TCG Design / General

Can't you get transparent sleeves?

Agreeing with on flavour, and if you balance in knowing the types of shit an opponent can do it could be cool.

Also it makes special effects like playing from the deck or cards that push the various colour pies that much more powerful - say you see your opponent has all fire backs in-hand, you play with that in mind, an ice card outta nowhere would/could be devastating

How do you track HP on these?

Fuck, forgot about sleeves. That is a huge concern. Most decent sleeves have a something covering the card back so it would completely fuck up the system. Preventing people who want to use decent sleeves from using them seems like a terrible choice. Do you think that making people use two/three types of sleeves would make this less of a problem?

Oh, right. I thought it was the name of a single game.

>Can't you get transparent sleeves?
I my experience, most transparent sleeves are shit. Decent sleeves usually have something covering the card back, which is a huge turn off for the idea.

> Also it makes special effects like playing from the deck or cards that push the various colour pies that much more powerful
So far, there's literally only 1 card (out of 316 I have planned for the first set) that has an effect that considers the type of the cards. Besides that 1 card, the type is only relevant when building your deck.

Uh, right now I use a pair of d10 for each character, but I think if I ever try to publish this game, I will likely just give a small notepad with the game to track the HP with pen and paper.

pic related

>the type is only relevant when building your deck.
So there's no faction-associated mechanics?

Post rules. I love this sort of thing.

Have you considered eliminating shuffling? Randomness is the keystone of the tcg genre, but there have been games that experiment with the idea. There might be something in a game where your deck is both preconstructed and pre-ordered, so that you theoretically 'know' what is going to happen next. The game then becomes a match of who can play their chosen strategy best, rather than who can play the hand they're dealt best, and it also makes disruption cards (the ubiquitous 'look at the top three cards of a deck and replace them in any order') much more powerful than usual. I think it'd be an interesting thing to play with.

Neat. game-icons.net is a great resource - they've done some updating lately that give you a much better level of control over the art. You can add glows/shadows/outlines etc... to your designs before downloading them. Two personal notes, as a potential player: the chiller triggers me, and the overlay looks way too busy on some cards, such as 'Weaver of Lies' and 'Wurbus the Midlasher'.

If you move into another tier of production, a dual-dial can make for an attractive life counter. You can colour-theme them and everything. See pic for example.

> So there's no faction-associated mechanics?
What you mean? Like "your fire cards do 2 extra damage" or "your undead characters gain +3 attack", this sort of thing? If that is the question, the answer is no. Like I said, there's literally only 1 card that does this sort of effect.

Though it doesn't feature explicit associated mechanics like that, the cards of each type of magic synergize very well (but sometimes, there's also so great synergy between cards from different magic types).

> Blood Magic
Basically consisted in bashing the shit out of your enemies. This type of magic features a huge amount of cards that increases the attack of your characters, and the rest have attack-related effects.

> Necromancy
Direct damage, life steal, reviving or turn characters into undeads, sacrificing life for power, some evil rituals, etc.

> Witchcraft
Healing, increasing/reducing armor, damage over time, manipulating the deck, turning enemies into frogs, etc.

> Shadowmancy
Reducing attack of enemies, drawing cards, forcing opponent to discard cards, manipulating the attack stat, milling, controlling enemy characters, etc.

> Stormcraft (fire, lightning)
Lots of direct damage. Lightning also manipulates time (giving you extra stuff)

> Stormcraft (frost)
Freezing characters, or manipulating time (reducing your opponent's actions). Total control.

That is what each magic type does, basically.

Has anyone else in this thread tries making a tcg? How'd it go?

A while back, /m/ tried making a tcg (twice!), and I refined the rules for the second attempt. I'm still pretty happy as to how the game turned out, but finding people to play-test with ended up being far too difficult. I managed to convince some of my mtg friends to give it a shot, but while /m/ loved contributing card designs, nobody seemed to actually want to play it. And 75% (at least) of game creation is play-testing, so the game died (twice). I still pull it out every now and again, and it's still pretty fun.

>Have you considered eliminating shuffling?
While interesting in theory, in practice I think it would be pretty terrible. Most tcg decks run 40-60 cards, and getting those into a specific order at the start of every game would be a huge time drain. It could work with smaller decks, but that has its own constraints, and even then it takes a good chunk of time and effort to get things into their specific order. Most importantly, though, I think ordered decks eliminates a lot of the drama of card games. It makes the outcome far more clear, which will likely mean the outcome is obvious well before the game is done. This problem would get exponentially worse if the game took off and any kind of meta formed. Rather than the gameplay itself, once you know what deck the each player is playing, the game could be determined by "did the opponent put card A at position #9, or position #14?", and "what did the opponent choose to put at positions #15 and 16?". Knowing those few cards allows you to completely predict the match.

I tried putting together one a while back. I tried to play with different ways to use the space of the card itself. The cards rotate, flip over, and I even played around with layering transparent cards. I never got far enough to playtest since I never really finish any project i start but it was fun at the time!

I can dump a few examples?

> Post rules. I love this sort of thing.
I'm not sure I have the written rules. I rarely write down the rules for my games.

> Neat. game-icons.net is a great resource
Like it very much. Since I found it, back in 2014, I always use it in my games. I also made a print and play (fuler.games) that uses icons from there.

> the chiller triggers me
What you mean?

> the overlay looks way too busy on some cards
I'm not very good at doing this. Usually when I need something more decent, I ask my cousin for help.

> If you move into another tier of production, a dual-dial can make for an attractive life counter.
I think this could come as an fancy expansion pack or something, but it is hard to use it as standard because I would need at least 6 of them in the basic set, but if anyone summons a new character (there's a few summon cards), it would need a 7th one. Seems cheaper/more direct to just use pen and paper for this.

Ah that's too bad. I'd have enjoyed emulating your game at home.

