I’ve been playing trading/collectable card games (TCGs/CCGs; they’re basically the same thing) and learning lessons about game design through them for over 30 years now. It’s quite likely that I’ve learned more about crafting a tabletop game experience from this kind of game more than any other. There’s certainly a ton that’s been written about crafting them, and if you ever want a thorough, encyclopedic tour, I’ll point you to my friend Mark Rosewater, who’s been writing about his time designing Magic: the Gathering since almost the beginning of the game’s life, and recording two podcasts a week about it for the last 12-odd years. I started reading Mark’s writing some where around 1995, when he was appearing regularly in the Duelist magazine. By 2006, I’d learned enough about TCGs — and how to catch a professional game designer’s attention — that Mark actually signed me on a contractor to work on a Magic set, Shadowmoor.

To be fair, wile I’d learned enough to land the gig, in all honesty, my skills for it were still very raw. While I could talk game design theory well enough, I’d never really made a name for myself as a player, and lacked the experience at that time to “go pro” either as a player or designer. My contract lasted for one set, after which I returned to my primary profession at the time, graphic design. I wrote an article about it all for the Magic website once, but it’s since been lost in massive article archive purges. Mark’s story about it all is here, and I must say he’s very gracious and generous when he speaks of my time there. He’s a good dude.

Since that gig, I’ve gone all-in on game design. I’ve been working in the greater tabletop games industry for over 15 years now (this last year’s been something of an outlier; while I’m currently not working as a full-time, in-house designer, I’ve been picking up contracts here and there to pay the bills and keep my design muscles fit). Most of that time has been in the tabletop board game category, but while it’s a very different animal than TCG design, many of the lessons learned about the latter are entirely applicable to the former. This is especially true when some board games get expansion content after the fact, as there’s a significant parallel in both models being crafted with a growing variety of strategy options available to players.

I don’t think I could ever have designed Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances at The Op if it weren’t for the things I’d picked up about the modular designs of TCGs. Three-plus decades of playing and reading taught me a ton about user experience, player motivations, and designing components that give the end user the freedom to customize their own game plan. All of this is as applicable to card games as it is to board games.

Last week I wrote about seeing my first Lorcana set debut. There will be several more of those in the next few years, as my time at Ravensburger, while short, was an intense schedule of design. My most recent takeaway from all of it — reinforced by seeing fan response — was that the things I’d learned about TCG design to that point were well applied to the assignment at hand. I may not have 30 years of professional experience specifically with trading card games, but I have enough combined study and application under my belt to speak intelligently about some of the core principles.

Also in last week’s post, I mentioned that I’m currently working on two new TCG projects. And while those two games are largely still under wraps, today I’d like to put together some thoughts on how the things I’ve picked up in my time as a gamer and designer have informed and inspired the games currently on my design desk and prototyping table.

In no particular order…

Trading Card Games Must Be Both Rigid and Flexible.

Making a TCG is about balancing two very different kinds of design. This is a core tenet of TCG design that I picked up on very early, while I was still a graphic designer by trade.

It’s the central point to the first online conversation I had with Mark Rosewater that convinced him to sign me on for a contract designing a Magic set with him and his team. In my day job at the time, I was creating art for inter-mixable kids home decor and furnishings. One pattern of wallpaper could match five different bedspreads, which could all match three different clocks or pillows or rugs. Everything was essentially modular, and it gave parents the ability to customize their kid’s bedroom. I wasn’t designing the room for them, just giving them the compatible pieces for them to decorate that room the way they wanted to on their own.

Just like designing the rules and cards for TCGs.

Card games in general have existed for hundreds of years. Until only recently, players would all play from the same shared deck, and that deck rarely changed from game to game. So while one deck might be useable for a variety of games, all players knew up front what they were eventually going to see once all the cards had been dealt or drawn.

Trading card games, on the other hand, start with the premise that each player has their own deck of cards, and chooses what cards go into it from a much larger pool of available options. It’s not unlike having a huge Lego kit without specific instructions on what to build; you get a lot of parts, and when you put this subset of bricks together it looks like a castle. Putting together a different subset will get you a car. Another subset makes something resembling a horse-elephant hybrid with retractable cannons.

