maxplaysgames ([info]maxplaysgames) wrote,
@ 2005-02-10 23:02:00
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CCGs
Why are some CCGs really addictive, and some really sucky?

One thing about a bad CCG is the high turn angst (time waiting until you get to do something) or high decision paralysis (time spent figuring out what to do when you have too many options). I think many CCGs went to market without much playtesting, or only being playtested by designers and pros, and thus never given to a new person who would approach the game from a novice perspective.

The thing I like about some of my favorite CCGs (and games in general) is low turn angst. The less time in a game (which is about fun, right?) I spend waiting to get to do something, the better.

This is one thing that non-electronic games can learn from video games. It's great to come home at the end of the day and play some video games because I have no waiting to do and no delays to face. (Yes, this is not always true. Allow me my generalizations.)

So anyway, currently I'm interested in Pirates of the Spanish Main (part card game, part minis game) and A Game of Thrones (CCG I've been playing for a while now). We'll see if I tire of them like I did of the LOTR TCG (managed to get my fill through the beta of the online game) or others.

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[info]grnarmadillo
2005-02-11 07:27 pm UTC (link)
I played a fair amount of LOTR Online, but haven't touched it in a while due to the low marginal benefit of spending money on the game. After a while you realize that, once you have a starter deck and cards to replace the unplayable stuff in it, the chances of opening a pack and finding cards that are useful to you are very low. You can go whole hog, spend several hundred bucks on cards, and have a killer deck until the next set is released with cards that beat your current deck to force people to upgrade, you can accomplish the same for less money but also less available options by carefully designing a decklist and purchasing the cards as singles, or you can resign yourself to losing in ways that aren't even fun to people who have done one of the first two. Of course, Decipher really hasn't helped LOTR with oft-times poor playtesting and rampant money grabs by escalating the game with each set in the form of rare or even ultra-rare cards that any deck needs in multiple of in order to stay competitive. I'd love to be able to play a game like LOTR on a monthly fee of some sort, but it's just a bad return on my limited entertainment dollars with the current pricing structure.

That said, I think your point on the game design isn't easily solved. There's no way to design something like LOTR that doesn't have high turn angst and decision paralysis, unless players simply don't have many options. If you did somehow design a game that had, say, no decision paralysis, that would basically mean that you both constructed and shuffled your decks and the outcome of the game was set from that moment. In which case, it would be a waste to actually play the game. If anything, I think attempts to lessen turn angst in LOTR by introducing a massive number of out-of-phase response actions in recent sets have actually worsened the overall decision problem, while simultaneously breaking old cards balanced under assumptions that are now broken. The best you can do is try to streamline aspects of the game as best as you can, NOT SCREW WITH IT IN EXPANSIONS (or else house rule that you're only going to play with the base set), and try to design it so the time that WOULD be spent on turn angst is instead spent on your decision process (e.g. while you're playing Fellowship cards, I'm counting your companions and how much twilight I'm going to get from my next site, examining my options, and deciding what my next moves are likely to be depending on how much twilight you might give me). Either way, I've never played a game whose expansions didn't promptly ruin it, and I'm not optimistic for the genre as a whole.

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