>> the chiller triggers me
>What you mean?
The font you chose. As an abortive design student it causes me physical pain. But that's as much a personal aesthetic choice as a professional one, especially if the game is just for your mates. Respectfully, if you escalate to publishing, I'd strongly recommend switching to a cleaner sans serif font.

The icon on the overlay represents their magic type, right? So if you have Grazz'var, you can include electric magic in your deck?

Would you mind if I took a run at a template for your cards? I mean, I probably will either way, for the practice if nothing else, but I won't post it if you don't want anyone messing with your stuff.

I put together a game (more of an LCG) a few months back, just to get the feel of GameCrafter down before moving on to anything more serious. I feel your paint: creation is a lot of fun, but the real hard work is playtesting, and no one wants to work hard. My playtest partner and I discovered about six broken combos in my game as soon as the first print run arrived, and we promptly gave up working on the game, but at least it played from start to finish without any considerable issues with the rules as written. That's a huge victory in itself.

>While interesting in theory, in practice I think it would be pretty terrible.
You're probably right. It's something for a niche product maybe, bad for large distribution. There's a reason why all these games do the same thing - because they're tried, successful mechanics. Everything has been tried once or twice, and if they were good, I suppose the conventional logic goes, they'd be more prevalent.

Meant to add to my above post: those look really interesting. I like the way you've built inverting the card in as both a core element of the game and as a graphic element.

I'm working on making card designs (everything sans art & text) and I'm feeling a bit stuck.

What is your favourite looking card design?
Any graphic design bros have any tips?

Here is a current iteration (just a draft) for your consideration. The idea is it's all caught in the dwarf's beard (pictured mid-left on card).

I think that the best you could probably do would be having each "set" being the same back, even though that could cause issues. I only have recent experience with MTG, so I'll use that. If you reprint a card, ever, you could have those cards "marked" with the different backing, and there's no real way around that unless you never reprint a card, which leads to its own problems. Other than that, maybe you can put them into categories? Like maybe having all of the blue cards have one back, and greens another? I've done something similar with my B/U deck on MTG some years ago. Had different colored sleeves for the different colors of card. Wasn't too cheaty, but I doubt it'd be sanction legal.

> Ah that's too bad. I'd have enjoyed emulating your game at home.
This one is far from having enough digital material that I could share =/ the best I can offer you is another game, but considering you are a Cardfag maybe you won't find it so interesting. I have made available on my website a print and play cooperativa board game (1 to 6 players), if you want to check would, that would be great for me. But again, you came into a TCG thread, and that one isn't a TCG at all. (link at )

> Respectfully, if you escalate to publishing
I'm 100% aware my design choices when it comes to visual aspects are completely questionable. I'm not a design student, and even though I would like to know this stuff, I simply don't. (I'm learning a bit on the run, but I still have a shitty eye for visual design). If I was to publish any of my games, I would have someone with decent experience in this sort of thing to take a look and help me out.

> The icon on the overlay represents their magic type, right? So if you have Grazz'var, you can include electric magic in your deck?
Exactly. On top of that, some cards requires 2 (or even 3, in rare cases) characters of that type. This helps giving a decent reason for people to focus on 1 magic type or even go full mono-type.

> Would you mind if I took a run at a template for your cards? I mean, I probably will either way, for the practice if nothing else, but I won't post it if you don't want anyone messing with your stuff.
I wouldn't mind at all. My card layouts are shit (the one I post here is one of my best ones, but have a look (pic related) on what I use for regular deck cards... yeah, I know it must look ugly as fuck haha)

So, feel free to show anything you come up with. I struggle hard with this sort of shit. >

Thanks! I tried to play around with having the card be more than just a static 'thing', so I'm glad it worked out alright.

Not sure how this design worked out, since it would require sleeves and desleeving (or some sort of extra deck?) but it's more space to explore

> Like maybe having all of the blue cards have one back, and greens another?
That is exactly the original idea. Each "color" having its own card back. But pointed out that the fact people like using sleeves sort of fucks this idea up =/ most decent sleeves have a solid color/image on the back.

...

...

btw, forgot to tell you. if you go to my website, your eyes my bleed because its fucking ugly haha but if you could spare the time to check out the components i did for the print and play and give your opinion on how they look, I would appreciate :)

>your eyes my bleed
might*

Gorgeous. That's like a light and fun indie-gamers wet dream. If that represents everything you need to say, then I wouldn't change a thing.

There are clear sleeves that work well enough. Serious hardcore players don't usually prefer them, but if it was clear that you needed to be able to see the back in order to fully experience the game, it probably wouldn't be a stretch to require them.

I did actually take a look at your website and your print-and-play game. You're right, it's not really my speed, but it all looked very clean and professional.

I'm really impressed with these. There's something about the punchy colours, and the self-aware borderline cheesiness, that make them really appealing.

> it probably wouldn't be a stretch to require them.
Idk, I found this factor a massive turn off. If I want to join the market, letting people use the sleeves they already have from other games is a good way because reduces the investment they need to make to play my game. Not sure the benefits of doing this makes up for this problem.

> I did actually take a look at your website and your print-and-play game.
Thanks :) I appreciate the fact you took the time to check it out.

Took me a minute to figure out Kojita/kolita was actually Kouta. If I hadn't seen Gain already, I'd probably be henshining Kolita into Gaim. The font is really weird.

Otherwise, while the cards are a little busy for my tastes (one thing I love about Weiss Schwarz is how clean the card frames are), they look interesting, and I definitely appreciate all the design exploration going on.

>first print run
>print run
Ooof. I feel your paint as well. I always create a paper copy of the game to stick in front of sleeved mtg cards (finally a use for rubbish draft chaff!) to test the game system, then I print them out on basic 8.5x11 sheets for testing (cutting them out and sticking them in front of sleeved mtg cards). It takes months before I'll feel confident enough to order a proper printing.

