The challenge

A while back I started designing a game, as a challenge. They say that constraints lead to interesting designs and innovation. The challenge was simple: What would a trading card game look like that only requires 5 cards to play?

Starting to think and design

First, I thought about what I would want from a TCG. Coins, tokens, and dice. Every good TCG has those right. They do, but we really need them? No. We will ignore them for now, but maybe later.

We do need to discuss randomness. Is randomness something that is fun? It is really awesome when you high-roll and your player deals critical damage in an RPG. The vice versa is also true. Yes umm no. Let us call it sometimes. It can have dramatic effects in those RPG games.

So, the question is do we want those dramatic effect in our TCG, the answer is yes. This type of randomness is less helpful in a game of skill. We don't want to make the player depend on luck to win the game. It feels terrible to lose a well played game to a random roll of the dice. We want drama from inspired plays, sneaky shifts in tempo, and other player driven excitement, not random results.

That is just the long and short of randomness. A game that is well played should not able to be flipped on its head by chance. What I'm saying is we want zero output randomness. We do want input randomness, but we will talk about how we'll achieve that later.

Digging deeper

However, the big issue is the challenge. Most popular card game have between 20-60 card in a deck. They are a mix of creatures, spells, weapons, and resources.

For a Magic the Gathering deck, 15-20 of those cards are resources. With the requirement to have only five cards means that we can't have this type of card at all. Furthermore, it means that we can't have a cost to play a card as well. So we can play any card at any point.

Next we look at creatures. I think creatures are the root of all the popular TCGs. Maybe there is a good TCG out there that doesn't have creatures. Let me know. This game is going to have creature, because I said so.

Now that, that is settled. Let's look our remaining thing that a deck commonly holds. Creatures, spells, weapons, and effects. Again, it is obvious that we can't have these as cards as well. Oh well, so sad.

In reality, all these cards are just effects. Yes they are often rapped in a fancy mechanic. All they do is change some attribute of the card. So we are just going to replace those mechanics with one of our own.

What could this mechanic be? We don't have much at this. We have two mechanics so far: cards and that we play them somewhere. What else can we do with cards? We can draw them from the deck, play them to the board, return them from the board to the hand, discard them, send them to trash, attack, defend, they can die and be revived. I've decided is that we can use these effect when we take those actions. This gives us a lot of support in the form of using the specific actions to win the game.

Input randomness

I told you would talk about this later. Well now is the time. Now we have cards, and they have actions they can take. Building 1000 unique cards seem like a tedious task. So... let's make 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 cards.

Yes, for the coders out there, that is a 64-bit unsigned integer worth of cards. We are going to build those cards using procedural generation. Some of those cards will end up without any effect or actions. We will add a new mandatory action for all cards, the item action, it ensures that no card is completely useless.

This large base of cards leaves us in somewhat of a pickle. So many cards. So little time. Okay, we are going to make decks. Decks will consist of 32 randomly generated cards, but we are going to further.

The game will be a draft style. Drafting five cards from our deck to battle with. We have two players, each with 32 cards. They will then draft 5 cards in sets of 3. That is, you look at 3 cards and pick one to keep, and repeat until you have five. We will also add in the ability to pass completely once. This means that you could see up to 18 of the cards in your deck. Which means better than 50% of your deck will be seen as you start your game.

That's... end of the beginning

This it for now. Hope you enjoyed my thought processes. Next time I'll write about what those effects we have talked about will actually look in practice. Maybe a few other things as well. The end goal is to have a working Play2Earn NFT deck building game on the Hive blockchain.