities for everyone involved to feel thrilled and invested. This post on the Board Game Designers Forum describes it very well, and you do it with naught but writing some stuff down on bits of paper and some more bits to keep count of something, and then it’s all in the rules of the game, followed by a lot of playing and testing and tuning.
So if you wanna make games, give it a shot. Try it, stop imagining that it’s hard, imagine instead what you want to show people!
Introducing The Rogue-Like Card Game:
In brief:
RLCG is an asymmetrical card game that pits an Adventurer against the Dungeon Master (with multiplayer to come!).
The asymmetrical play means that the two players play differently. The Dungeon master lays out the dungeon for the adventurer to move in. There is a certain ratio of boons and banes in the Dungeon Deck (following deck construction rules), so the adventurer is never completely overwhelmed. The dungeon builds Power over time, and its master can make use of the stockpile of Power to wake slumbering evils, or he may choose to save his power to assault the hero in another way. Power tokens can be taken into the dungeon’s power stockpile, or be invested on the board, over face-down cards. When an adventurer slays a minion, the dungeon loses power from its stockpile equal to the cost of the monster. This creates an interesting choice for the dungeon – does he hang onto the power, where it could be lost, or does it invest it on the board, where it’s safe from the adventurer’s attack? The dungeon may also create disinformation by investing power onto cards that aren’t monsters, creating the illusion that they are indeed monsters.
Each turn, the Adventurer moves through the rooms of the dungeon. If the dungeon has enough Power in hand and on the hidden room, it may spring the room’s evils on the Adventurer… Or it may choose not to. The Adventurer may then choose search the room: if it’s something bad, the dungeon need not to pay Power to wake it, but if its a boon, the adventurer claims it. If it’s a monster, a battle ensues.
The game is one of bluffing and calculating risks, for the adventurer knows not what is in his surrounding, but must discover the treasures and slay lesser monsters to build up skills to tackle the bigger fiends, before the dungeon gathers enough power and overwhelms the adventurer.
The hero’s task is to steel himself in the dungeon and defeat enough minions, before assaulting and destroying the Heart Of The Dungeon. The Dungeon seeks to defend itself and kill the intruder.
A varied mix of character cards, dungeon features (monsters, traps, treasures, etc) and skills round off the game by making each combination a unique experience, with some features being stronger against some than others.
Eventually, this will have multiplayer – with multiple adventurers competing to be the first to slay the dungeon heart – but the dungeon may just slay them all first!
Further exploration
I've play tested it several more times since and I've had some very interesting discoveries:
1. The blind exploration of a rogue-like doesn't translate directly into a board game, specifically a versus game. The hero needs more of a goal to move towards, or it just becomes a case of randomly searching some rooms and not others. Am addressing that with special dungeon destinations in the dungeon deck that have a different card back.
2. Resource management: dungeon side has resource management, while hero side has very little. I didn't want to make it too similar on either side, but it feels like I need to assign costs to hero cards so there is a reasonable amount of resource management and card cycling going on for the hero.
3. Not sure if I want to/should make the cards pure and lite and make it a limited game like citadels, or insert hooks and abilities to make it expandable like magic or other CCG/LCGs.
I’ve still got a lot of polishing and testing and tuning to do, but the game is making me very excited So hopefully this will get a name as well – I’m not sure what I wanna call this, if you have suggestions please let me know! All suggestions welcome!
Thanked by 1hanli
Comments
Like, the player would have a face-up set of 4 dungeon cards, of which they could place 1 and burn 1 (then refill). Each dungeon card would have a set of resources or settings that could affect the player somehow: "+1 defense, -1 gold earned" or "+1 item drop, +2 threat" for instance. So the player would put those down strategically, trying to create a neat path for themselves, but the dungeon master would put enemies and traps and the like on those dungeon squares in order to herd the player towards specific things, or make an otherwise juicy tile useless, etc.
And thematically I'd like to keep it blind for the hero - he's exploring, he's seeking out fortunes, while the keeper is the malevolent force that's trying to foil the hero - while he has all the information, he may still get stuffed up by a clever play, or while he's building power.
I feel that it's important that the dungeon creates choices for the hero, and the hero chooses. The dungeon bluffs, the hero calls them... Or not, or whatever.
You're pretty spot on that the dungeon herds the hero is always choosing where to go, and I'm trying to give him a goal to get to that'll benefit him a lot. So the dungeon tries to disrupt that.
So right now one of the biggest elements missing is a sense of "purpose" and context - there's the goal of killing more monsters and leveling up, but without any direction, the hero is forced to move almost completely at random. Which takes away from decision making. In the reverse scenario, the dungeon would feel forced to only react, robbing him of choice too, as the player could go wherever they want. Again, the lack is of a goal that someone moves toward, creating a semi-predictable path, and competition.
-----------proposed solution to my own problem statement---------------
So I'm planning cards with different card backs as the dungeon "essentials" - every good dungeon must have an armoury, a kitchen, a spawning pool, etc, and the dungeon deck should have enough of those features that they will come up often. When they do, they can be placed AWAY from the hero, creating both a goal for the hero to shoot towards and a path along which the dungeon can dedicate its resources to defending. Those special rooms would both hold great treasures for the hero, as well as become the victory condition.
Also, these "essentials" are what powers the dungeon - giving points towards being able to pack more stuff into the dungeon deck. Balance will be important... There would have to be some kind of points guideline, like a basic dungeon must have 20 points worth of dungeon essentials, and for every point you have you're allowed 2 more points of your army in the deck, or something like that. Deckbuilding balance stuff.
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Though I think the terrain thing is pretty neat, I might consider that, I just wanted to keep this game REALLY paired down - so there're fewer variety of stuff that gets differentiated - one deck per side, and play starts. There are already cards in the set that has "room effects" like a blod ward that the hero puts down, and never leaves the room. While in that room, Defence +1.
Save the Princess!
I agree that the question of purpose is a good one to explore in depth, it could be that for every adventure the rouge has a different purpose that affects the gameplay. This could make it very interesting because the dungeons' purpose would generally be fixed, monsters etc. unaware of the rouge goals. Moves are open to the careful analysis of the rouges motives.
Having played mansions of madness for the first time last night I find it interesting so much of what I have parallels with them. This also makes me wonder if I should stay away from mechanically similar games to avoid being influenced, or i should absorb and research more of them so I can learn more from the "masters"... Hmmm.
With this in mind, I'd recommend taking a look at Descent (1st or 2nd edition). It has a similar feel to it than 1 party plays the dungeon lord, while the other players take on the role of heroes. :)
I'm just guessing here, having just played it over in my head with the little I understand about the game, but it seems to me as if where you go pretty much doesn't matter at all, except when you find your path blocked by a monster. As the adventurer, you just know the dungeon has to place the cards you want eventually, and will likely always play the cards that would reward you, out of reach. So it's not just moving about randomly and without purpose: it's that plus potentially always having the rewards placed away/hidden/behind obstacles, and you can only get to the loot once the dungeon has no choice but to let you take the loot.
So, if that's the mechanic that's at the heart of it (and, again, I don't know if it is?), then I imagine that you'd want to allow both players to be able to wrestle that balance. Danny suggested one way; but maybe the adventurer could play (limited) fortune cards that force the dungeon to play its next card in a certain place, or force the next card to be a boon. Otherwise, even though the adventurer's the one invading the dungeon, it kind of feels as if the adventurer's always on the defensive, and is just waiting around for the right tiles to show up. I don't know; I don't know what cards you've already got. :)