Play-testing can be fun, though; you're basically just playing the game a lot. If you get to the point the game is stable enough to go for a proper printing, and you're still enjoying playing it, that's usually a pretty good sign.

i tried to keep them fun and definitely pulled some inspiration from 80's/90's nostalgia so I'm glad that came across well.

The font's a problem, yeah. I've been told about it before, but I haven't touched these since... may, 2016? so i haven't had a chance to change it yet.

Any idea what would help with the business?

Since its sort of related, whats the cheapest options for self publishing a card game in very limited qualities? Would even be down to buy a special printer under 4k.

I took a run at it, but I'm feeling uninspired and my clock just bonged 2am, so I might give it a rest. I guess what I was going for here was a less busy design - the magic type visible, but not splashed over the face of the card; a unified colour-scheme referencing the magic colour (which I did as blue, but realise now it should be yellow) which can be carried on to the related spell cards in hand. I hope, if nothing else, it inspires you artistically to do something better than my meager offering.

>the cheapest options for self publishing a card game in very limited qualities
I printed 90 cards and some tokens on TheGameCrafter for about $8.00 with $4.00 shipping. I haven't found a cheaper price without requiring a larger run.

You won't get a printer for under 4k. You'd be lucky to get one for under 40k. They're expensive pieces of equipment. Something I did once with some success was buy a pack of 'print yourself' business cards - basically a sheet with perforated squares a little smaller than a playing card. You can print those in a regular printer.

This is all personal preference talking, but the background lines especially are super distracting to me. Honestly, though, just darkening the text boxes a bit to make the text stand out more on its own will help, and (as mentioned) the font is a little dramatic. The all-caps nature of the effect font is kind of triggering as well. Flourishes aside, I do feel the overall layout is really solid.

Pic related is probably my favourite template I've made, for context. Again, I may lean too far into simplicity.

There's plenty of print shops out there that take small print runs. I've used print and play games, but there's tons of other options. There's also a few with connections to the big printers in China if you want to print over 500 pieces.

Where would I go for Chona prices?
Ill check that out.

My game is 18+ so it may be more of an issue.

Chona? The site I've been looking at is Print Ninja. For my project of 36 cards, smaller print shops run about $8 - $9, with a discount of 40% - 50% for massive print runs (so about $4 per deck minimum). A print run of 750 decks at Print Ninja, on the other hand, brings the cost per deck to $1.75. Print ninja also gives you a couple fancier options, such as foil text or booster pack packaging.

For the project I was looking at, though, 750 pieces was the minimum, so smaller, US based shops are the best option I've found unless you're pretty serious about things.

China, sorry phoneposting from work

Sound advice. I'll take it into consideration if I pick this back up again? that'd be cool, but effor.

Thanks for all the input!

also last pic, its what I did when trying to figure out the layout and 'system'. it rotates AND flips AND flips and rotates

>Knowing what type of card to expect from a card facing down might not be so cool as I expect.
In the games that i know, the back of the cards are allways the same unless there were more than one deck, like in L5R or munchkin, in wich the different back of the cards represent the different decks.
>Anyone ever had this idea or even tried this?
Never tryed, never think about it
>Anyone knows any card game that does this?
As I said, just in case of different decks.
The closest to that is The Elder Scrolls: Legends (online game), in wich some cards say "Trigger an ability if the next card in your deck is of X color" and the computer tells you what color is after playing the card, but you could do the same in Magic the gathering using "Show the top card of you deck, if its of X color trigger ability"
>The cards of type of magic have a very unique set of possible effects, so the other player will know what sort of things to expect based on the cards on your hand
Well this happens in a lot of games and you know what type of color your oponent uses after a few turns, you even know what kind of deck uses after some turns, so i dont think this back card flag would change things a lot

>So, what your thoughts?
No much into it, not a very good design decision (not bad either way). If you really want it in your game consider separate decks, one for each color and the players could draw from what they want depending of what they need, or they may be forced to draw from one different each turn

You know the game crafther?
thegamecrafter.com/

No, not really, but I noticed someone mentioned it previously in this thread. I will have a look when I have the time for it.

Right now I'm working on an updated version of the pre-Konami version of Yu-Gi-Oh! made by Bandai (since the game wasn't really ever functional).
In the past I've made fan-sets for a few games including the old DBZ CCG made by Score (pic related, made the template myself).

Making dice required seems like a bad idea to be honest.

Though yeah I'm surprised that Commander: The Card Game isn't that common of a tcg idea and not surprised that you're doing something similar. Might be interesting.

> Making dice required seems like a bad idea to be honest.
You mean, using dices as counters, or using dices as part of the game's mechanics?

> Though yeah I'm surprised that Commander: The Card Game isn't that common of a tcg idea
My original idea was that each player would have 1 character, which would be more like Commander (though the idea was more to be like mtg's Vanguard thingy, I'm not even sure Commander existed when I first thought about that). But someone suggested me to roll with 3 characters, and it turned out to be a really good idea.

What about if I want to sleeve my deck?

What do you mean?

Dice as part of the game's mechanics
I don't like using them as counters either, but mtg has made ensured that dice bringing is common enough it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Clear sleeves

is this the card game creation thread?
i had a nice idea but I kind got stuck at some point and there's some holes I wish I could fill before getting into the hard stuff. like historical accuracy and such.
any one here knows how to write a design document? or some proper way to express the intentions/goals and everything for the game?

>My game is 18+ so it may be more of an issue.
No man can judge you if you print at home.

I had an idea last night after I went to bed. Tracking health: why not make the cards larger (like Commander cards) and build a health tracker into the card? Two rows of numbers: the top row reading 0-6, the bottom row 0-9. You place two small tokens over the numbers representing your health, and move them as health increases/decreases. I did something similar with a game I designed last year called 'Immorta' (pic related). With health routinely running into 50s you couldn't do it that way, but you could do the rows/columns idea.

Open a document and just start spitballing. If it's just to clarify your own ideas, then there won't be any need to follow a formal structure - write until you turn the gunk into pearls.