All of those different Lego bricks though need to follow the same core rule: the studs on nearly all Lego bricks are always the same height, and always the same size and distance from each other. Break that rule, and things stop being infinitely compatible.

The longer a TCG sustains an audience and is continually produced, the more designing for that game is about making new cards and decks. The designers are making modular parts that may be remixed in a million-bazillion different ways. What you see there though is a five story building that’s continuously being added to upwards until it’s a legit skyscraper. The foundation underneath that building has to go very deep down, and be robust enough to support an indeterminate amount of weight on top of it.

Part of constructing that foundation — the first kind of design — is making sure the rigid, weight-bearing structures reaching upward have enough space between them for creative variations on the main blueprint. Defining the functions of individual cards — the second kind of design — is what allows players to flexibly imagine and craft those creative variations.

In design phase one, the designer has to write that rigid set of rules that control everything. The sequencing and patterns of the game. The pace, and how to accelerate or throttle it. The types of cards you’ll find in the pool of cards to build with. Ways to win — or lose — the game. What a player must include in every deck, and what restrictions there are on what they could put in their deck. The more flexible spaces in between those foundational rules are where the player takes over, infusing it all with creativity and strategy.

In design phase two, the designer is there to make sure that the individual parts can be recombined into those castles, car, and horse-elephants intuitively, with the assurance that their core set of rules will make all of those models actually function.

Home decor, Lego bricks, and TCGs. All basically the same thing.

The Symbiotic Pairing of Design and Development

In my experience, Game Design and Game Development are two distinct skills. It’s sort of like architecture and engineering; one tends to be more about the creative art of building something, and the other is the understanding of how to make those creative ideas practical and well constructed. One thinks about style, the other thinks about structure.

Which is not to say the two function independent of each other. A good designer understands and appreciates good development, and a good developer can see the underlying logic of a well-imagined design. Ideally, someone in either role can fill in in a pinch for the other.

In my time working on sets for Lorcana, I had the benefit of a very fluid and organic relationship between my design team and the development team assigned those sets. We as the designers could throw together a batch of ideas for cards and mechanics, and we knew that the developers would include us in their process of improving and balancing what we gave them. There was a lot of productive back-and-forth, and team members on both sides of that line got to learn more and more about what went into the two processes.

If designers and developers aren’t able to keep that dialogue flowing, there’s a very real risk that elements of a card or mechanic’s design that the designer felt were vitally important could get stripped away by developers who deem that card or mechanic less than optimal. What the designers see as a load-bearing structure, if not visible enough, can get cleared away by developers who see something else as the more visible and balanced path to follow. And sometimes the developers are right in that the card or mechanic’s juice isn’t worth the squeeze, but more often it can turn out that the intended design just isn’t supported enough by other design elements, and feels unintentional to the developers.

There is a short, but still effective conversation where a developer can say, “this design isn’t exciting enough”, and then cut it to make room for other things that are proven to be exciting in any environment. A good development team can do this efficiently.

There is a longer, but very valuable conversation where the developer gives the designers a nuanced explanation of why a design isn’t exciting, and then the teams identify ways to not only improve, but support that design until there’s a fun deck to discover in that particular environment. A great development team does this regularly.

It’s the conversation that comes from a good developer explaining why a card is getting intentionally reduced or improved at their stage of the process that shows the designers where to put their creative resources. Ultimately, both teams are there for the same reason: to make the game fun to explore and play. Collaboration between the teams, rather than strictly sequestered handoff from one to the other, improves the product and the people behind it.

Resource Systems Exist to Both Fuel and Constrain Gameplay

In any TCG, you’re going to find something that sets the pace for which cards you can play on any given turn. Usually, there’s some kind of resource in the form of a card that can be put into play “for free”, often once per turn, that act as your currency throughout the game. In nearly all cases, those resources are renewed at the start of your turn, so that if you were to play a resource card every turn, you’ll eventually graduate from playing low-cost cards in the early game, to mid- and high-cost cards later in the game.

