Deckbuilder Games

dysjunct wrote: BBTM was fun.

I think a good theme for a deckbuilder would be a gang war. Since you control who's in your gang, but due to the criminal element they are kind of inherently unreliable -- your hitman might be in trouble with the law, your bookie or drug pusher might be late bringing in his payments, etc. You build up your gang and use your resources as best you can.

Anyway, there's my million-dollar idea, now someone else make it into a fun game.

That is Nightfall, which I forgot despite it being a lot of fun.

Legomancer wrote:

dysjunct wrote: BBTM was fun.

I think a good theme for a deckbuilder would be a gang war. Since you control who's in your gang, but due to the criminal element they are kind of inherently unreliable -- your hitman might be in trouble with the law, your bookie or drug pusher might be late bringing in his payments, etc. You build up your gang and use your resources as best you can.

Anyway, there's my million-dollar idea, now someone else make it into a fun game.

That is Nightfall, which I forgot despite it being a lot of fun.

That's also City of Remnants, which was a pretty good game too.

When it comes to Dominion, my group (who are mostly recovering MTG addicts) loves to create a finely-tuned draw engine and churn through their entire hand on their turn. I find that incredibly boring so I end up flailing around, buying this and that, until the game is over and I'm in a distant third, if I'm lucky. The only times I've won have been when the card that rewards purchasing Gardens comes up so it allows me to pursue a different strategy instead of making the same "Me too!" purchases that everyone else is making.

I like Core Worlds quite a bit because there's an actual setting and it has some neat deck thinning and manipulation mechanics to reinforce the theme of multiple planetary invasions. The first expansion is really good, too (I don't have the second).

Marvel: Legendary is fun and barely worth playing in spite of the set up, which is a chore.

Since I turn off my brain when playing Dominion, anyway, I'd rather play the DC deckbuilder. It's very simple but my kids can play it and it's surprisingly satisfying when I'm in the mood for something light.

I can't stand Dominion. I'm sure it's fine, but it does my head in.

Star Realms is basically a re-tooling of Ascension, but I play this every day vs the phone AI, and it's excellent. The expansions (all of them) ruin it. It's best with the original, core set. While it shares the randomness of Ascension with the trade row, when you get a feel for the specific cards in the deck, the cards on show, the chances of revealing a good card for your opponent etc, there's a lot to get your teeth into there. Of course there are still the bullshit openings where you can't buy anything but an explorer and your opponent grabs a freighter etc, but playing more games evens that out.

Cthulhu Realms is objectively much cleverer, with some ridiculous potential for chaining draws, trashes, triggered effects, combos etc, but it's less obviously fun and really misses out on the fourth colour. I haven't tried Hero Realms at all.

I enjoyed Zeppelin Attack! and Valley of the Kings for their different approaches to the game style, but neither got much traction with my group back then. I'm pretty much done with the "Cerberus" games (Lord of the Rings, DC) except for DC Villains which adds a lot of pvp fuckery. They are otherwise just long slow snowballs.

Shadowrun: Crossfire is sublime. It turns deck-building into a tight hand management affair, because your deck is rarely going to be more than 10 cards or so.

I'm not sure about counting in games that feature deck building as a component- ASiE 1st Ed, Time of Crisis, BBTM all great. In fact, thinking about it, all the DBGs I really like involve some element of hand management, rather than the "use it or lose it" game-play of Dominion clones.

One thing I want to specify- I don't like playing DBGs in-person because of all the (almost entirely accidental) cheating. With so much shuffling, and so many people unable to actually shuffle, you end up facing against killer combos that land in player hands with statistically improbable frequency. At that point you're not even playing the same game, and it's a waste of time.

I guess I'll be largely the contrarian and say that I really enjoy deckbuilders and that deck building is probably my single favorite mechanic, or at least right up there with area control. My wife and I have played Dominion over a hundred times, which doesn't sound like a major achievement given the game's length, but we have a roomy collection and play Dominion mostly in bunches. We've also played Thunderstone Advance quite a bit (and backed Quest), Legendary a fair bit, and a few others some. Clank! is a pretty decent balance of deckbuilding and board play in terms of time and weight, although I'm not sure that you have all that much control of the deck itself or its utilization. I'll admit to having not played the heavier games with deckbuilding, such as Mage Knight, but I do have GMT's Time of Crisis, which looks like an interesting and relatively light approach.