There have been some good dice/card hybrids, though. Ashes, FFG's Destiny and Quarriors!* all come to mind. Dice add a new element of randomisation, while giving cards new ways to interact with each other and the new elements. I think it's an area ripe for exploration.

*DiceMasters is often touted as a 'DCG' but really it's a dice game that uses cards to track information. There isn't a 'hand', there's no playing cards etc...

One more: Star Wars Destiny is pretty popular too

Hey! The card you did is pretty cool (way better than anything I could do), but it does not match the game's theme at all haha. The game is supposed to have a dark, bloody and tribal-like theme. I like the effect you did with the icons, and I would also like to know what is the name of the font you used (its nice).

Btw, why did you choose to put the stats on top of the textbox? I usually put it on the bottom because when you stack multiple cards, you can just leave the bottom part of them out and add the stats (not sure if what I described made any sense)

> If you really want it in your game consider separate decks
Separated decks is not really an option.

> Dice as part of the game's mechanics
I don't really see why using dices as part of the mechanics would be any bad (besides a matter of preference). Also, if you really want to play the game but hates dices, you can build a deck that doesn't use anything with dices (3 of the 5 magic types are 100% capable of not using dices at all).

OP here. Someone else pointed out and, even though some others don't see it that way, I think the might be a huge con (probably enough to turn the whole idea down). Forcing people to use clear/transparent sleeves (which usually are of poor quality) seems like a bad idea.

To be honest, I never thought about doing it specifically on the card itself, but I thought about having a support card with a health tracker. The problem of having it on the card itself and making the card bigger is that I wouldn't be able to do the same with Summon cards (they are not very common, but some cards from the deck allow you to make additional characters). Summon cards is also why I'm considering just go with pen and paper rather than having any extra component to track health (because I would need spare components to track the health of summons).

Also, there's no maximum hit points, so even though the highest initial value is 60, it could potentially go up to 100. (there is a card that you win if you have a guy with 150+ hit points, so people might build decks that try to reach for the sky when it comes to hit points.)

btw, had the opportunity to teach a friend how to play tonight (we played twice; pic related). He liked it so much he said we should always play this while we wait for the rest of the guys to arrive on RPG nights haha

Ah interesting. Yeah I went for generic dark fantasy - knowing the theme now, I can see how it doesn't fit. The font I used was Malefico (dafont.com/maleficio.font) which is also free for commercial use! It's a nice clean font which still has a bit of that dark edge I think you were going for with Chiller.

Your comment about overlaying cards makes sense. Knowing that, I'd probably make different design choices.

>summon cards
>so even though the highest initial value is 60, it could potentially go up to 100
Ah right, that does make things tricky. As you've said, a track pad would be the best option then.

>He liked it so much he said we should always play this while we wait for the rest of the guys to arrive on RPG nights haha
It's always great to receive that kind of feedback. I haven't even played it and I'm already a fan!

Vulnerable to cheaters, but if you made it digital like Hearthstone and/or had an impartial judge do the shuffling it'd work beautifully.

I came up with a basic idea that I haven't fleshed out yet.

The basic premise was that it was a TCG played on a board - a 7x7 (or larger, depending) grid, where you play "Terrain" cards (i.e. special cards, or any card face down) onto the board to fill out the grid and allow your monster cards to move around and go attack your opponent. Terrain cards generate mana (special Terrains generate colored mana, facedown cards generate colorless, most monsters use almost entirely colorless), and you "lock" the mana from a set of Terrains in order to play monsters, so you can't spend mana from those terrain cards for anything else as long as a monster is out there. You can play non-monster spells without "locking" the mana, though, although it does consume it for the turn.

Alternatively, you could send your deck away to be professionally shuffled beforehand (for a nominal fee, of course).
youtube.com/watch?v=M4I7Q4Cs8_Y

>dark, bloody, tribal-like theme
I took another run at it. I'm basically just bumping the thread at this point. I really like your project OP, and I hope you stop in at /gdg/ to update us from time to time. The thread is usually created every other Saturday. I post there under the same moniker, and I'd like to follow your project's progress.

Ok I've got an idea and I can visualize how it will be played. I've got the ideas written on a doc if anything happens but that it.
where I can get some card frames templates? it's necessary for me to learn some Photoshop if I want to continue with this personal project?

> Ah right, that does make things tricky. As you've said, a track pad would be the best option then.
It still not something set on stone, I'm not that happy with that option. However, all options seems to have their downsides, and that one at least is cheap and flexible enough.

> It's always great to receive that kind of feedback. I haven't even played it and I'm already a fan!
Thanks a lot! I've designed plenty of other games (2 cooperative board games, 1 strategy board game, 1 "snakes and ladders" sort of game), but this was my first one and still might be the best one! First time I played it was in the summer of 2014 with the only friend I had at that time (relax, its less pathetic than it sounds), and even though he isn't a gamer and never played any card game, the first draft was good enough that spent all night playing. In fact, it was already so sweet that only 1 rule of the game changed from the original version to today's version (but the cards themselves experience quite a lot of change, of course).

I have also tested this multiple time with non-gamers, including my parents (55+ yo, no experience with games at all), and everyone who plays the game are able to learn the rules the first time then play and enjoy the game. I also played a few times with a friend that is a hardcore MtG fan, where each one of us would build our own decks, and it was a really cool experience and he liked it a lot as well (so the game can suit both non-gamers and hardcore gamers at the same time).

This new version is A LOT more awesome!! It does fit the theme a lot more, and also made me realize something! This new version you did fits well the Stormcraft element (lightning, fire and frost), but doesn't fit that well the other magic types. I'm not bitching: this is an insight. Just realized they should have VERY different card layout. The whole game is about how each magic type is different, and the card layouts should reflect that!

The game is not digital. I thought about making a digital version but that would be just a way to advertise the game (my original idea was to make a single-player storyline, that introduces players to the game's mechanics, theme/ambiance and storyline at the same time). But the core game would still be non-digital.

