Design Journey

Thu Oct 13 – Rebalancing Action Cards

The Kickstarter reward for creating 10 new cards with a backer got me thinking about the size of the deck overall.  I  don’t want the deck too small, or there won’t be much replay variation, nor too large, so you never see all the cards.  Also I don’t want too many phase-specific cards, or you end up with a hand that has nothing for the current phase, nor too few so that every phase feels the same.  It’s been a while since I last looked at all the cards.  I sorted them into piles for phases, then sub-divided into reputation, support, and meta.  I was pretty close to 140 cards, so I decided to have half for any phase and half for specific phases.  Within each phase, I went heavier on flavored reputation cards, with very few support cards and very few meta cards.  This will result in support cards being mostly Any Phase and more flexible for use in any contest, and the reputation cards being more focused on Events, Elections, and Promotions. 

Next I noticed the influence costs were all over the place, with way too many costing zero, and little consistency between related groups.  When I was working on the Player cards earlier in the week, and began dreaming up Junior Partner abilities, I realized there needed to be a wider spread.  Instead of costs from 0 to 3, I doubled that to 1 to 8.  I set the standard as 1 influence buys 1 reputation or 2 support.  Then I had to factor in the tags that can provide boosts from Skills and Traits.  Once the scale was set, I reset the costs on every card.  I ended up pulling an all-nighter, and nearly fell asleep at work during some rather dull meetings. 

Which of course causes a ripple effect in the economy.  Tonight I’ll look at income at the start of the game and the Refresh Phase, with an eye towards balancing between too poor and unable to play any cards, versus too rich and not feeling any resource constraints.  I view such constraints as essential tension.  When you can’t do everything you want, you have to pick and choose among many paths to victory.  We’ll definitely have to monitor the new economy numbers in the next round of playtesting.