A weird CCG idea

I had the idea of having each card with a *scratchy*... As in some statistic remains unknown until you "use" the card in a game... I know my neighborhood printer has already told me it would be possible to do. I just inquired because I wanted to know if I could design my own scratch tickets.

Anyhow this is *in the spirit* of your one card for each player, you could use the card once without knowing the value of the card (it could go either way), next time you play you know what the value is. The first time, it adds an element of surprise.

I just thought of how fun (and hard) it would be to program something to generate art for something like this.

A CCG like this would be very fun. Opening packs would be epic.
It would be practically impossible to sell cards online, share decks with other people etc.

I think it should cycle around so that there are a few more than one of a certain card in existence. For example if there are 1million cards and you print 5million cards there would be approximately 5 of each card in existence.

Hey Hotsoup

You have a great idea and I love the concept of each card being unique. I am a little stumped, however, about how this would be worked out on a large scale. Runedrake may have a good point about possibly having a few multiples so that there would be more cards in existence. I think this is key in that there are only so many combinations of affects, abilities, and overall differences that can exist in a "playable and fun" game, although there would be quite a bit. Let me explain:

You can only have so many mechanics and card features that go into a game. To clarify this, look at MTG. There are multiple types of cards: instants, artifacts, enchantments, creatures, etc. Let's say each type of card has their own unique mechanics. Now each mechanic can be made different from some numerical and/or categorical basis (such as damage dealt, multiple targets vs single targets vs global effect, use multiple times vs single use, etc etc etc).

To keep the game fair and playable, there would need to be some limit to each and every mechanic (some will be self-proclaimed, such as you cannot have 18 targets in a 4 player game). Using MTG as another example, look at creatures. While there are creatures that having enormously high Power/Toughness, the number of them that exist shrink exponentially as P/T's increase. If it didn't work this way, the game would not be fun as there'd be creatures with P/T absurdly high. The same works in the other direction, P/T's don't really go into fractions otherwise they are basically useless, within the context of the game. Limits to the cards and mechanics come natural to the game; it's part of what makes the game work, and fun.

Now back to your concept of uniquely individual cards. It would be pretty difficult to design a game in which you can create one million unique cards that are also playable within the game mechanics, but I'm not saying it can't be done. You can create more viable cards by having more card types and card type mechanics. The difficulty with this is, the more card types and card type mechanics you have, the more rules there are, the more difficult the game becomes to learn, and the less likely people will be apt to pick it up to play. This can be solved, however, by starting simple and expanding the game later. I hate to go back to the same reference, but look at Magic. It started out incredibly simple, got a huge following, and then expanded into new rules, card types, and mechanics. This was necessary to keep the game exciting and new for players, while also allowing the production of new card ideas. But MTG only has 11,441 different cards (not including basic lands), and it's been out for a very long time.

I'm not trying to deter you from your idea, as I find idiosyncrasy and character admirable, but am trying to do quite the opposite. Games like MTG have very simple and big limitations, whereas designing a new game is literally limitless. I am merely trying to put into perspective the task at hand and want you to question how much you want to take on such a big undertaking.

Anyways, good luck!
20%

What if you had Characters who could be "upgraded" in some way, and each character interacts differently with each card you play? Thus, the same deck of cards used with two different characters would be a totally different deck.

Sticking with the four numbers, one in each corner:

Each number can be either Red, Green or Blue.

Each number is between 1 and 10 inclusive. This gives 30^4 possible combinations of numbers (apologies if my maths is wrong!), which is 810,000 cards.

The artwork in the centre of the card is in three colour, and is based on circles of a radius from 1 to 10, scaled to fit a standard playing card size. Where Red and Green converge you get an arc of Yellow, Green and Blue gives Cyan etc..

The mechanics are then based solely around the mathematical nature of the numbers in the corners and their colour, and perhaps a set of dice.
Colour D6: 1-2, colours must match, 3-4 colours must differ, etfc.
Number D6: 1-2 Greater than, 3-4 less than, 5 - is a factor, 6 - equal.

You then shuffle the cards and deal out X to as many players as are playing, turn one card over to start and lay it down, then take it in turns to roll the dice and try and match a card from your hand against what is on the table.