> and/or had an impartial judge do the shuffling it'd work beautifully.
I don't see shuffling as big of a concern. What really bummed me out was the sleeve argument some people gave. For shuffling, I could just say that each player shuffles the opponent's deck instead of his own. That would probably sort the problem.

> where I can get some card frames templates?
No idea

> it's necessary for me to learn some Photoshop if I want to continue with this personal project?
No. What I usually do for the first draft of my games is to get a regular sheet of paper, cut it in several small sizes (depending on the type of game) and just write with pen/pencil on it (I usually use colored pen/pencil to help differentiate things). For a first draft prototype, I find this the easiest and fastest way to make it. If things go well, you would of course invest more in making a more visually-appealing game, but to first try the mechanics, this should be enough. Also, if you are a card game player already, you could use cards from other games (do the paper thingy I said, then put your paper card inside a plastic sleeve, preferably with a card from another game in there as well. This will give the paper cards a more real feel with basically none extra trouble)

That is what I do.

For instance, this is a photo of the first prototype I did for my print and play cooperative board game (all my games uses a lot of cards, because I'm a cardfag I guess).

On this one I cut each paper sheet on 16 "card"-sized bits, then I wrote down what each card do using pen, and finally put them on transparent sleeves together with MtG cards. The "board" is simply a few regular paper sheets that I drew on with pen/pencil. All the other components I "borrowed" from other games (dices from D&D, rest from random things).

No photoshop, no printing, and that is already presentable enough that wouldn't make potential playtesters run away. Don't spend too much time/effort doing it because you might change a lot during the first playtestings.

How important is visualisation to you? It's very important to me, so I go to a lot of effort in the prototyping stage to make everything look as close to a finished product as possible. If it's important to you like that, then you will need to learn to use some kind of graphical program (or entice an user by getting them hyped about your project so they'll do it for free).

If it's not that important to you? Well, most office supply stores have these things called 'system cards' - they come in packs of 100, cost about $2.00 a pack, and you can just write/draw on them. That's a totally valid way to prototype.

>This new version you did fits well the Stormcraft element (lightning, fire and frost), but doesn't fit that well the other magic types. I'm not bitching: this is an insight. Just realized they should have VERY different card layout. The whole game is about how each magic type is different, and the card layouts should reflect that!
Thanks! That's a really good note. There are lots of interesting things you could do with the borders and iconography to represent the different kinds of magic.

>What really bummed me out was the sleeve argument some people gave.
What is the resource system of your game? Is it just 'spot a character with like symbols to cast' or do you need to pay a cost to cast a spell? I had this idea where, whenever you drew a card, you needed to add a glass bead to a pool of magic in front of you in the play area. Each glass bead is a different colour, to represent a different kind of magic. You get the same effect (oh no, lots of red beads, his hand must be full of fire magic) without needing the backs of the cards visible.

The downside is that this adds to the complexity of components (everyone needs beads), and you already have cards and dice. I mean, I play FFG games, I'm not put off by needing a tackle box full of extra components just to play a card game, but some people are.

This is definitely the ideal way to start testing.You only need to start to worry about the graphical side once you're certain the gameplay is compelling enough to be worthwhile. That being said, you'll need to learn photoshop eventually (although for pic related, I wrote a code that would create text boxes and write the text over an art file, then take a screenshot, then save the screenshot and close. As you can see, it still leaves a few jagged edges, so photoshop is still needed if you want to commercialize).

This sounds neat. I've often thought about trying to get some sort of grid out of cards (cards specifically, because I have a lot of spare time at work, but not much to work with past scraps of paper). Your idea is definitely closer than anything I've come up with. You should try fleshing it out and see how it goes!

How does your CG handle life or winning conditions?

I am making a CG that heavily focuses on creatures, with each creature/character card having a passive ability, at least one active ability, and lasting damage counters. Kinda a mix between MTG and Pokemon.

I was thinking that every time you destroyed a creature, the opponent would suffer an amount of damage. This is in addition to attacking without resistance like in MTG and YGO. However, that would make removal too useful, and strategies like spawning creature tokens too risky. But I also want to make creatures count and incentivize players to target them, with most abilities being focused on interactions between creatures.

Personally, I dislike using life, and try to actively keep peripherals required by the game to a minimum (dice, pen and paper, etc). My ideal is a game that requires only the deck of cards.

So I use face-down cards to track round wins, or have any single unanswered attack be game over, or use shield cards. Admittedly, there are still occasional slips into life counts, like in the /m/ game above, as it was deigned for quick mass audience adaption, and the first iteration of the game proved that people grasp innovations in resource systems faster than they do innovations in combat.

On a tangent, the first iteration basically cribbed mtg's land system, and innovated heavily in combat, which led to problems in people poorly understanding card power levels, and general strategic ignorance. Magic is living proof that a primitive/shitty resource system is easy to ignore when the combat step is reasonably compelling. The first version of the /m/ game (Gattai1) had a mess of a combat system that had way too much life, and mechanics that left very little room to recover, but also took a long ass time to capitalize on an advantage, leading to incredibly long games of attrition that one player had control of for pretty much the entire time. The second iteration, Gattai Revival, cribbed mtg's combat system almost whole cloth, with the exception that tapping was not a mechanic (and life totals were adjusted down to compensate). The resource mechanic, on the other hand, was streamlined considerably, and as a result games were over in a quarter of the time or better, and yet had much more strategic back and forth. /tangent

Basically, the pace of the game should be the first priority when figuring out combat and resource systems, and anything too complex or outlandish fucks hard with people's ability to grok how the cards work.

This post turned into a fucking mess.

I like this thread a lot.
Bump for interest. I'll be back later

I've got three card game ideas in my head that I haven't had time to flesh out too much.

First is fighting in a dream scape. You'd connect with the subconscious energies of multiple dreamers as a power sourse, and your cards would have different stats based on if you were awake or asleep.

