This guest post is brought to you by Carl Van Ostrand, designer of Draconis 8, which is in its final days of the campaign over on Kickstarter.
Draconis 8 Coming to Life!
To those reading, thank you! For designers, the absolute best reward is when the original inspiration behind the game brings fun to you, the players. So I’m shining a little light on why I wanted to bring this game to market (thank you Wise Wizard Games), and soon, your tables!
Draconis 8 was once a “pipedream” creation, stewing in my brain for about a decade, though dormant for long stretches. Like many designers, I was toiling to create something that I wish existed, but for a while I wasn’t sure it could be done. It seemed like an impossible intersection of goals.
A Draconis 8 Card
I wanted a TCG with extremely high accessibility. Ideally, this could be your 50th TCG or your 1st, and you could dive right into it. Traditional mainstream TCGs have a fairly high “wall” when you factor in the elaborate card pools, large deck sizes, and expansion sets. They can be quite hard (and expensive) to get into, even if you want to – something I’ve heard echoed by many others.
I also wanted to disrupt the typical TCG rarity systems (which frankly, had turned me off to TCGs), but still provide an expansive card pool for players to explore if they want to. How could I retain the fun-factor of discovery of a huge card pool without a traditional rarity system?
For those who play video games, I was tired of the “pay-to-win” loot box systems that tempt you to pay more for the best “stuff.” The goal for Draconis was that all cards would be centrally balanced, but widely varied, so you can optionally “pay more to discover more” – which for me anyhow, seems like a more-ethical exchange.
So of course, central to all of this, the game needs really strong gameplay that scratches a surface level tactical “itch” or a deeper “meta strategy” itch, depending on player-preference and experience. I’ll come back to this, but in summary, the goals solidified as:
Accessibility:
- Completely language independent
- Low components, small footprint, fast set up, fast play, simple rules, less than $30 buy-in
- Digital app version
- Every booster pack doubles a playable deck
- Pocket-sized decks allows easy/fast deck construction
- Cards and decks are “fair”
Discovery:
- Near-unlimited card pool, millions of stat + ability combinations and orientations
- An intelligently intertwined deep pool of card art (tethering stats + abilities to the art itself)
- Fun, but optional, card variants to “chase”
- Playing opponents reveals cards you’ve never seen
Personally, I like setting tough goals like this because if you can achieve them you’re likely bringing something innovative to players. One “ah ha” moment I had was when I really started seeing the upside of language-independence. When you remove card text – it’s more accessible – but you also greatly reduce the “lift” required to deepen the card pool well-beyond the typical TCG. Why? Because using a design principle called “orthogonal design” you can apply math to build a near-limitless number of interesting card iterations, while also creating fairness / balance, and diversity-of-play.
[to be continued…]