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

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 Deckbuilding Lite Look at Great Western Trail

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 Model for Decision Making in Games, Part One: Action Selection

Two weeks ago I wrote an article defining worker placement in response to some rather loose use of the term. I thought I might get some disagreement on my definition, but instead I got disagreement on the use of the mechanic itself. Some people apparently hate worker placement because they feel that it restricts their choices and has made previously complex games simple. I disagree, because I think the comments reflected a somewhat superficial understanding of how decisions are actually made in games. Though it’s quite possible that some worker-placement games have fewer meaningful choices than some pre-worker-placement games, I don’t believe that it’s endemic in the category of play, and I’m certain that it’s not a requirement. That’s because worker placement only affects one phase of the decision making process — and not the one that leads to the most voluminous set of options. Hence, this article, the first of three. It’s not about worker placement specifically, but rather about the whole spectrum of decision making in games (and how worker placement fits into that).


Introduction to Decision Making

When you make a decision in a game, it comes in three parts: what you are doing; how you are doing it; and what the results are. The first two parts of that formula represent an ever-branching tree of options, while the last part involves the mechanics of the game system churning out the results.

Figure 1. The three parts of decision making.

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A Deckbuilding Look at Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour

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

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

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

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

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

A Bagbuilding Look at Orléans

Dominion (2008) kicked off a whole new genre of play: the deckbuilding games. But it’s also created a few spin-offs of its own, with Orléans (2014, 2015) being one of the more far-flung examples.


Styles of Building Play

Though Dominion is all about deckbuilding, a few variants of that core gameplay have appeared.

Deckbuilding. Dominion (2008) debuted the core idea of deckbuilding play. Players start with a deck of mediocre cards that allow them to undertake actions. Over the course of the game players add new, better cards to their deck and remove old, worse ones. Each turn, they’ll randomly draw some of those cards; hopefully they’ll be a coherent set that allows them to take great actions.

Dicebuilding. Quarriors (2011) was the first dicebuilding game. Here players instead start with a handful of dice and buy new ones to improve their dice pool over time. The randomness of the play is moved: where in a deckbuilding game, players draw random cards, in a dice building game, players instead roll random results. This somewhat constrains the randomness: where deckbuilding games tend to be binary (you get a result or not), dice building games tend to have more nuance (you get a result, but its level of effect varies). Dice building games are also theoretically simpler than deckbuilders, as you can’t fit complex effects on a dice face — but Quarriors fought against this limitation by linking dice to reference cards, which was a bit exhausting.

Of course Quarriers also involved a bag: you draw six dice from up to twelve in the bag each turn. But, it’s better to keep that aside for the moment, as the use of a bag defines the newest sort of *builder game … Continue reading

A Mini-Deckbuilding Look at Lord of the Rings Deck-Building Game

Lord of the Rings: Fellowship BoxOver the Christmas holiday I was fortunate to play a new-to-me deckbuilder, the Lord of the Rings Deck-Building Game (2013). It’s based on the Cerberus Deckbuilding system, which is the same game engine used by DC Comics Deck-Building Game (2012). In fact, it seems likely that the two games were developed in parallel, as DC Comics appeared in December 2012, and Lord of the Rings appeared just a few months later, in April 2013. As such, the games are pretty similar.

I already covered the core of the simple and light DC Comics game in a previous article, but Lord of the Rings still deserves a bit of discussion for how it updates and adjusts the Cerberus system. Continue reading

A Deckbuilding Look at Cthulhu Realms

Cthulhu Realms BoxThe brand-new Darwin Kastle deckbuilding game Cthulhu Realms is a new iteration of his Star Realms system, which means that it’s another classic deckbuilder with a focus on interpersonal combat. Despite its origin as an iteration of an existing design, it still offers new innovation to the field.

With its Lovecraftian basis, it’s also a great game for the Halloween season!

The Game

The gameplay of Cthulhu Realms (2015) follows closely on the design of its predecessor, Star Realms (2014). This means that the deckbuilding play is pretty basic: you play cards that give you money (conjuration points), then you use that money to buy cards from a row of randomly selected cards. The cards then go into your discard pile, for use on future turns. This also means that the other play focuses player conflict: you play cards that do damage to your opponents, with the ultimate goal of killing everyone else off (well, driving them insane; it is a Cthulhu game, after all).

However, the cards of Cthulhu Realms are also heavily interdependent. Many have powers that only activate when you play a card of a certain color or a card of a certain type. Others only activate when you force a discard of a card or trash (abjure) a card. The result is both increased tactical play and increased emphasis on the deckbuilding. Continue reading