Second, a dungeon crawler game where the "colors" are based on class and strategy, so like fighter-rogue-mage-cleric and heavy-quick-average-sneaky or something. Your party makeup would determine the cards you could play so a "diverse party" wouldn't always lead to the most powerful cards. Your deck would be gear, loot, and monsters that are played against your opponent to slow them down, or against yourself to obtain the bonuses. Your opponent could also take or play your own cards under certain circumstances, and the party that survives or ends the game with more loot wins.

Third idea is for a commander style game, but the factions are based on fashion styles, and the cards are accessories, followers, etc. that further your goal to being the prettiest princess (or prince). Kind of a joke on Japanese card games, but also something I'd like to explore seriously and see if I could make a game with no swords or magic or guns compelling.

I always liked this game, and still have all my old cards. Thought the idea and gameplay was good, but it's been years since I've played, and I only ever casually played with one friend.

Piccolo having a bigger deck and regen meant he was my best deck, though Cell could swap in if I wanted to. What are you doing for powerlevel scale?

> Thanks! That's a really good note. There are lots of interesting things you could do with the borders and iconography to represent the different kinds of magic.
Yeah! As you can see on I was using the same layout for all magic types (just changing the icon), but now I think they should have very different designs to emphasize they are that different.

> What is the resource system of your game? Is it just 'spot a character with like symbols to cast' or do you need to pay a cost to cast a spell?
You need to pay a cost. The magic type limitation is only valid when building your deck (for instance, if your only Lightning character dies, you can still play lightning spells normally - what matters is that you originally had a lightning guy).

The cards use 3 types of resources:
> Phases
Each player has 5 phase tokens per turn. Cards can require the player to spend 1 or more phase tokens to play it.
> Energy
"Energy" is just a fluffy name for "discard a card". Cards can require you to discard one or more cards from your hand as part of the cost to play it.
> Blood
Cards may require you to sacrifice an amount of hit points from any of your characters as cost to play it. The costs are always multiple of five (5, 10, 15, etc...)

On top of that, each magic type uses a specific set of costs. This helps to endorse the idea that each magic type is very different from each other. Here is how it works:

> Blood Magic
uses Phases and Blood
> Necromancy
uses Phases, Energy and Blood
> Witchcraft
uses Phase and Energy (maximum of 1 phase per card)
> Shadowmancy
uses only Energy
> Stormcraft (fire, lightning and frost)
uses Phases and Energy (also, there's 1 special "neutral" card that can be used to replace the Energy cost of Stormcraft cards)

So this not only make each magic type feel different, but also gives them a very different gameplay. I've done a few "monocolored" decks and each have its own feeling

>see if I could make a game with no swords or magic or guns compelling.
I've made a shared deck game around a pair of rival museums competing over who gets government funding. It plays a bit like yugioh with a drafting component (ie. crazy fast paced). The goal is to use your exhibits to reduce your opponent's reputation (life points) from 8 to 0.

I made so time a go a card game where you played as a director of a secret intelligence service organization. It played like a mix of android netrunner and force of will. Too bad I lost the pics.

I'd love to hear more about it. Sounds cool.

It's the first game I actually had printed at a card shop, and I really enjoy it, but it's a bit too derivative of yugioh to really take too much further.

The draft component has players taking turns of either of two actions: 1) look at the top 2 cards of the shared deck, and acquire one and put the other into the line, or 2) take a card from the line. There are also use up to one of the 'acquire' effects of a card you already have, see image.

Once both players have 8 or more cards, they shuffle them into a deck and draw 5. The second phase is basically a simplified yugioh game (you can display one exhibit per turn, excluding effects that put things on display, and you can play any number of events per turn), with no second main, and no draw step (the only way to draw cards is through card effects).

There's 4 main archetypes in the shared deck, and 6 generic support cards, and each archetype is designed to play well with other cards of the same archetype. There's:
Fossils: prestige (tribute summons). Big and powerful.
Statues: prestige cards that can ignore their costs by discarding cards, and cards that activate effects by being excluded from storage. Less powerful than fossils, but with more staying power.
Art: event based. Card advantage, stall, and burn. See above for an example.
Space: swarm based, with lots of fast-displaying abilities. Crazy amounts of burst damage, but really fragile, and often can't make more than one overpowering attack.

As mentioned, gameplay tends to be really fast paced. OTKs are common (especially in Space, that archetype can sometimes assemble 16 interest (atk power) in one turn, double the starting reputation (life total)), and it's rare for a game to last more than 4 turns. Even with the drafting and a best of three match structure, the game rarely takes more than 20 minutes once people know the cards.

I tried to make a game once where 'life' and 'mana' were a single thing (called Power). Once your Power hit zero, you were out of the game. You played cards that attacked other people's resource pools (which cost you Power) - like 'Lightning Bolt: Cost - 1. Remove 2 Power from an opponent's pool.' There were also minion cards, but unlike in MtG or Heartstone, they didn't have their own 'attack' and 'life' values, but rather they just existed, giving you a passive benefit until you forced them to 'bow', at which point, at the end of that round, they'd be removed. Bowing usually had an active effect, like: "Each opponent loses 2 power, then you gain 2 power for each opponent."

I also tried to make timing important to the game, and to give each card multiple avenues of use. So that earlier Lightning Bolt spell actually read: "Cost - 1. Remove 2 Power from an opponent's pool. If it is the first round, instead remove 3 Power." And that servant card more like: "Cost - 5. Bow this servant to either Bow an opponent's servant, or Remove 3 Power from an opponent. When this card is removed, if it is the third or the fifth round, Remove 2 Power from each player."

It all worked well enough, but tracking Power was a pain in the ass. You needed at least 50 Power per player, and that resulted in a mess of tokens.

> How does your CG handle life or winning conditions?
OP here. Each player has 3 characters, each character has 50 life. Whoever kills all enemy characters first win. One of the main reasons I chose this system was to go away from the usual creature-oriented type of card games.

