Category Archives: Deckbuilding Design

Deckbuilding Expansion: Ascension, Part Four: From Elements to Ancients

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Ascension Core GameAscension continues to be one of the most popular deckbuilders out there. So, following in the footsteps of my previous articles, A Deckbuilding Look at Ascension (#1), Deckbuilding Expansion: Ascension, Part One — From Chronicle to Heroes (#2-4), Deckbuilding Expansion: Ascension, Part Two — From Vigil to Champions (#5-8), and Deckbuilding Expansion: Ascension, Part Three: From Dreamscape to Shadows (#9-10),  I’m looking at sets 11 and 12, to see how they changed the game, for better or for worse, and how they ended a second era of Ascension, that had big ideas (almost) every time. Continue reading →

A Bagbuilding Look at The Quacks of Quedlinburg

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Ten years (and several months) after the release of Dominion (2008), I declare the deckbuilding era of eurogaming dead. Oh, Dominion and Ascension (2010) are still putting out expansions, and Pathfinder ACG (2013) just got a big new edition, but the biggest recent successes have been Star Realms (2014) and Clank! (2016), both several years gone now. They just aren’t making them like they used to.

With that said, I’m thrilled to see continued innovation in the subgenre of bagbuilding. I suspect these games are cheaper to make than classic deckbuilders because they don’t require the huge set of cards, and so they’re helping to keep the intriguing deckbuilding mechanism alive in a slightly different form. So in what I suspect will be one of my final articles in this long-running look at the rise and (now) fall of deckbuilding games, I wanted to take a look at one of the newer bagbuilders, The Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018) — which to my disappointment turned out to have nothing to do with ducks.

The Game

The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a bag of making potions. You start with a bag of explosive white ingredients, plus a little bit of green and orange. You make a potion by drawing those ingredients from the bag one at a time. You’re trying to make a potion with a high quantity of ingredients, but if you draw too many white ingredients, your potion will blow up, so it’s a game of pressing your luck, as you’re trying to get lots of stuff into your potion without drawing too much white.

Once you’re done, you get to earn victory points and buy new ingredients, based on how good your potion was (and whether it blew up). New ingredients not only help to water down those explosive ingredients in your bag, but they also can give special powers, either when the tile is drawn or at the end of the turn.

Using cards to define the tokens.

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A Deckbuilding Lite Look at Great Western Trail

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One of the most popular games of recent years is Great Western Trail (2016), an intricate resource-management and set-collection game … that also has a relatively minor deckbuilding component. But, as it turns out, that deckbuilding includes some pretty innovative aspects, and so is worth discussing as part of my overall series on deckbuilding mechanics.

ThreeFour Generations of Deckbuilding

I’ve typically classified deckbuilders as falling into three generations — or three degenerations if you prefer, as each moves further from the original precepts of Dominion (2008), now a decade old. These generations aren’t entirely separated by time, but instead by the maturity of the mechanic. Continue reading →

A Bagbuilding Look at Altiplano

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Deckbuilding seems to have slowed down in recent years, after being one of the dominant forces in the industry throughout much of the ’10s. But it’s nice to know that when we see a new game in the genre, it tends to be more original and innovative, as is the case with Reiner Stockhausen’s newest bagbuilding game, Altiplano (2017).

The Physicality of Bagbuilding

Each of the bagbuilding games that I’ve played has gotten me thinking about the genre because it’s simultaneously so close to deckbuilding, but so intriguing different. So I previously defined the subgenres derived from deckbuilding (while writing about Orléans) and talked about the things that bagbuilding does particularly well (while writing about Automobiles).

This time I was thinking more about the physicality of bagbuilding: how it tends to be built around small pieces, like the cubes in Automobiles or the discs in Orléans (and Altiplano Itself) by simple virtue of the fact that that’s what you can easily draw from a bag. Continue reading →

A Deckbuilding Look at Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour

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Deckbuilding has become an increasingly popular mechanic for co-op games, with newcomer Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour (2017) following on from the similarly witchy theming of Witches of the Revolution (2017) and of course adventure game co-ops like Aventuria Adventure Card Game (2016)  and the classic Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013).

The Game

Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour is a simple game of surviving to dawn: the players must run out the clock while avoiding the game’s potential loss conditions, like gaining too much corruption or losing too many cards from the main supply.

More specifically, what the players have to survive is demons. Each turn, each player may attract new fiends, depending on how much corruption they have and which “sigils” they have opened. They then get to buy new cards from the supply and play cards from their deck, hopefully killing demons in the process (or alternatively: helping their fellows). Afterward, any remaining demons attack. These attacks are what give players the most corruption and what removes cards from the supply, advancing it toward loss. Continue reading →

A Deckbuilding (And Adventure Game) Comparison of Aventuria

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Imagine a fantasy roleplaying game that was so popular that its sales at one time eclipsed those of industry leader Dungeons & Dragons (1974). Then, create a card game based on it that focuses on cooperative play and that allows long-term campaign gaming through a clever deckbuilding mechanism. That description could apply to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013), which I’ve discussed several times on this blog, but it could also apply to the Aventuria Adventure Card Game (2016)*, which is a very different beast.

