Playtest Quest I: The Journey Begins
TCGss are unique class of game that blur the line between player and designer. If you’ve ever built or altered a deck: you are a game designer. And it ramps up from there. Playing a TCG is a gateway into making your own game. Plenty of people who play TCGs, try to make their own card game, but few succeed.
What Are Trading Card Games?
Tactical Card Games encompass a variety of formats, including:
- Home Trading Card Games (HTCGs): Examples like Chaos Galaxy and Shard TCG fall into this category.
- Self-Contained Games: These are complete in a single package, such as Radlands and Blue Moon.
- Living Card Games (LCGs): Games where your purchase predefined groups of cards like Arkham Horror: The Card Game and Earthborne Rangers.
- Collectible Booster Pack Models: Games like Magic: The Gathering and Lorcana
All these games have pieces that introduce new rules or exceptions, where “reading the card explains the card.”
The Challenges of Game Design
Game design is incredibly hard. To make a TCG you’ll find yourself doing graphic design, art, math, marketing and more. It’s easy to fail at one or more of these activities.
- You’ll spend way to much time designing mechanics in your head
- Your core design falls apart 5 minutes into a playtest where you made 100 cards
- An online forum trashes you for using AI art
You are going to need a plan. This guide is going to teach you how focus on what matters and get your game to the table.
The Process
It’s easy to get bogged down in game design tutorials & resources. It’s easy to tell yourself that watching youtube videos, making art in Midjourney and designing your card frame is game design.
Here are the only two things you really need: Goals & Design.
Goals help keep you focused. They help you filter out feedback that doesn’t matter. They force you to finish something.
Design is about making something for people. Games are not art. Art is all about the artist expressing themselves. Design has goals and an end user. Design is never perfect the first time. Like the scientific method we will:
- Make a hypothesis
- Test it
- Iterate
Resistance
This guide will be split up into individual sessions you can finish in one sitting.
Don’t start a session unless you know you can finish it.
If you are having a tough time finishing a task, just do the best you can. None of this is set in stone. The worst thing you can do is quit. Resist the urge to open up your browser for more “research” so you’ll be “ready.” That may feel like work, but it’s just a distraction that will keep you from making your game.
Use a sketchbook or keep a running digital document that you can easily refer back to during playtesting.
Let’s do this.
Goals & Focus
Session time: 1 Hour
It’s very easy to get off track when making a card game. Having goals helps you know what to to focus on. When something isn’t working in your game, you’ll want your fix to get you closer to your goals.
What are your goals?
Everyone has a reason for why they are making a game. Maybe you don’t like an aspect of your favorite CCG. You probably have an idea for a world and mechanics. It’s usually something like “I want it to be a dystopian world, and kind of like Magic.” That’s a good start, but let’s get more specific.
Here are some examples.
Market Based Goals: Fix mana screw. Make a game where resources reliably scale up.
Player Experience Based Goals: Make a game that feels like players are exploring a dungeon.
Other Goals: Make a playable game in a month. Get a job in the card gaming industry Kickstart a successful game that makes over 10k
Capture 2-3 design goals.
Assign numerical priorities to your goals. Changes to game mechanics often have a “ripple effect” and cascade throughout the system. Parts of the game will get better, but other parts will change completely. If you have a prioritized list of goals when this happens, you’ll know if it was the right change for your game.
Focus
Bottom Up or Top Down?
What is your focus for this game? Are you interested in the ruleset? Or are you a worldbuilder who is using the game to tell a story?
You probably have ideas for both, but it’s important to decide your priority for this project.
Top Down: Using a world or story to define the mechanics of your game.
Bottom Up: Focusing on the rules first, and having the story follow how the game plays
How experienced are you making games?
If you’ve been playing CCGs, then you’ve made it past the Beginner phase. Depending on your experience with game design, you’ll want to stay closer to established design patterns. This way, you can have a functional game that you can iterate on.
Intermediate. I have never made or reskinned a game. I’ve never playtested a game with strangers.
Advanced. I’ve made a card set for an existing game. I’ve designed and playtested prototypes with strangers.
Decide which one most describes yourself. So, now depending on your experience and focus, that will put your game in one of 4 quadrants.
If you are an intermediate designer who’s working bottom up, you’ll be making a Hack.
If you are an advanced designer working bottom up, you’ll make a Construction.
If you are an intermediate designer working top down, you will make a Mod.
And if you are an advanced designer working top down, you’ll create a Narrative
None of these ways are “better” than the other. There are plenty of successful games out there in each of these categories. Think of the video game industry. Do they reinvent the wheel with every new game? Most of the time with TCG design, I see people trying to make Constructions because card game design allows it. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Being “original” is overrated. You don’t want your game to die in the design phase before you can have people play it. A well executed Mod will be much more successful than a bad Construction.
At the end of the day, this choice just helps you determine what to build to move forward. It can change later if your goals change or a great idea hits you during playtesting.
Time Commitment
Here’s a different way to think about Intermediate & Advanced: Resources.
Advanced games are going to take more time, testing and cognitive load from your players.
- They’ll take more time, because less of the mechanics are tested and you’ll have to do a lot of iteration.
- They’ll take more cognitive load from your players, because they’ll have to learn new rules and mechanics that don’t match their mental model of how TCGs work.
More resources = More time = More resistance. It’ll be harder to test your game. It will be harder to finish your game. And it will be harder to achieve your goals.
Have Realistic Goals
This is a good time to review your goals from before. Do they work with the category that your game is in? Your first game isn’t going to displace “the Big 3” (Magic, Pokemon and Yugioh.) You need to be honest with yourself about what you can achieve. If you get a few strangers to play your game AND have fun, then you’ll have achieved more than most.
If you need to slightly alter your goals to be a bit more realistic, do it.
Congrats! You’ve finished the first session. I’ll email you next steps real soon! For now, take a break. Come back later and keep going.