Edtior’s note: Many of the pictures featured in this article contain placeholder art which I do not own. Since they are from quite a long time ago it’s sometimes been difficult to track the source and artist down, but a lot of them have been borrowed from Magic the Gathering. They have been used solely for private prototyping purposes and for educational purposes in this article. If you own any of the images please contact me and I’ll credit you / take the images down.
#1: Actions, Reactions and Upgrades
Goal and Vision
A lot of inspiration came from Terraforming Mars, Magic the Gathering and Spirit Island. Spirit Island has a wonderful way to use assets (presence) on the map as requirements for using cards. E.g. a card’s effect can only target lands adjacent to lands where you are present. In Terraforming Mars a lot of passive upgrades are used in conjunction to create an engine to drive your strategy forward. And in Magic the Gathering you have cards which allow you to instantly react to what your oppononets are doing.
I wanted to create a game which had the synergy and deck building feel of Terraforming Mars, the card playing mechanics of Spirit Island and the reactionary nature of Magic the Gathering.
Implementation
The three types of units which existed, and have actually lasted until the final versions, were Warriors, Shamans and Buildings. Depending on the type of unit the cards had different flavours. Warriors were all about fighting and brute force, Shamans about area control and Buildings about economy and growth. I wanted this to be a central part of the cards and thus required different sources to be able to play a card. Sometimes you needed 2 warriors and at other times a shaman.
Action cards were cards you played during your turn and cost a certain amount of resources. They were used to move your troops around, fight in areas, recruit more troops, build buildings, deal damage or had utility effects. The way actions were played have varied between versions but in general they have always been played during a player’s own turn.
Reaction cards were cards which could only be played under certain circumstances. As their name implies they were for reacting to something, e.g. a troop which died, or an enemy who recruited a unit. The reaction cards also followed the same pattern of having a source requirement and a cast range.
Upgrade cards were cards which provided a passive ability to a player once they were played. It could be that they boosted all Warriors’ health by 1, or you could move extra troops every time you moved your troops.
Each player started with a specific deck depending on their chosen race. When a card was played it was put in a discard pile and once you had no more cards on hand you picked your discard pile back up again. The wording was often terrible and all over the place as can be seen in the card above.
When playing an action card the player always had the option of either paying for the card, or discarding the card and pay for a standard action instead. The standard actions were:
- Recruiting a troop
- Building a building
- Fighting in an area
- Moving troops around.
During a player’s turn they had the option to purchase more cards to put in their decks. This was done by drawing a few cards from a big deck (consisting of actions, reactions and upgrades) and then keeping one of the cards.
Analysis
Card Economy
One thing which turned out to be quite an issue was that reaction cards allowed players to go through their hand quicker than people without reaction cards. This in turn allowed them to regain their most valuable cards since they got to pick their discard pile back up again.
Upgrades were insanely strong
Getting a permanent passive boost proved to pretty much always be worth getting, regardless of how expensive it was.
Standard actions were crucial
Having the option to always do something relevant even though your cards didn’t allow for it proved to be very important and enjoyable. This mechanic removed some of the luck factor from the random card gain.
#2: Card suites – Hatred, Xenophobia, Greed, Pride, Madness
Goal and Vision
I was quite happy with the general feel of the cards but wanted to add more flavour to them and differentiate more between different cards. I also wanted to reduce the randomness of which card you might get when gaining new cards. Lastly, I wanted to solve the issue of upgrades being way too powerful.
Implementation
Card suites
To give the cards their own feel and theme (sort of like the mana colours in Magic the Gathering) I introduced five different suites:
- Hatred (Offensive, wants to destroy everything else)
- Xenophobia (Defensive, wants to protect themselves)
- Greed (Economy, wants to expand and gain a lot of resources)
- Pride (Points, wants to celebrate different achievements to gain victory points)
- Madness (Utility, wants to create chaos on the map by moving troops around and bending game rules)
The cards were split up in five different decks (according to their suite) and when players gained new cards they had to choose from which pile to draw from.
Resources
In addition to the suites a new suite resource was introduced. Whenever a player played e.g. a Hatred card they got a Hatred resource. This resource could be used to pay for making other cards even more powerful when played. I won’t go more indepth than that here but it’s covered in my first article.
Initiative
Another new mechanic was the idea of cards having an initiative. Each turn every player played 2 cards face down, and then simultaneously revealed them. The players then performed their card (or paid for a standard action) during their initiatives, going from the lowest to the highest.
