More Card Battling!

In the last post, I talked about the initial tests and the first set of changes I'd made as a result of those tests. That post also explains the basics of how the game works to make it easier to follow along with the discussion. I won't repeat those basics here, to avoid repeating myself too much. The first set of changes there was intended to address some scoring deficiencies as well as improve the strategic options for players.

The tests with the changes went well. The ergonomic change, of discarding a card after drawing a Reserve card, worked great. The additional layer of shaping your hand by discarding was a fun little decision that was occasionally consequential, and it was nice to not have to count the tricks as carefully. The Battle is over when you run out of cards, simple. There was one small modification, which was that initially I was discarding the cards face up into a discard pile. That had two problems. One, I didn't like exposing the discarded card to the opponent, it gave more information that I wanted to to the second player, who could shape their hand in response. I didn't want quite that much sensitivity to player order. Second, discarding face up led to potential confusion between the discard pile and the current Battle card. I changed to discarding face down, and that worked better.

The changes to scoring were pretty solid. The Rout points system is working to provide a realistic alternative victory condition, one that I've had happen in a couple of games. It's certainly a big improvement on just three Routs winning. The change to make each round score equal to trick difference is fine. I'm still not totally sure it's the right thing to do, but it's working for the time being, so I'll leave it in place for the time being. It's not really a problem to address right now.

The other change, of dealing the first two cards before selecting a Battle, is working great. It's not a ton of information, but now selecting the Battle site involves a few variables, and it's not a trivial decision which one to pick. Each player's Rout points, the state of each player's Reserve, the two cards you can see, and the remaining sites on the board are all inputs into the strategic decision, and that feels like a good direction.

So, what are the new problems I'm seeing? One is that the Reserve is too random. You'll get a hand that's bad for the current Battle, and draw on your Reserve to help out. It feels really bad to draw, say, an off-suit 9, a card which might have been really helpful if it matched the trump suit but is otherwise probably a waste. Your Reserve is very short, and wasting even one of your precious draws feels bad. In some ways, this mirrors the problem that I previously had with Battle selection. The randomness of Reserve draws was swamping the strategic decision of when to draw. It felt like you weren't really adjusting the course of the game as much as you should be, and given that managing the Reserve deck is one of the critical things tying the Battles together, players needed to have some control over the Reserve.

This is a decision that I ended up sleeping on. One thing that I strongly considered was making the Reserve deck a fixed set of cards. I already had it seeded with two Kings, after all. Incidentally, that decision to add Kings to the Reserve was made before I first played it, for a couple reasons. First, Kings score a point when taken and I wanted them out of play at the beginning of the game so later Battles on average would be more valuable. Second, at some point, I'm going to want those cards to have some special effect, as they'll represent commanders on the battlefield, so I started by seeding them to players to make sure the special cards were evenly distributed. Finally, as the second highest cards, it adds some cheap drama when you pull one of your precious Ks from the Reserve and it gets beat by an Ace. I am absolutely not above trying to create some artifical dramatic moments.

Anyway, a fixed deck of Reserve cards potentially could be interesting if those cards were all special in some way. If they were all decent to strong cards, and all had their tactical uses, then you wouldn't have the problem of a dead draw causing you pain during the game. Ultimately, I decided to not move forward with this for now. I think it's an idea I might revisit when I create a custom deck for the game, but for now, it would make setup more painful and make the Reserve more predictable, which isn't exactly the direction I wanted to go.

However, I got somewhat stuck on that solution to the problem. This occasionally happens with game design, that you see a problem clearly, and a solution that doesn't quite fit the bill, but it can be hard to shake yourself out of that solution to move to a better one. You get trapped in that local optima and it can be difficult to move to another part of the design space to find a better approach. In this case, I used an old standby: thinking about the problem as I fell asleep. That method has its risks, of either coming up with something and forgetting it or thinking you have it only to have the light of day demonstrate you're a bozo, but in this case it allowed me to see a potential new path.

I had been treating the Reserve as a deck of cards. A deck of cards, of course, has an implied set of rules. A deck is face down so you can't see what's in it. A deck is ordered. A deck is accessed one card at a time, from the top. It's a useful construct for many games, and these implicit properties and rules help people quickly understand how to interact with common design elements. But, those implied rules are ones that are worth examining. Was the Reserve using the right design construct?

There's a parallel to a problem in software engineering, of choosing the right data structure for a system. Thinking about how the data will be organized, how the data will be used, how often data will be retrieved, added, or removed will inform what the is the right data structure for a use case. Similarly, it's worth considering whether you're using the right game element in your design, given what you want it to accomplish and the role it plays in the design relative to the other elements.

In this case, what occurred to me is that maybe treating the Reserve as a deck was the problem. The Reserve was small, and the decision to draw a card from it was very high impact, one of the most important ones the player would make during the game. Given the centrality of the Reserve to the decision space for players, it seemed to make sense to provide them with more control over it than they currently had. The thing I needed wasn't a deck, it was a hand. If the Reserve was a hand of cards, the player could choose a card that they knew would be helpful in the current Battle. They wouldn't ever waste anything, and they could deploy their resources meaningfully. As the game was already fairly random, this piece of control would help adjust the balance towards skill. I would include it in my next set of tests.

Another problem I wanted to tackle was a mirror of a problem that I had in Fox in the Forest, at least the early versions. The player on-lead in early versions of Fox had too much control over the pace of the game. The biggest decision you make in that game is the choice of lead, as the response card was more constrained, and it was too easy for a player to keep a stranglehold on the lead and therefore the big decisions. The introduction of the special powers on the 1s and the 3s was my solution to breaking that cycle and giving the following player the ability to change the tide of the game.

In Napoleon, Blown Apart, the decision of what Battle to choose rested with the winner of the previous Battle. Since that player now had access to some information about what Battle to choose and could tilt things towards their own hand, it provided a bit of the same stranglehold problem. Once you won a Battle, you were more likely to win the next and keep the ball rolling. In Napoleon, it's easier to fix than it was in Fox. I could have the player with the fewest points select the next Battle. This would provide the trailing player with a minor advantage to assist in catching up, and didn't really have a downside, so it was an easy change. It's also easy to kind of squint and see how it matches with the theming, as the player that is behind is presumably on defense, and the defender choosing the ground for a Battle isn't an unreasonable reflection of historical patterns.

The final thing to consider was a largely hypothetical problem thus far. I wanted the Rout point mechanism to provide hope for a player even if they're down on points, with the idea that they might still be able to Rout their way to victory. However, with the current scoring, there's a possibility that a player might be drawing dead going into the last Battles of the game. If there are insufficient tricks left in the Battles on the board for a player to win by Rout, and they are behind enough on points, their position might be hopeless or effectively so. Unfortunately, the computation to figure out if your position is hopeless isn't trivial, so I couldn't put in a rule saying someone is eliminated under certain conditions. I think it's a bad property of a game to have a player be in a hopeless spot but not have the game end, so I wanted a fix, ideally one that might permit a comeback.

I settled on the idea that you can't win if you were just Routed. That's a simple fix, easy for players to understand, and it leaves the possibility for a comeback win at all times. No matter how far you are behind, if you can string together Routs to get to 7 Rout points, you'll win. If the final Battle of the game is a Rout against the leading player, deal a new Battle site and keep going.

These fixes togther increase the amount of player control in the game. It's a card game, I don't want it to be a perfect chess match. But I do want players to feel like their skill matters, and I want them to feel good if they make a strong play and it leads to victory. By increasing the decisions around the Reserve and giving the trailing player some advantages, it should lead to a higher skill ceiling and closer contests. And overall, the game was still showing promise, which is very exciting.