Co-op Case Study: The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

Recently I’ve been writing about Eric Vogel’s Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game. I wrote about how it encourages players to even out resources here, then I wrote over on the Meeples Together blog about how its solo play differs from true cooperative play. When my co-author and I at Meeples Together realized that we hadn’t yet published the Meeples Together case study on the game, which is actually one of the oldest in our archive of bonus case studies, we decided we’d better do so. Here it is!

This article was originally published on the Meeples Together blog.


The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game by Eric B. Vogel

Publisher: Evil Hat Productions (2017)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Adventure(ish), Card Management, Resource Management

Overview

The players take on the roles of Chicago wizard Harry Dresden and his friends. Players each hold a very limited hand of cards that they must play to jointly kill as many Foes and solve as many Cases as they can — but they also have to manage their Fate pool, which decreases with the play of every card. Continue reading

Co-Op Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & The Dresden Files Co-Op Card Game

Dresden Files CoverEric B. Vogel is the designer of multiple games, including two deckbuilding designs, Zeppelin Attack! (2014) and Don’t Turn Your Back (2015), that he’s discussed in previous interviews. This time around, he’s created his first cooperative game, based on the popular Dresden Files series of novel — a game that’s now available on Kickstarter.

I talked with Eric about the mechanics of designing a cooperative game in an email interview conducted over the course of April 2016.


Shannon Appelcline: Thanks for agreeing to talk about your new game design, Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game — or DFCO to use the abbreviation favored by your publisher, Evil Hat. It’s your first cooperative game. What made you decide to go with a cooperative design?

Eric B. Vogel: It was the publisher, Evil Hat Productions, who made the stipulation that they wanted it to be a cooperative game. That was not initially something I was happy about. I had done some development work on a cooperative game previously, but I had never designed one up to that point. So I started the project without any clear ideas for cooperative design. It took a few months of blind fumbling before I finally came up  with the core mechanic of DFCO. Continue reading

A Deckbuilding Look at Don’t Turn Your Back

Don't Turn Your BackI haven’t talked about a new deckbuilder all year. As I’ve previously written, I think that’s because the genre has peaked. So I was happy to get my Kickstarted copy of Don’t Turn Your Back (2015), by Eric B. Vogel, because it gives me a chance to return to a topic that has often filled this blog in recent years.

I talked with Eric about the game in February, but now that it’s out I can talk more about my own experience with the game — about how it expands the field and where it has troubles. I should note that Eric is a friend of mine, and I playtested the game several times in 2014, so take what I write with the appropriate amount of salt!


The Game

Don’t Turn Your Back is a deckbuilding/worker-placement game. You buy cards and filter cards like you’d expect, making the best deck that you can. However, the game’s use of those cards is unusual. Instead of just playing them and taking their effects, you instead place cards on specific areas of a game board, each of which has limited spaces. Doing so produces specific results: Continue reading

Deckbuilding Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & Don’t Turn Your Back

Don't Turn Your BackLast year, I talked with my friend Eric B. Vogel about his first published deckbuilder design, Zeppelin Attack! Now that he’s got his second deckbuilding (and first worker placement!) design, Don’t Turn Your Back, on Kickstarter, I couldn’t resist talking to him again, to see how his ideas about deckbuilding have evolved in the last year.


Shannon Appelcline: Don’t Turn Your Back is your second deckbuilding game, following Zeppelin Attack! Why did you return to the genre?

Eric B. Vogel: For me it didn’t feel like a return to the genre so much. That’s because when you’re playing, the worker placement element feels most prominent. You really only shuffle every turn or two, buy one or two cards a turn, but you place 4-7 workers every turn. You also have the area control elements. I would say this game is 1/2 worker placement, 1/4 deckbuilding, and 1/4 area control. So to me, I felt more like I was creating my first worker placement game, instead of my second deck-building game.

Continue reading

A Deckbuilding Look at Zeppelin Attack!

Zeppelin Attack!Zeppelin Attack!, by Eric Vogel, is a deckbuilding game that I have a personal connection to, as I gave playtesting comments on it from its earliest days. It’s also published by Evil Hat, who is currently running my Kickstarter for Designers & Dragons. So, take what I say here with a grain of salt — but I do find it an interesting and innovative deckbuilding design.

The Game

Zeppelin Attack! is a game of fighting zeppelins. You build a fleet out of your flagship and other zeppelins, and then you use those zeppelins to launch attacks and deploy operatives. The card-based direct conflict of zeppelin-to-zeppelin attacks makes Zeppelin Attack! a very different sort of game from the multiplayer solitaire that’s the basis of much of the deckbuilding genre. You even get points when you cause another zeppelin to “retreat” (die in flames!), making the conflict an important element of the game.

As you’d expect, there’s card buying too. Currency in the form of “Fate Cards” can be used to buy new cards from piles of Attack cards, Defense cards, Operatives cards, Attack Zeppelins, and Operations Zeppelins. The big catch is that the Fate Cards go away when you use them! This isn’t the infinitely renewing currency of most deckbuilders, but instead a uniquely expendable resource that must then be reacquired. Continue reading

Deckbuilding Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & Zeppelin Attack!

Zeppelin Attack!I’ve been writing about deckbuilding games here for a while, so I’m delighted that my friend, Eric Vogel, has a deckbuilding game of his own coming out from Evil Hat. It’s called Zeppelin Attack! and it’s a new Spirit of the Century-themed game. I played it while it was under development, and liked it quite a bit, so I asked Eric to talk to me about the new game and how it advances the deckbuilding form. —SA, 1/28/14


Shannon Appelcline: Thanks for talking about Zeppelin Attack! What led you to design a Deckbuilding game?

Eric B. Vogel: When Dominion first came out, my friends and I played it to death. We played it till we were sick of it. I thought it was incredibly clever, but it did not directly inspire me to make that kind of game. Later, when I played Thunderstone and then later Ascension, and it was clear that deckbuilding was going to be a genre and not just a game or two, I started to really have a desire to design one myself. Also, with the design of Armorica [a card management game —SA], I started to wrap my head around some of the technical issues involved in designing complex card games. A deckbuilding game seemed more like something within my grasp. So probably around 2010 I started really playing with ideas for a deckbuilding game.

Continue reading