* If you’re wondering about the roleplaying connection, the Aventuria ACG is based on The Dark Eye (1984), a German roleplaying game that sold 100,000 copies in its first year, after a licensed version of D&D failed to emerge in Germany. Continue reading →

A Deckbuilding Look at The Quest for El Dorado

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The Quest for El Dorado (2017) is exciting because it’s an entrant in the deckbuilding field by master designer Reiner Knizia. It’s also exciting because it’s one of the scant games that uses deckbuilding as an engine to drive play on a gameboard, with Trains (2012), Tyrants of the Underdark (2016), Automobiles (2016), and several wargames being among the few prior releases that did so to this same depth, and at this same level of quality.

The Game

The Quest for El Dorado (2017) is a racing game, and in fact it’s the game that encouraged me to write my current series of articles on racing games, in large part because it’s a pretty great one. The object of the game is to travel across several tiles to be the first to get to El Dorado. Each of those tiles is filled with hexes of a variety of terrain types, with the most important ones being green jungles, blue waters, and yellow villages. Players will actually get to choose their route across the tiles, strategically selecting between long but easy routes and short but difficult ones. Continue reading →

Deckbuilding Expansion: Ascension, Part Three: From Dreamscape to Shadows

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Ascension Core GameAscension is one of the prolific deckbuilders out there. In the past I’ve written about the first eight releases in Deckbuilding Expansions, Part One: From Chronicles to Heroes and Deckbuilding Expansions, Part Two: From Vigil to Champions. As I said at the time, I wanted to discuss how these expansions “influenced the Ascension game and deckbuilding in general”

Since my last article, in August of 2015, several new Ascension expansions have appeared, but these new releases represent a change in how they’re produced: they’re no longer arranged into paired blocks that work well together. In fact, they’re on longer even lightly linked as was the case with the seventh and eighth sets; instead each expansion now feature totally disparate mechanics As a player I’m not fond of these change, because some of the games no longer feel like they have enough cards. As a designer, however, I’m thrilled that it allows me to explore that many more mechanics.

Because of these changes, new articles in this series will be talking about individual sets, rather than coherent blocks. This article discusses sets nine and ten, both of which were pretty feature rich.
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A Deckbuilding Look at Witches of the Revolution

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Witches of the Revolution (2017) is the newest game to combine deckbuilding and cooperative play. Rune Age (2011) is the oldest game I know in this duo-genre, but it used the tack of taking an existing game and offering cooperative gameplay as a variant, and the results were somewhat lack-luster. We’ll have to see if Star Realms (2014) and Hero Realms (2016) do better, as they both have cooperative scenarios on the way. However, Aeon’s End (2016) offered a different methodology: a pure co-op build on the deckbuilding mechanic. Witches of the Revolution continues that trend.

The Game

In Witches of the Revolution the object is to resolve events before too many pile up, ending your game prematurely. You do so by playing cards, each of which has two or more icons on it. When you put together a large-enough set of icons, you resolve the event card. There’s an important second step: whenever you remove an event card, you also get to remove a matching chit from one of your four objectives. If you manage to finish up all four of your objectives before you’re killed by events, you win.

However, those cards are multi-purpose, and that’s where the deckbuilding comes in. Instead of using a card to help with events, you can instead use it to buy cards. These go into your draw pile and will help you on future turns.

Because I’m looking at the deckbuilding aspect of the game, I’m only going to note the co-op play as it interrelates with the deckbuilding; focusing on the co-op itself would be a whole different article.

So what does Witches’ deckbuilding do, that’s interesting or troublesome? Continue reading →

Return to Pathfinder Adventure Card Game II: Skull, Wrath, and Mask

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It’s three years later, and I’m still playing Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. With a total of 87 plays (including 39 of the original Rise of the Runelords game), it’s on the verge of surpassing Dominion as my most-played deckbuilder. During those three years, Paizo has also released three new adventure paths for PACG — essentially, three different games using the same core systems. So this week I’m going to look at each of these variants and see how each has changed the deckbuilder genre, for better or for worse — or alternatively how they changed the other major aspects of PACG’s gameplay, which fall into the cooperative gaming and adventure gaming genres. If you’d like to read my previous articles on PACG, take a look at A Deckbuilding Look at Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Return to Pathfinder Adventure Card Game — The Campaign. Continue reading →