Though deckbuilding games have been around for a few years now, we haven’t seen many experienced eurogame designers dive into the category. Martin Wallace’s A Few Acres of Snow (2011) was a notable exception — and unsurprisingly one of the most distinct deckbuilder designs. Thus, I was very pleased to see Copycat (2012), by experienced euro designer Friedemann Friese.

The Game

Copycat is uniquely a game that combines worker placement mechanics and deckbuilder mechanics. After players have auctioned for initiative, they place workers on certain choice office spaces. Only afterward do they have the opportunity to purchase new cards and earn victory points.

The game works because its two parts are very symmetrical — a topic I’m going to return to shortly. The powers of the worker placement spaces and the powers of deckbuilt cards have a lot of overlap: either one can give a player money to spend, or let him draw cards, or earn him victory points. The worker placement spaces provide the unique ability to give players “buys” — which are required to actually make purchases — while the cards have several (slightly) more esoteric powers, and also offer the unique ability to give players more workers to place.

The entire goal of the game is to earn victory points. These show up whenever players place workers in victory point spaces, play victory point cards, or use worker placement spaces that were unpopular in recent rounds. At the end of the game, players may also get the opportunity to turn their last hand’s worth of money into victory points — though this can sometimes be blocked by other players.

No matter what sort of deck a player made, it’s the person who earned the most points over the course of the game who wins.

The Good

Deckbuilding as a Mechanic. Most games approach deckbuilding as a subgenre of games. There are thus certain rules and methodologies which are incorporated into those deckbuilding games … and they don’t tend to go further afield. Copycat instead approaches deckbuilding as a mechanic: it’s one of several different parts which are put together to form a game engine — with the other major elements being worker placement and (to a lesser extent) auctions.  A Few Acres of Snow (2011), which combines wargaming and deckbuilding mechanics, may be the only other game that does this to the same extent. By using deckbuilding as a mechanic, Copycat is able to deviate quite a distance from the deckbuilding norm.

Amazing Integration of Deckbuilding & Worker Placement. One of the most impressive elements of Copycat is how well it integrates worker placement and deckbuilding into an entirely coherent whole. For example, at the start of a game, you tend to have four cards and three workers. Since the actions for the workers and the cards are very similar, this is a lot like have a hand of 7 cards — except 3 of the cards are in contention. If you prefer to look at the game from the worker placement side of things, the offices on the board are like public buildings and your cards are like private buildings that only you can use. Players will naturally combine the resources from the worker placement with the the resources from their card play on every turn — creating a very integrated whole.

Not Entirely Dependent Upon Your Deck. The integration of deckbuilding and worker placements provides for a deckbuilding game that’s a lot more forgiving than most. Players can actually build a deck that’s missing a key component (such as coins!), and make up for that with aggressive worker placement. I think a lot of deckbuilding games could benefit from figuring out how to better support failures of strategy like this.

Clean SImplicity. Because there’s a lot that’s going on in Copycat, its deckbuilder cards can be pretty simple. There are just a few different activities among all the cards, and there aren’t any cards with the complexity that you’d find in a typical deckbuilder. Some games like Arctic Scavengers (2009, 2013), 3012 (2012), and Penny Arcade (2011) have tried to go the same direction, and I haven’t always been convinced by the result, but it’s a lot more successful in Copycat because the deckbuilding is part of a whole.

Simple Cards Become Resources. Most of the simple cards are effectively resources, that provide either meeples, coins, or additional draws. This twists deckbuilding in an interesting direction, since it becomes about managing those resources rather than about hoping for special powers when cards are drawn.

Round-Based Play. The majority of deckbuilding games play continuously around the table. Copycat instead feature a more complex play order. First,  the game is split up into rounds. Second, each round is broken into three parts: a battle for initiative, worker placement, and purchases. This adds for a lot of variability, which lets the game running longer than I think a typical deckbuilder can support. It also allows for more thoughtful strategy, as players try to figure out when they’d like to go in each of the different phases.

An Orthogonal Use of Cards. Initiative is divvied out based on a simultaneous-bid auction, where each player reveals one card. Those cards’ initiative values are then used to determine who goes in what order. This provides for yet more interesting strategy, as players figure out which card to sacrifice to the initiative auction. Sometimes they may dump a bad card, even though it has a horrible initiative number, and sometimes they may play a great card because of its high initiative value.

I feel like much of what I’ve talked about thus far goes far beyond typical deckbuilding design, opening up entire new vistas of play to explore. However, Copycat also twists some of the more typical deckbuilding ideas just a little bit:

Random Cards, with a Twist. As in Ascension (2010), the cards that players purchase in Copycat are made available randomly. Unlike any other deckbuilding game that I’m aware of, these cards are stacked into sets, so that better cards come out as the game goes on. In addition, the cards are effectively sold through a Dutch auction: they’re a little more expensive to buy when they first appear, but that price comes down as cards ahead of them are purchased.

Victory Points are Continuously Earned. Most typical deckbuilding games give players points only at the end of the game, when they score what’s in their deck. Ascension gives players some points in-play and some based on their deck. Copycat goes the rest of the way and gives players all of their points through the play of cards over the course of the game — which introduces interesting questions about when to earn points, pretty much from turn one.

The Interesting

A Carefully Timed Game. Because of the way in which points are earned, and because of the fact that Copycat’s endgame can be suddenly triggered by a couple of different factors, players have to very carefully manage the timing of the game in Copycat. They have to figure out how fast the game is going and how quickly they should be earning points, in response.

The Bad

Overall, Copycat is a terrific game — one of my favorites in the deckbuilding field. However, like all games, it has some flaws …

Multiple Awkward States for Cards. During his turn, a player can have cards in four different states: in his hand; in his play area; in his clipboard; and in his discard pile. In any deckbuilding game, the difference between a play area and a discard pile is a little awkward for players. Copycat makes this worse by introducing the clipboard. The goal is to make sure that players can’t “copy” cards that they played for initiative, discarded, or already copied — but it’s awkward and confusing for new players. I wish something better had been developed.

SImple Simplicity. Though I lauded Copycat’s simplicity above, I also have some concerns that it ultimately could become too simple. The limited number of cards (and thus actions and resources) keeps the game from being as variable as the average deckbuilder. Thus, the question becomes whether its worker placement mechanics are enough to keep the game interesting. The answer is: I dunno. I’ve played it twice in three weeks and enjoyed it both times, but I’m not entirely certain about the strategic variation in the long-term.

Conclusion

Copycat is one of the best games to come out of the deckbuilding field. That’s not just because it innovates the field by a considerable amount, but also because it takes all of the exciting new ideas that were kicked off by Dominion (2008) and applies them more generally to the gaming field, producing a game with more depth and complexity than a straight-up deckbuilder can offer.

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