> Magic is living proof that a primitive/shitty resource system is easy to ignore
Lol. No one believes me when I say magic has a rubbish resource system. Now a days they handle it pretty well, but on its core, this whole mana shit is quite crappy. Many card games tried to follow this path and fucked up (pokemon tcg for instance is very shitty, in my opinion, and probably one of the reasons is because half of each deck is those stupid energies)

> It all worked well enough, but tracking Power was a pain in the ass. You needed at least 50 Power per player, and that resulted in a mess of tokens.
What about 10d6 to track Power? That way each of them would start at 5, and you reduce any whenever you take damage. Could even come up with some mechanics related to the use of dices. (where choosing what dice you reduce from is actual relevant)

>My ideal is a game that requires only the deck of cards.
A noble goal. You could track health using four cards - two with lines of numbers on them, two to overlay those lines of numbers. See my crude picture for an example. In the image, the player has 48 life left, because the '4' and the '8' are the top-most visible numbers. You move the card down as your life decreases, and up as it increases. The only problem would be that a simple bump of the table would cause the cards to become askew, and then there'd be fights about whether a player had '21' or '11' health left.

>Dreamscape
Love the theme.

>DungeonCrawler
That's interesting. So you're opposed to each other on the crawl? To an extent, you're both playing the adventuring team and the dungeon? I think that idea has got legs. Most dungeon crawling card games take the form of unified players against a preconstructed 'enemy' deck, like the old WoW game. Yours sounds more like a competitive TCG version of Munchkin, which is awesome.

>Fashion
Could be fun. The idea of creating a competitive versus game without resorting to the usual violent tropes is an area worth exploring - though don't forget, that incredibly flashy gun could be the ultimate fashion accessory.

I like that resource system. Creating different mechanics for different playstyles is a good move, and it's not something done very often. Do you have any images of a 'spell' card (or other card types) handy? I'm curious to see what you've done there.

Is this thread only for TCG/CCG likes?
or any game that uses cards are welcome?

>any game that uses cards welcome
You could probably post whatever you wanted, though I imagine you'd get more engagement posting about a card game that resembles the TCG/CCG (like a Dice Card Game or an Expandable (Living) Card Game) than you would if you were going to post your homebrewed take on Gin Rummy.

I was looking forward to make a 1V1 deck builder, kinda like star realms or dominion?
in this idea you might have to equip your character with armor pieces and weapons but I can't decide if should I make the weapons degrade on use, be a 1 use item or make them last for a couple of turns and then discard them.
also, for armor I have the same doubt, should I make them have like hit-points before break, dispose after a couple of turns or provide a passive rather than a flat number of protections

I haven't played as many deckbuilders as I should have, so I won't speak to specifics. With most mechanics, there are a number of ways you could go, (as you've identified) and the direction you choose is based on other factors. The question is: what fits thematically, and what's fun? If your theme is Dark Souls low-fantasy, breaking weapons is bang-on trend. If it's heroic, then persistent weapons that you override at will are more fitting. Same deal with armour.

Bomp

>Do you have any images of a 'spell' card (or other card types) handy? I'm curious to see what you've done there.
Yeah (pic related), but sadly its in my language (portuguese) rather than english. I used to do all my games in english, but lately I'm getting some backlash from that when I try to playtest with strangers, because many people here don't know english very well (enough so that playing a game in english is troublesome). All the current prototypes I have are in english, but i'm slowly translating them to my language (against my will, because I would rather leave it in english).

These cards I made last weekend for a more pretty version of the prototype (currently, what I use are template cards printed with blank spaces than filled with pencil). The idea is that the background image is the same for every card of the same magic type (with exception of the main characters, of course).

What this guy said: . You are always free to post whatever you want, but people that come to a TCG/CCG thread are more likely to reply to and engage with posts about that subject.

I see what you mean about overlaying/stacking cards and stat blocks with 'Rage', how that +8 will appear below the character's original stat. That's good design.

>The idea is that the background image is the same for every card of the same magic type (with exception of the main characters, of course).
That's a good idea, not only for unity of design, but because if you were to move into publication you'd have to commission original art, and your best deals with commissions run between $50-$90 USD per image depending on complexity (and can easily cost twice or thrice that, depending on how 'professional' your artist is). Having all 'fire' magic use the same image cuts that cost right down.

> I see what you mean about overlaying/stacking cards and stat blocks with 'Rage', how that +8 will appear below the character's original stat. That's good design.
Yeah :) there are several cards that don't even have a textbox, and just uses the stats. And its not uncommon to have 5 "stat bonus" cards over the same character (not permanently, but for 1 turn).

> That's a good idea, not only for unity of design, but because if you were to move into publication you'd have to commission original art
It was not really a design option, it would be a lot more preferably for each card to have its own illustration, design-wise. I made this choice recently thinking purely on making a more affordable cost for illustrations. Also, I want really hardcore illustrations, so they will probably be expensive a piece (some games can go for cheaper simple-style illustrations, but I don't think that is what my game should go for), which makes the idea even more appealing.

So I want for the newest version of the prototype, to achieve these things:

1) Look a little better than right now (which is not hard, since the current version is a shitty template card with the values written by pencil). Currently, only the characters have a "decent"-looking card.

2) Translate the game to portuguese. Sadly, some people suck at english (bothers me because I like english a lot better than portuguese for most things, especially for games).

3) See if its possible to have the game use the same image for all cards of the same magic type. I want to playtest a lot like this and see if it is okay, see if people wouldn't mind too much. The idea is to invest on art/illustration to make really cool-looking cards and characters, but cut back the cost of illustrating each deck card. It would be "only" 12~15 characters in the first version, so its a more affordable cost.

Also, just realized maybe I should illustrate just a few deck cards (the most powerful/cool ones) to make them look like promo.