I suppose I like deckbuilders in part for the same reason that I theoretically like tableau builders but don't as much in practice: because the deck's in my hands, literally and figuratively, and not scattered over tiles or whatnot in front of me or (worse for me, from a visual standpoint) in front of my opponents. I guess I like the ramping-up feel, which to me, again, is probably clearest/strongest in Dominion because it's purely deckbuilding. Some adaptation is required in game, but it's possible to pursue various strategies with the same broad offering of cards. I agree that approaches to Dominion (in particular) can make the game deathly--the old "Village idiot" strategy of gaining actions, or endless card draws that take a lot of time and somehow don't seem to end up improving the hand.

I think we have to contrast deckbuilders with deck construction games. Magic requires advance deck construction (or supports that), whereas deckbuilders involve in-game deck construction.

Another issue I have with the genre is that they are very slow starters, even by the standard of what are generally short games. It feels like they force the players to fart around doing piddly stuff for about the first third of the game, before you can get more impactful cards and do more interesting stuff. This is not good for pacing.

I've also noticed that they tend to focus more on the purchasing of cards, rather than how those cards are used once you buy them. Some games have gotten this right, but not enough of them.

My wife and I are fans of Dominion and Thunderstone. We both enjoy determining the combos to be made in any given Dominion setup, although purely random setups can give you some dogs. I think that what we enjoy most is the weight of a card can vary based on the other cards available and the strategy for a winning path can vary setup to setup. I really miss Isotropic when I could play many games in an evening with zero setup.

We don't pull out Thunderstone as much as we used to, but that is more a result of having played quite a bit when we first got it. I'm not bothering with Quest, as the original and Advance are all we need.

san il defanso wrote: Another issue I have with the genre is that they are very slow starters, even by the standard of what are generally short games. It feels like they force the players to fart around doing piddly stuff for about the first third of the game, before you can get more impactful cards and do more interesting stuff. This is not good for pacing.

This is pretty noticiable in Star Realms, actually. The very first decisions are very straightfoward (Get cash or deck thinning, a medium-size hitter if you can't get either) and the end is abrupt (players snowball and do 30-40 damage in one turn) so the time spent on the fun parts is actually fairly small.

That said, I shouldn't really talk much because I played the game a lot and I'm burned on it.

Surprised no one has mentioned Time of Crisis yet. It's easily the best new game of 2017 I've played. It uses what I believe is a unique deckbuilding mechanic in that you pick your hand each turn. So you pick whatever 5 cards from your draw deck that you want to be in your hand. The game adds randomness/chance through die rolls, both in combat and for events that may come up. So in the end I think the "luck" is the same, but it feels like you have so much more control in what you want to do each turn because you totally decide what options you want to give yourself for your next turn. I really expect this mechanic to start showing up more if it hasn't already.

JEM wrote: With so much shuffling, and so many people unable to actually shuffle, you end up facing against killer combos that land in player hands with statistically improbable frequency. At that point you're not even playing the same game, and it's a waste of time.

This is an actual thing for me. I, personally, hate shuffling so much, for things like Eldritch Horror and Arkham Horror LCG, that I use a random number generator to pull the cards out of the deck (yes, yes, I understand that these are seeded with a prime number and so technically are not random...yawn). This saves all that nonsense with pulling chits from bags and my shitty shuffling.

It's totally OCD, of course, but I don't care because all my gaming is solo.

For hand over hand shuffling you need to shuffle approximately n times, where n is the number of cards squared, to properly randomise. No one is going to do that and riffle shuffling with 12 cards is a waste of time. Pile shuffling does not randomise at all, it simply separates stacks of cards, which is not randomisation.

ratpfink wrote: Surprised no one has mentioned Time of Crisis yet. It's easily the best new game of 2017 I've played. It uses what I believe is a unique deckbuilding mechanic in that you pick your hand each turn. So you pick whatever 5 cards from your draw deck that you want to be in your hand. The game adds randomness/chance through die rolls, both in combat and for events that may come up. So in the end I think the "luck" is the same, but it feels like you have so much more control in what you want to do each turn because you totally decide what options you want to give yourself for your next turn. I really expect this mechanic to start showing up more if it hasn't already.

I mentioned it in passing. The deck building in Time of Crisis is very similar to that in Rococo. Another game I really enjoy that I just remembered is Don't Turn Your Back which has a few cool things going on, the main one being that each player has their own "trade row" to purchase cards from (from identical decks).

