To date, very few deckbuilding designers have returned for a follow-up try at the category. It was therefore really a pleasure to see a second deckbuilding design from Martin Wallace — one that feels both like an evolution of his A Few Acres of Snow and also like a new and innovative design.

The Game

A Study in Emerald (2013) is a big game that includes deckbuilding as one of several moving parts that together create an intriguing multi-faceted game design.

• It’s a team game as the Loyalists (Cthulhu lovers!) fight the Restorationists (Cthulhu haters!), where players are trying to support their team while winning individually.
• It’s an open-ended auction game, where players bid for cards with cubes, working to win great new goodies for their decks.
• It’s an action game, where players can choose from a menu of options: bidding on cards, claiming cards, retrieving bidding cubes, spending money, adjusting team-focused tracks, moving agents about a board, and assassinating (or protecting) Cthulhoid royalty.
• And, ultimately, it’s a deckbuilding game, where players build a deck of hard-won cards that might contain victory points or might give them the resources they need to excel at the numerous actions inof the game.

Though there are a lot of different options in A Study in Emerald, the deckbuilding still stays very core to the gameplay — perhaps even more so than in Wallace’s deckbuilding wargame, A Few Acres of Snow (2011).

The Good

A Terrific Way to Buy Cards. Cards are acquired by winning an auction (or if you prefer, winning a majority control), then using an action to grab the card. The entire system is an innovative and thoughtful way to acquire deckbuilding cards, because players have to decide what cards are worth, they have to think about how other players will value them, and they have to allocate actions to bid on and take those cards.

A Complex Ecosystem. The auctions of A Study in Emerald are part of a complex ecosystem that far exceeds the mechanical infrastructure of most deckbuilding games. Players have to manage actions (by choosing what to do), to manage cubes (by getting back used cubes and by acquiring new cubes), to manage cards (by figuring out ways to discard less useful cards), and to manage several other resources (including coins and team tracks). Some of this creates a real rhythm within the game (as you bid cubes, acquire cards, and retrieve cubes) and some of it creates tough choices (as you decide which options to take). Overall, the depth of play far exceeds simple card usage, and is something that more deckbuilding games could benefit from.

Reality-Based Cards. In A Few Acres of Snow, Wallace linked some of the cards to locations — so that you acquired a card if you won a location and you lost the card if your opponent took the location from you. Wallace uses the same idea in A Study in Emerald, but expands upon it. There are once more location cards, but there are also agent cards, where a card is related to a specific token moved around the board. If someone else takes the agent, you lose the card; while in many cases if you want to make use of an agent’s card, you have to have his token in the right location to do so. The result really cranks up the theme of A Study in Emerald and it also helps to integrate the board with the decks — something that’s very important for a deckbuilding game that seeks to go beyond simple deckbuilding play.

Multiple Use Cards. Many of the cards in A Study in Emerald are multi-use. They allow a player to place bidding cubes, or to take coins, or to move the team trackers — but only one at a time. This idea has been seen rarely in a few deckbuilding games like Arctic Scavengers (2009, 2013), but hasn’t been that widely used.

That’s a pity, because it’s an interesting mechanic that allows players to have more tactical options and simultaneously helps to keep decks from becoming too diffuse to use effectively.

More Influences from A Few Acres of Snow. Overall, A Study in Emerald has inherited quite a bit from A Few Acres of Snow, and it’s all for the good.

• Most of the cards have simple, repetitive powers, which makes it easier to build a  complex game that doesn’t focus entirely on deckbuilding. Copycat (2012) also used this methodology.
• Most of the cards are also unique. This improves the variability of the game, and also makes sure that those simple, repetitive powers don’t seem boring.
• There’s a heavy focus on hand management. You have to use a limited action to discard cards, which means that you really have to think about how to utilize all the cards in your hand. Simultaneously, because you can save cards from round to round, you can make longer term, more strategic plans, an element in deckbuilding games that was also used to good effect by Eminent Domain (2011) and Nightfall (2011), but not too much else — probably because that’s now how Dominion (2008) did it.

Great Teams! I think that A Study in Emerald’s teams would be innovative in any context: though you win individually, you lose if any member of your team has the lowest score. It’s a great argument for working together in a fully competitive game. With that said, I’m surprised that more deck builders haven’t experimented with teamplay of any sort, as I think it’s a way to really liven up games.

The Bad

Too Many Options. There is a stunningly large array of options in A Study in Emerald. I’m not even talking about the half-dozen action options. What I find troublesome are the 15 or so cards that you can choose to bid on at any time (or double that if you include the cities). I think it can be too much of a good thing, and it suggests that you need limits for how much is available for purchase. As is, some stuff gets ignored, and then suddenly someone remembers it’s there, and there’s a rush.

Not Enough Icons. A Study in Emerald makes good use of icons for the major card abilities (cubes, coins, team track modifiers). However, many cards also have textual powers, and these are easily lost when they’re spread across a board and when there are way too many of them. Many of these textual powers are repetitive (e.g., save or assassinate royalty), and it would have been easy to add icons to support the text; doing so would have improved the usability of the game, but sadly it wasn’t. I find this an ongoing problem with deckbuilding games, from Dominion onward. The category has never fully adopted the euro style of using good icons to back up text, and so games like Tanto Cuore (2009) with great icons have unfortunately been the exception.

Games with lots of repetitive card-based powers need icons!

Conclusion

So, I should admit: (1) I’m a fan of Martin Wallace’s games; (2) I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman, who created the background for this game; and (3) I’m a fan of Lovecraftian things. With that said, I think A Study in Emerald is a terrific deckbuilder. It offers a lot of depth because there’s so much to do — not just deckbuilding. It also integrates all of its variant mechanisms into a coherent whole that doesn’t get stuck on the “rules” of deckbuilding that originated with the design of Dominion (2008).

A Study in Emerald isn’t as innovative as A Few Acres of Snow because it repeats many of the same tropes … but it’s still innovative in the overall deckbuilding field, and the ideas that it repeats from Wallace’s previous game are good ones that more deckbuilders should consider.

Overall, it’s a fun game and one full of deckbuilding ideas that other deckbuilding designers should consider.

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