A Hatred action card and a Madness reaction card. The initiative is the middle number (93 and 35 respectively) and the casting requirements is listed to the left (2 shamans with a range of 0, and 1 shaman with a range of 1)
Upgrade cards
I wanted to make the upgrades less permanent than just a passive effect noone could do anything about. I solved this by tying the card to a unit out on the map (e.g. to a warrior). If that unit were destroyed the upgrade was discarded. I practically implemented this by having two circular tiles with the same number on them (I borrowed the summoning tiles from Gloomhaven during playtesting). The small tile was put on top of the card and the large tile underneath the troop which had the upgrade.
An upgrade card and the tile-pairs used for upgrading a unit. The upgrade card’s effect would trigger each turn at its initative (but there were also passive upgrades which e.g. made a troop stronger).
Duration cards
I also introduced a fourth kind of card, which was the duration cards. They sort of acted like the upgrade cards but you had to pay an increasing upkeep cost to keep their effect. The area were the effect was happening (e.g. a poison cloud dealing 1 damage each turn) was marked with the large number tile, and a small numbered tile was used to mark which duration card it was connected to.
All duration cards had a persist cost. During the initiative the player owning the card had to pay the persist cost if they wanted to keep the card in play. The persist cost increased by 1 for each initiative in stayed active (so first turn it would cost 1, the next 2, then 3, and so on).
Analysis
Too many colors
Since the suites had their own colors (Hatred: red, Xenophobia: blue, Greed: yellow, Pride: green, Madness: purple) and the different card types also had different colors (Action: yellow, Reaction: blue, Duration: purple, Upgrade: orange) some players felt it got very confusing. They would’ve prefered to only have 1 color associated with the type of card.
Card mechanics instead of theme
When gaining cards the players often wanted to have a specific kind of card mechanic (e.g. they wanted to recruit more, or they wanted to move a lot of troops). Since the five different suites were divided into a theme instead of mechanics the players still felt it was very difficult to plan which suite to choose from.
The upgrade and duration tiles
This one worked better than I thought it would, but it was still pretty messy. The units hid the number on the tile and it was generally quite a hassle keeping track of which upgrade/duration tiles belonged to what cards.
Initiative
Having initiative on the cards was an appreciated feature but having more than 1 card per player to keep track of during the initiative phase was quite annoying. Instead of going in initiative order it jumped back and forth between different players.
Duration and Upgrade initiatives
To make the above point even worse some players ended up with 4 or more cards to trigger during their turn because they had upgrades and persisting durations. In a digital game this could’ve perhaps worked but in an analog game it was way too much admin to keep track of everything.
#3: The Trading Card Game attempt
Goal and Vision
Since so many things didn’t turn out great in the previous iteration I was starting to have some doubts and wanted to try something quite different. I had a feeling that the core was still good but the mechanics revolving around it needed tweaking. A few years back I played a lot of Android Netrunner which had an action point system (in their game called “clicks”), where a player could spend these action points during their turn from a variety of options. Translated to my game they could be for playing cards, gaining resources, recruiting troops, drawing cards, etc. The idea was to make everything a standard action and you payed for them with a set amount of action points each turn.
Implementation
In this new version there were five different kinds of cards. Actions, Reactions, Abilities, Leaders and Resources. Instead of initiatives the players went in turn order and were allowed 4 order points each turn. The drafting and deck building aspect during gameplay was also gone, and the deck building would instead be done before each game. The sizes of the decks were about 40 cards.
A part from the player board, depicting the available standard orders to the player, and slots for keeping track of their remaining orders.
Actions and reactions
These two card types remained pretty much the same. Once played they performed their effect and then went into the discard pile.
A Mushroom action card and a Lizard reaction card. Pretty much functioning the same as in the earlier iterations.
Abilities
Abilities were cards which once played could act as a new order. They were supposed to give the player more options to choose from, and each ability card could be used once per turn (indicated by rotating the card 90 degrees).
Conversion was an Elf ability card, which cost 2 to play. Once in play, a player could activate the effect of the card by paying 1 order point.
Resources
Resource cards were often passive cards which boosted the economy for the player. It could be just a steady income of cash or something which had to trigger in order for the player to get the money (e.g. destroying a troop).
An Elf resource card which granted them money at the start of their turn depending on how many areas they controlled.
Leaders
Lastly, we have the leader cards. A leader was essentially a starting passive effect for the player, and the idea was that the races could have different leaders.
The Swamp leader Glondu, whose deck revolved around sacrificing units to grow stronger.
Analysis
Clear playstyle in the decks
The decks had a very clear theme and playstyle which made it easy for players to understand how they were supposed to play. Since they had been used to configure the deck themselves from the earlier play testing iterations they felt limited in what they could do. If they had the option to fully build their decks from scratch this maybe wouldn’t have been an issue.
