Cards and Sorcery, publishing a prototype and reflecting on it

Intro

I am not actively working on this project anymore. I'm putting it up as a display of what I’ve created and also make it available for other people to play around with. So let's go on a little retroscpective of what works best in my opinion, what doesn't and some things I tried beforehand.

If you want more context about what I'm talking about, you can look up the rules or my how-to-play summary but here's a little summary.

Cards & Sorcery is a deck-building board game. Players start with the same 13 cards and will buy and play better cards to try to score more points than their opponents before the game ends. It features a random market selection with cards of different rarities every turn to feel like a draft game. It has a mana system inspired by classic TCGs (you know the one), featuring mana colors and steadily increasing production every turn to create early/mid/late stages where you can play not only more cards but also a larger variety of cards as you diversify your income. The game is overall low interaction but players can choose to spend resources to attack eachother's cards and they can play reactions during eachother's turn. Once the market deck runs out, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

What works

First of all, I’m very happy with the core mechanics of the game. The loop of playing something and sacrificing it to get an effect is a great trade-off between the typical “building a board” of TCGs and one turn effects of deckbuilders, allowing you to delay some stuff at the cost of opening you up for an attack. It also opens up a great balancing opportunity by moving mana cost between playing the card and sacrificing the card, keeping the same total cost but changing the opportunity cost of attacking it or its flexibility.

Overall I think the starting deck is very solid. I love the tempo vs flexibility tradeoff of the Blank Gems and I also think the Channeling Gem is a great “filler” card that serves to enable Reaction, save leftover mana or set up the next turn. The Avatar is also a neat way to both skip a useless first turn and give a couple of re-rolls later on, although the re-roll option does seem pretty weak at the moment.

I like the overall distribution of the market deck. The relative rarity between Very Common and Unique cards feels pretty on point. Between that and the fact that you can effectively skip a couple of turns and “save” mana by playing Power and Channeling gems without activating them, you’ll never feel like you don’t get anything good to buy. It also replicates the auto-battler limited supply mechanic where the more players buy into a specific strategy, the less likely it’s gonna be to get more of it. I only think it could use a little more colorless cards.

What doesn't and how it could be improved

Now for the thing i’m less convinced about. The game duration, burning cards by converting power, and victory cards need more testing. Those are all very recent additions to replace previous mechanics I was not happy with. I think, conceptually they all work but could use refining. First of all, I didn’t do any math when trying it and the game feels slightly cut short right now. This could be changed any number of ways, including changing the number of cards in the deck, changing the rule for power conversion, changing some power-generating cards to potential or even adding an effect on some cards that slows down the burning of cards. Second, the power conversion mechanic is a little clunky to explain and especially to remind to new players. However it gives a much needed distinction between power and potential since the only difference otherwise is attacking which happens pretty rarely anyway. There should be a way to make this more intuitive and card design should also consider this, a majority of them give power simply because i didn’t want to lock players out of dealing damage too much. Third, the victory cards work but they are kinda raw. I like how all three of them have unique designs fitting different strategies but they might not be balanced very well. The most expensive one is a little underwhelming and the cheapest one might not be enough for an aggro game with 4 players. I don’t know if this implementation is the best but I for sure like it more than the first try of having them shuffled into the market deck which bloated it early on and made getting points later on just dumb luck. A way to get rid of the victory cards could be to assign a point value to each market card and score point through the regular cards instead. The idea I like the most is accruing points from a board-state that you’d need to build up and defend but it’s an idea that would require reworking major parts of the game to try out.

Player interaction feels a little rudimentary at the moment. It is mainly composed of 2 mechanics: attacking and reactions. By default attacking is not resource efficient or interactive, which is on purpose. The point is to make later cards more efficient at generating Power but also making it so attacking should be reserved for the opponent's key cards so players are allowed to keep stuff on the board. The attacking mechanic is not really thrilling but it’s also not the purpose of the game. I believe it’s a perfectly fine rule to support the actual deck building mechanics. Reactions on the other hand are a little un-tested but I believe the current version is the best yet. And, I would add, they are also necessary to have meaningful interaction between the players in this version. I think the only downside is that too few cards use it in a meaningful way making it fairly obvious when you’re preparing to use the only reaction card you’ve acquired so far, even with Channeling gems. I experimented with drawing cards at the end of the turn but it made “Before your turn” reactions impossible to implement. If you untap at the start of the turn and draw at the end, you’re likely not gonna have mana saved for any reaction you draw so you’d need to draw it, and keep it a whole turn to use it as a reaction. If you untap and draw at the end, then playing a reaction before your turn doesn’t matter at all since you’re gonna be able to play all your cards during the turn anyway. And these cards are kinda necessary to make it possible to bluff the rarer reaction cards. The only other viable solution would have been to do the untap and draw at the end of the turn and not bother with any “Before turn” reactions. This would make the main use of reactions to have random ones available at the end of every turn and needing to keep them a full turn to plan something with them (which is necessary for some to matter). This has it’s appeals but I’d rather encourage planned use of reactions instead of delaying it, hence the current version.

And the last and obvious point to work on is the overall balance of the market cards. Many are niche and either too difficult to make use of for their cost or not well supported enough by the rest of the set. Since I dug this back up a few months ago, I made quite a few balancing passes but it’s hard to test all the niche cards. Right now, it’s far from perfect but it’s not in a shameful state either and I’m quite proud of what I’ve got.

Also, back when I designed this set of cards, I ran out of creative fuel towards the end and just wanted to complete the full color/rarity distribution. The truth is that it’s hard to create fun effects without something like a combat system to influence. An eventual re-make of this might need something a little more involved to interact with. My two ideas are either changing the attack system to make it more interesting or generating victory points from active cards on the board (a little bit like having attackers on the board in a tcg takes you a little closer to victory every turn.) That’s however more work that I’m willing to put into this right now.

Conclusion

And that’s why I’m posting all of this. Yes I want to add things I’ve done to my portfolio but I also believe these are strong grounds to build upon and if I’m not gonna do it, I might as well lay it all out if anyone wants to pick this up. I also think this project could be very fun for other people to mod. I believe that designing an alternative deck of market cards built from the same rule has to potential to be a fun experience similar to designing a cube in a tcg.