The museum game I posted above is basically a two-player deckbuilder, so it's probably fine to discuss here. One thing I have noticed is that you want to very careful about how much detail you add to the game. If your character is going to have 5 pieces of equipment at a given time, each with their own hp or timer on them, then that's a lot of finicky information to be tracking, which will slow down the game and make it less appealing to people who aren't already heavily invested in it. As you mentioned Dominion, look at how simple its effects generally are, and you only need to think about 10 of them in a given game. Achieving that level of simplicity is more an aspirational goal, but it should be kept in mind (for the record, the museum game above has way too much text per card, another thing that's holding me back from trying to commercialize it).

The best approach is probably to figure out what you want the core gameplay to look like, mock up a few of the simplest cards, and test it to see if the game stands on its own. If you're just sticking paper with the effects written in pen in front of sleeved magic cards, it should be pretty easy to test all the ideas you mentioned and find which one suits what you're going for the best. Testing is the most important thing in game design!

These cards would look either badass or ridiculous with holofoil on em.
Take that as you will.

I don't think mono-image cards are necessarily a bad thing, but maybe that's just me. I was following a game a while ago called 'Trigger Discipline' - it crashed and burned on Kickstarter, but I thought their card designs were pretty good (pic related), and they were using a single image per character/weapon. Mixing the two (having all 'fire' cards share one image, except for three which have individual images) might be off-putting - I think you either need to commit to one or the other. Just imo.

I always find the budgeting part of game design really prosaic. You've just dreamed up a great idea, and then you calculate how big your art budget will need to be: 15 characters, and one image per school of magic (7 schools?) = ~$1300 usd for art. Throw in a card back and a few supplemental bits of art (game logo, card frames, packaging design) and you're looking at more like $1600. I don't know how well the Euro trades against the US dollar, so maybe it's not so daunting for you, but in my currency that's more like $2500. That's just in my experience sourcing artists and putting products together, though - if you had a contact, a great artist friend who'll work for beer, that price plummets.

Art is definitely the most expensive part of getting these games made. I'm making a game that needs 40 unique pieces of art, even finding enough artists to cover that while staying somewhat consistent in terms of style is a pain, to say nothing of the budget it requires.

You ever think about trying to market this? Get an artist to do a few pictures, design a card back, and have at least a nice version of it for yourself. Seems like a nice quick game to play with friends between other games.

Either way I like how that sounds, and honestly taking a huge game like YGO and condensing the core gameplay to a single deckbuilder is a great idea if it plays right.

>The only problem would be that a simple bump of the table would cause the cards to become askew
This problem would exist with dice, counters, and any other card positioning, much less the deck itself always being vulnerable to being bumped. But yeah, with multiple cards representing a specific value in a specific order, shit could get really annoying.

>DungeonCrawler
And yeah it would be fully a TCG, with you competing with your opponent. Your own deck would have monsters and traps you'd play against any player to either slow the enemy down or to reap the benefits of victory.

> I don't think mono-image cards are necessarily a bad thing, but maybe that's just me
I still need to try it out live with some playtesting. It is not ideal, specially because sometimes people might have 10-20 cards on their hands (depending on what strategy they are going for), and each one have its own illustration could have an impact in helping the player figuring out what card is what in that crowd. (when i played on monday with my friend, he tried to draw a lot of cards and he had to spend a lot of times figuring out what card was what... so that could be an issue)

At the same time, illustrations also have a great role at making it easy to identify what cards are what in the board, visually, and since most cards don't stay on the board (and most that do stay stacked on a character card), that part is not a big issue.

But in the end, requires a lot of testing.

> Mixing the two (having all 'fire' cards share one image, except for three which have individual images) might be off-putting
Why is that? I think this would emphasize how awesome certain cards is. For instance, the most "promo" card in the game is called Finger of Death, and it deals 50 direct damage to a character (killing full-health characters in one hit). That is the sort of card that totally deserves its own awesome illustration.

> I always find the budgeting part of game design really prosaic.
I don't know shit about budgeting a game, or at any part required to publish it. I'm really clueless on that matter. I only know how to make games, not how to sell them.

> I don't know how well the Euro trades against the US dollar
I'm from Brazil. Our currency is a bit lower than 1/3 of a dollar. (though I actually earn my salary in american dollars)

> if you had a contact, a great artist friend who'll work for beer, that price plummets
I was actually considering hiring a guy I know for this. That could be a bit cheaper than hiring a stranger.

>You ever think about trying to market this?
I've put some thought into it, yeah. Rather than hiring artists, I was considering approaching local museums and asking if I could use photos of their collections. Promoting local museums would also give me a distribution avenue, through selling it through their gift shop (and local game stores). The only problem with that approach is that the game feels too complex for the audience that would be buying it through that model of distribution. It's a concept I'm working on, but at the moment I'm focusing on two other games I think are more promising.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, either way.

I've had some luck using websites like iStock and Shutterstock. I think physical print runs are limited to 500 000 items, but hey, who's ever going to sell that many? Pic related is like $10 for commercial use, and there about fifty/sixty more in that style. The only downside is that you don't get exactly what you want, only a facsimile of what you want.

Otherwise I've commissioned some decent work on Fiverr for between $25 - $40. I've only had them do the characters, then I've done the backgrounds myself, which halves the price. You can do that too by just requesting the image be on a transparent layer, and then throwing in a free domain background with a gaussian blur of about 25. The good part of Fiverr is that you can make deals with people, negotiate the rate. I've gotten discounts by making requests and saying: "If you give me $10 off, then instead of the seven day turnaround you indicate on your sellers page, I'll give you a month. You can work at your own pace." You just need to vet them first: there are a lot of fakes on there.

>Why is that?
Honestly, just a feeling. Your logic is totally reasonable. You should do what feels right for you.

Wikimedia Commons might be a good source for high-quality museum images that are without copyright.

This thread reminded me of the short-lived revival of the Veeky Forums TCG. I kinda liked where it was going.

Takes me back