I go back and forth on deckbuilders. I tend to actually enjoy the gameplay, while playing, but afterwards...there's no great memory. very low in calories.
Still, they can be a fun way to pass the time with friends. I still remain on the fence with the Street Fighter deck builder. It's part of the 'Cerebus System', but I haven't played any of those titles, so have no idea if that's good or bad.

I think that it could be a great supporting mechanic in a bigger game, but it's rarely used that way. Starcraft did.

I mentioned to a designer working on a Battle of the Atlantic game that a deck-building mechanic could be useful for a self-learning A.I. -- if you attack from the rear you add a Protect-The-Rear-Response card (blindly) into the convoy's Defense Deck, that kind of thing. From that perspective it allows an A.I. opponent to react to your choice of actions over time, forcing you to adapt your approaches throughout the game. He seemed intrigued, but I don't think he's incorporating it. It may be too messy for his particular approach.

One of the things I really don't like about Artificial Intelligence opponents is that they're not intelligent. They don't think, they just play a rote algorithm. I think deck-building presents a way for them to truly adapt to your actions, perhaps in ways that are less than completely predictable play to play. If attacking from the rear means you pull a random card from a Protect-The-Rear-Response Deck that has four different kinds of card in it (multiples of each, maybe 20 cards total) you could end up with an opponent that is unpredictable in spite of you taking the same approach to it game after game. Half a dozen seeding decks, Protect-The-Front, Protect-The-Rear, Protect-The-Side, Protect-Within-The-Convoy, Protect-From-Long-Range, Protect-From-Short-Range, etc. could create a seeding function that imitates your enemy's central command responding to your tactics with new best practices for the fleet. With enough cards in the convoy's Defense Deck you would get the effect of gaining limited insight into how your A.I. opponent is responding with each encounter, but never a complete picture. That seems like interesting play to me.

This would be just one part of a bigger game, one that likely could be included without too much complexity. A.I. needs an ability to adapt in order to be even remotely interesting, and this is the only way I've considered viable to make that happen in a tabletop implementation. I'm all ears if anyone can think of another.

S.

That's a great idea. It also lets you do things like "set up" the AI for a particularly powerful attack by playing several, weaker attacks from the opposite side to decrease the likelihood of it drawing the appropriate defense card.

A similar way to do it would be to use a dice pool mechanic where, for example, there are 3-4 colors of dice. The AI dice pool starts out with 7 blue dice and as the game goes on they can be replaced by yellow (more dangerous) or red (most dangerous) dice and the number of dice in each color works with the dice values to determine the behavior. You can get more complex behavior with this system but it would be much slower than your version. Keep in mind, I'm a big fan of the Battletech damage tables so I would consider that a feature and not a bug.

SebastianBludd wrote: That's a great idea. It also lets you do things like "set up" the AI for a particularly powerful attack by playing several, weaker attacks from the opposite side to decrease the likelihood of it drawing the appropriate defense card.

A similar way to do it would be to use a dice pool mechanic where, for example, there are 3-4 colors of dice. The AI dice pool starts out with 7 blue dice and as the game goes on they can be replaced by yellow (more dangerous) or red (most dangerous) dice and the number of dice in each color works with the dice values to determine the behavior. You can get more complex behavior with this system but it would be much slower than your version. Keep in mind, I'm a big fan of the Battletech damage tables so I would consider that a feature and not a bug.

Your dice idea increases the difficulty of the game, but not the response to what happens on the board. I suppose it could . . . it could make using the same style of attack more difficult if you had a different dice pool for each attack approach.

I think the cards could really shine just because they could be quite specific tactics, ones designed to address a particular approach, and they could be cross-producted. That is, a short range attack from the front could add one Short Range card and one Front Attack card to the Defense Deck, etc. And frankly, as I design this concept in my head on my commute I have each deck shuffled at the start of play, the top two of each drawn, those drawn cards shuffled and then two of each inserted into each Response Deck so that there is some level of noise introduced into the Response Decks as well. A simulation of the enemy not understanding the way they were attacked on occasion, and responding incorrectly.

Needless to say, I don't think Euro is the best model for deck-building, unless you're looking to reinvent Dominion. That's already been done a couple of dozen times, so I think the concept hasn't been explored to its fullest. There's more to it if designers look to use it for bigger design goals.

S.