There’s generally a catch though. In all but a handful of TCGs, there’s one or more mechanics baked into the resource system that create some give-and-take:

• Your resource cards may start the game shuffled into your deck, meaning that you won’t always have them when you need them as turns go on.
• If they’re in your deck, drawing a resource card typically means you didn’t draw a card that can be played as something that can directly impact the game state.
• Playing a resource card from your hand means there’s one fewer card of any type in your hand, and the fewer cards you have in hand, the fewer options you have available on your turn.
• If the game has a “color pie” (I’ll explain those later) tied to the resource system and your resources don’t line up with the colors of the cards in your hand, your current resource cards may not actually give you the ability to play those mismatched cards.
• If the resource system differentiates between cards that can and can not be played as resources, you need to make sure that an adequate number of cards are put in the deck before the game even begins in order to play the cards you want during the game.

The list goes on.

As miserable as all these situations and constraints may seem to be, they actually go hand-in-hand with a central concept that makes games fun: variance. In some games you’ll get exactly the resources you need exactly when you need them, and things will run like finely tuned machinery. Those moments can be tremendously satisfying (at least for one player). Other times things don’t go as smoothly and you’ll need to get creative with the options you have available. Pull off a win under those conditions, and once again, loads of fun and excitement. And sometimes you’re in a bind, and the only thing that’ll keep you in the game is your opponent getting too many/not enough resources. There’s tension in that variance, and tension in games is very frequently tied to having fun.

And finding different paths to a fun experience in the same game over and over is what we call replayability. It’s one of the biggest keys to making a successful game.

Now that “color pie” thing…

Most TCGs have a system built into the core structure/rules that puts different kinds of mechanical themes and strategies into metaphorical silos. Those silos can be visualized as parts of a disk or pie, where they’re counterbalanced against each other around the edges. In In a lot of cases, those silos are visually represented by colors; they’re easy to refer to by name, and if used in the visual layout of the cards, they make cards of the same silo quickly identifiable. When a game’s color pie is well defined and understood, players can intuitively make reasonable assumptions about what a group of cards in a color silo can and will do when played.

Cards in a given color will generally have one kind of strength, but another kind of weakness. Cards in other colors will be similarly balanced, but with different set of strengths and weaknesses. The goal of the designer is that when taken as a whole, all of the different colors will balance out against each other.

When the resource system is tied directly to the color pie, like in Magic, it means that the game can be designed in a way where players won’t have easy access to all the playable cards. They’ll have to make decisions when they build their deck as to which colors they value most, and which they value least. In most cases, they’ll leave one or more colors out of their deck entirely — both because the strengths of those colors aren’t needed for the strategy they want to execute, and because getting the right resources to power those less important strategies takes away from the consistency of knowing they have the resources for their critical strategies.

Other games like Lorcana and Riftbound tell players in the rules that they need to make a choice up front: there’s a maximum number of colors you can include in your deck, and all of your cards must align with your chosen colors. In short, you’re just not allowed to play with all the colors at once. You must make a choice of which strengths and weaknesses you’re willing to accept.

In Lorcana, this structure means that resources don’t need to be specifically aligned to colors at all; any card with a specific symbol on it can be played face down as a resource (called “ink”), and cards just have a generic, indistinct cost. A blue (or “Sapphire”) card that costs 2 ink can use the exact same 2 ink resources as a purple (“Amethyst”) card that costs 2 ink on another turn.

Either way, the color pie model pushes players to make choices when they’re preparing their decks for play. Those constrained choices lead right back to… variance, and as we saw earlier, variance equals fun.

It’s all a big circle. Like a pie, see?

Players Like Obvious Decks. They Also Like Discovering Hidden Ones

Sometimes a player just wants a deck to come together quickly and easily, so they can get to the actual game part of the game.

Designers have tools to give those players what they’re looking for in ways they’ll find quickly. Cards that effectively tell a player exactly (more or less) how to build a deck are called “signposts”. If I want to drive from Seattle, WA to Portland, OR, I’m going to follow signs on the highway that say exactly which lane is going to get me to Portland. Signposts in TCGs work the same way.

