How to design a 2 page game with limited cards? I haven’t really had enough experience to distinguish it from a normal 2-page game. So I used an idea that firstly designed for an autochess game. Firstly I had some case study on League of Legends, a 5v5 MOBA game that seems totally irrelevant with card games. Because I quite enjoy the feeling of countering your enemy with a certain character.

In League, Picking countering character against your enemy requires that enough experience of each character’s strength and weakness and its mechanics. Besides, blind luck is also helpful because if you pick earlier than your opponent, you’re the one who will be countered. And the sequence is random. Once I win a game with a counter pick, I feel that there’s a strategy part in this victory. And it’s satisfying.

So let’s come back to the idea: counterplay between players. This concept occurred in almost every game. For instance, the basic Rock Paper Scissors game we have been playing since childhood. But it relies mostly on randomness. I’ll add some strategic decision making in it.

Then the first two cards came to my mind: Thunder and Mist. It occurs almost instantly. These two cards have the effect that disables the enemy’s attack – Mist can do some extra(let the attack cards backfire your enemy).

Then which cards to use against Thunder and Mist (T&M) ? The third one just came: Magic Shield. It can invalidate 2 cards above. What about a more positive function? So let’s add a healing function. Then a prototype just starts to form up. A 1v1 dual game with attack cards, control cards(T&M), and a Magic Shield card. That’s basic Rock Paper Scissors loop in my game.

And another case study I cannot ignore is Hearthstone by Blizzard. It is also a 1v1 duel game consisted of cards. In HearthStone, deckbuilding is further constrained by the Hero the player chooses: each Hero features a special power that can be activated during the game and exclusive cards that can only be used for that Hero.[1]

Then the structure is set within minutes of my walking after dinner. 2 heroes out of 3 and 10 skill cards out of 15, is basically how this setup will be. And in each turn, both players must simultaneously choose cards and then reveal them (like Hearthstone’s deck building before each game). And the in-game part I decided to use Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) to give it some randomness to make it fun.

Coming next week: the first edition of rules XD

[1]García-Sánchez, P., Tonda, A., Squillero, G., Mora, A., & Merelo, J. J. (2016, September). Evolutionary deckbuilding in hearthstone. In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.