The last project style assessment the Games subject had was a physical game prototype and high concept document. Since making a physical (paper) prototype was mandated I choose to create a card game. This was spurred on by primarily playing SolForge on iOS and seeing others play Magic: Duels of the planeswalkers, HearthStone etc.
I approached this by creating a game that is a chaotic collision of Solforge’s combat, deck building (a la Dominion) and the joy of being a jerk in games like Uno.
The brainstorming started with distilling the rules a player would have to know down, so removing things like action and buy limits and then designing 3 unique card types. Monster’s being the obvious one, the other two are to alter the state of play for players. A duration card is like a weather or headline from Arkham Horror, it changes or adds new rules to everyone’s turn. An Instant card, as the name implies, is instant and can be played by any player at any time for free. The goal of these cards is to make the simple rule set always seem fresh and to keep all player’s attention on the game and avoid the “let me know when its my turn again” problem many turn based games face.
Next was a long list of all the possible effects and giving them approx. utility to player’s and thus deriving the card’s cost and relative worth. The initial list was well over 100 different effect types, this was found to be way too many and some were far too similar.
I’ve tided up and shared the folder with the draft cards, the pdf that was printed out, questionnaire results, rules and High Concept Doc that was submitted.