If I have a card in my collection that says “I’m a Monkey, and I get stronger the more other Monkeys you have”, I’m probably going to want to pack my deck with as many Monkeys as I can. If I find another Monkey card that says “When you play me, gain a point for each other Monkey you have”, well, obviously that one has strong synergy with the first Monkey card. I’ll put that one in the deck too. With enough of these signpost cards, the Monkey deck will practically build itself!

If I open up a pack of cards and find a really cool Airplane card that does awesome stuff, but also says “You can’t play any more Monkeys when I’m around”, then I’m probably less likely to put the Airplane in my deck. Outside of some possible nuanced loophole, the Airplane is trying to obviously tell us “I don’t go in your Monkey deck”. Another signpost, just one warning us which lane won’t go to Portland.

Signposts don’t have to be specifically about Monkeys. You might have a card that says “Whenever you play a pink card, do a thing”, or “Action cards cost you 2 fewer resources to play”. In either of these cases, the signpost is telling you to play a lot of the thing they care about. The process of building the deck is straightforward.

As is the process of designing these signpost cards. They can often be designed with a whole deck strategy in mind. Start by understanding how the Monkey deck plans to with the game (“lets make a card where you win the game if you have 25 Monkeys!”), then make a bunch of Monkey cards that help you get there, or that keep things stable while you work your way up to 25 Monkeys.

What other kinds of cards should we design for the Monkey Deck?

• Cards that make multiple Monkeys.
• Cards that let you draw more cards when you have a lot of Monkeys.
• Cards that slow your opponents down when you have Monkeys.
• Cards that are Monkeys.

Easy. (Well, I mean, there’s still the question of whether they’re designed and developed in a way that keeps the game balanced and fun, but that’s boring technical stuff. MONKEYS!)

Other times, players want the challenge of discovering synergies on their own. They care less about obvious signposts that tell them to get a lot of Monkeys, and more about cards that create incremental advantages through specific optimized synergies and strategies.

Now this is a much more difficult kind of deck to succinctly summarize. You may be looking to build a deck that dumps a lot of your cards into your discard, then lets you play those cards from your discard as if they were in your hand. In this case, you’ll probably consider playing any card that gets those cards in the discard in any efficient manner. Normally, just discarding cards from your hand would be seen as a bad thing. But with the right cards that take advantage of previously discarded cards, all of a sudden, a card that says “When you play me, discard a card from your hand” sees that discard as “a feature, not a bug”.

Building this kind of deck is a lot like finding a really creative solution to a puzzle. The signposts are a lot more cryptic, but they’re there. They tell you take advantage of unusual interactions or strategies, but don’t always spell it out so obviously.

That anti-Monkey Airplane card? These are the players who see that and want to figure out how to actually make it do something cool and advantageous in a deck full of Monkeys. Will it be the best deck ever? Probably not, but that player’s going to have fun trying. And if it is the strongest deck ever? Well, nobody saw that coming, and it was fun for a minute or two. (Then we ban anti-Monkey Airplanes and let the usual shenanigans resume.)

Designing these cards tends to be a trickier process, as the relevant parts aren’t necessarily meant to be noticed right away. Done well though, they’re usually good modular parts that can be used in a variety of ways. Given a card that says “Discard a resource card from your hand to gain one point”, you might look for cards that let you replay those resources from your discard pile. You might look for cards that count how many total cards are in your discard pile. You might look for cards that do a thing whenever you discard any card, or that are better when you have fewer cards in your hand. There are a lot of metaphorical hooks to hang different kinds of strategies and synergies on here.

When a TCG set has cards that appeal to both of these kinds of players (and more), chances are good that the set will be a popular one.

———

Well, this has turned out to be a whopper of a post, and it barely scratches the surface of the subject at hand. If I had an editor, they’d be telling me to break it into multiple posts. And I suppose I probably could write more like this if that’s something you want to see more of.

Let’s open this up, “ask me anything”-style. If there’s something about Trading Card Game design (or tabletop game design in general) that you’d like my thoughts on, leave me a comment and I’ll put up a post about it.

In the meantime, I’m gonna go use this here accumulated experience and knowledge to make some more TCGs.

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