Maybe you have to match 1 corner, maybe match 2 corners, this could reflect in how you score.

Would be a great Maths tool in a school setting, where you could alter the rules depending on what you were teaching?

Another way to achieve this is to make a card game where players can design their own cards. In that case, all cards will somewhat be unique.

One of the problem is the learning curve. It slow down the gameplay because players are constantly reading cards to know what they do.

My thoughts on balancing the cards was to make each number have pros and cons. Like, in a combat-centred game, one number represented "order" used for constructing more units, but when fighting, the card with the lower "order" would win.

With that in mind, I wrote up a set of rules yesterday for a set of cards with three statistics: Autonomy (1-16), Order (1-32) and Peace (1-64)

SET UP:
* Both You and your opponent shuffle your decks and draw four cards from the top, putting them face-up in front of you

TURN ORDER
* On your turn, first choose one card to sacrifice. It is put into the discard pile.
* You may then activate any number of cards on the table whose total Autonomy is less than the sacrificed card, and perform one action.

ACTIONS
* Breed: Draw a number of cards from your deck equal to the total Autonomy of all activated cards
* Construct: Play a number of cards from your hand, onto the table, whose total Peace is less than the total Order of your activated cards
* Train: Put your activated cards under any of your other cards whose Peace is lower. Subtract the lower card's Order from the higher card's
* Attack: Put your activated cards onto any of your opponent's cards whose Order is higher. Your opponent must discard these cards

WINNING
* Peaceful Victory: You have 500+ Peace on the table
* Violent Victory: Your opponent has no cards left on the table

It was just to illustrate another way of unique artwork, based on the cards value. Nothing to stop Invaders being used :-)

You could also give each a name based on the four, coloured numbers.

sorry, double post.

After work i put together a quick design document that explains how i could imagine a random card game.

please note that this represents my personal interpretation of what we have discussed so far

you find it here:

http://www.bgdf.com/node/7804

glad you like my approach.

yeah i was thinking about better art as well. but do to a proof-of-concept fun game, the invaders should be enough.

on the other hand, fractals are used quite often in computer games nowadays. they can be used for terrain generation. this could be developed into a more complex system. maybe we have to move away from civilised beings on 2 legs a bit. to a approach like seen in the game "spore". imagine fractalized mutant-zombie-monsters roaming a fractalized random world !

PS: just updated my journal with thoughts about infinite sets in a random CCG enviroment.

http://www.bgdf.com/node/7814

PPS: first output from my random invader algorithm (there is still a lot of manual work necessary)

http://www.bgdf.com/sites/default/files/images/random-invaders.preview.jpg

Im just playing here okay? :-)

Had this wonderful idea this morning that was too good to be unique. I have it all sorted out in my head how it could work, but now that I googled to see what similar games already exist I found this thread. Of course someone here was on it already. :)

Will hopefully find a few free hours to make a proof-of-concept implementation this weekend. The idea is that players download a free application that can be used to randomly generate army packs (PDF countersheets for single-sided print'n'play). To find a good army you have to generate hundreds or thousands looking for one you like. Sort of like harvesting for bitcoins I guess. The random seed used to generate an army is printed on its countersheet, so any other player can confirm that an army is valid by generating it and compare, so no one could just make up their own army with any values they want. That way you can have a fair game of unlimited expansion packs without a central big company pushing out expensive booster packs and still if you arrange a competition you can make sure that all armies are valid.

I think collectible army packs would work better than cards, because in a card-game players expect more varied illustrations and card titles. Army units are ok with some slightly varied graphics (I'm probably trying simple 2D robots first) and different values.

Have some more specific ideas how to make it work, but I'm saving some for later (and its own thread).

Fhizban, I really like the idea you are coming up with, and I also liked your card graphics. Just a quick thought. You could offset any disadvantages associated with lower leveled invaders by giving them "group" abilities. As an example, a lone low level invader is almost worthless. However, when you spawn many low level invaders, they gain abilities and become stronger together.

I don't know if you ever played LOTR TCG but there was a strategy deck known as a swarm deck. Basically you filled your deck with tons of low level cheap minions. By themselves they would be killed and not harm the other player. However, if you played your cards right, you could annihilate the other player by the sheer number of them.

I look forward to seeing how the development progresses.