Not quite what I had in mind
To be fair, this version of the game didn’t feel like I had originally envisioned. It was a fine foundation to keep working from, but in the end I wanted a game where the players did the deckbuilding during the game itself. It was a fun experiment and could most likely be developed into a game of its own, but it wasn’t the direction I wanted for my game.
#4: Norsefolk early version – Order Points, Cooldowns and pledge cards
Goal and Vision
Somewhere along the lines I felt a need to update the theme and atmosphere of the game. I’m a big fan of Norse mythology and have actually been working on a digital game called A Journey Through Valhalla so I thought I’d might reuse some of that knowledge. In addition to this I also wanted to go back to the original idea of the game and away from the TCG-experiment. One thing I did like about the TCG version was that only 1 resource was used, and I also wanted to experiment with the idea of having cooldown on cards.
Implementation
Cooldowns, order points and enhancements
The actions and reactions were back again but this time they only cost order points to use but had a cooldown time before they could be used again. To facilitate an economic playstyle I also introduced the “Prosperity” currency which would only be used to pay for making cards slightly stronger (as a nice little bonus).
An action, reaction and upgrade, from different times during development. The hourglass symbol indicated the cooldown while the scroll indicated the order cost and the smaller print at the bottom was the enhancement if you player payed the prosperity cost. Upgrades (the purple card) were passive effects.
The player board where the upgrades were put at the top of the card, and the three cooldown slots were used to keep track of the cards currently on cooldown. Whenever a player’s turn began they shifted all the cards on cooldown one spot to the left (and took them back up on hand if it was in the #1 slot).
Pledge cards
In addition to these things a new kind of card was introduced: the Pledge. Pledge cards were high risk high reward cards where the players could give themselves a quest to finish to gain a big boost, but were punished if they failed to finish the quest. The quests were checked when they finished their cooldowns, and could either result in a Success or a Failure.
Analysis
The cooldown mechanic
This game mechanic worked surprisingly well, and better than I initially thought it would. Sometimes it could get a bit crowded on the cooldown track but nothing too bad.
Only having 1 resource for paying for cards
I missed the multitude of resources I had in the earlier iterations. Having several resources forced players to plan their turns a bit more carefully, and actually helped them when drafting new cards. It’s a lot easier for beginners to have the mindset “I’m going for the red resource this game” and picking red cards, than having to analyze each card carefully. The resources were also a good indicator for the players to know what the other players could do with their resources at hand; kind of the same way it’s possible to see a player who’s “tapped out” in Magic the Gathering.
Different card types
I once again came back to having three different kinds of cards: A card which acts during your turn (Actions), a card which can be used in response to what’s happening (Reactions) and passive cards (Upgrades). The pledges were a powerful, but delayed, version of an action and didn’t quite work out gamewise since they were too difficult to pull off reliably.
#5: Back to where it all started – Actions, Reactions and Upgrades
Goal and Vision
I was certain I wanted to go back to actions, reactions and upgrades again since that model had worked out the best during previous playtesting. Taking inspiration from the TCG and very early implementations I introduced Clans which basically were a group of starter cards so players could get going quickly with a balanced deck. Instead of the pledges I created quest cards to guide players with their initial moves and what to focus on. The quest cards only gave the players a victory point reward and never any board presence, since a board presence reward would only create a snowballing effect for the winning player.
The cooldown and action point systems were dropped for the actions and reactions and the intiative was reintroduced. The “base stats” for a card then became the source (e.g. a Shaman), its range, an initiative and a base cost. After some playtesting it became clear the source and cast range needed to be displayed in a clearer manner, so I posted on /r/tabletopgamedesign on reddit for advice.
The first image is what I started with and the latter how it ended up after the Reddit feedback session. The source and range were now together and all the base information had been centered on the middle frame, rather than having the initiative protrude.
This new layout has lasted until today and seems to be intuitive enough. As the game has become more stable I wanted to tackle another issue which was the graphical design of the card. I went to tabletopgamedesign again with different examples of a bordered design vs a borderless which prompted yet another amazing response from the community. After a bit of back and forth I finally landed in, what I hope, is a final design for the different cards.
The final version of the cards, from start to end: Action card (placeholder art by Kim van Deun), Reaction card (placeholder art by Dmitry Burmak), Upgrade card (placeholder art by Gancheng Li), Clan card, Quest card
In the end I feel rather satisfied with how it all turned out! There were many attemps back and forth, and I still have many ideas I’d like to try out. Those ideas will have to wait until a 1.0 version is out though, and might make their appearance in possible expansions if everything goes well! Let’s summarize this lenghty post off by looking at how the action card evolved during its many iterations over time.
The action card's many versions - From start to finish
