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Comment by piyh

2 years ago

Card games are generally played with 10-20 cards once you hit your mid/endgames. I can't think of a system where you'd have mechanical benefit of all those being epaper before you should go full digital. Having a few choice mechanics tied to them is the way to go.

What does epaper get you that paper doesn't? A microprocessor and persistent state. RFID cards on a board game might be a good middle state for most cards. Scan them as played. Build gamestate or dynamics to be populated to epaper.

Epaper would be good for storyline branches, timeline progressions, evolving characters. Make them traveling characters being owned by different players. Differentiate them from becoming a static scoreboard that could be represented on a single tablet.

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piyh

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jonahss  2 years ago

Yeah, I've been thinking evolving characters. Also more complex algorithms that you can't do on paper or in your head (and can't inspect).

When watching TV shows that have cool card games, like Yu-Gi-Oh, it seems like the game doesn't have rules, but instead the kids reason about the characters by looking at the pictures. Weird unexpected stuff happens all the time, I was thinking about how to implement that in the real world.

For example, imagine a vampire card that has its eyes closed. You try using it, but it doesn't do anything. But, you notice that when you play at night the eyes are open and now it's a powerful vampire!

So you can do time-based mechanics, I could add location-based mechanics. You can also make the cards do different things based on what other cards are in play.

  • Izkata  2 years ago

    Dwarf Fortress, the card game?

    > When watching TV shows that have cool card games, like Yu-Gi-Oh, it seems like the game doesn't have rules, but instead the kids reason about the characters by looking at the pictures.

    This is basically how it worked writing-wise in the original Duel Monsters series (though the characters acted like these were mostly all known effects/interactions), after that came GX where they toned down the creativity and mostly used real effects, then in Zexal and afterwards I think they stuck almost entirely to real effects with occasional exceptions.

  • bitwize  2 years ago

    The card game in Yu-Gi-Oh had "rules as the plot demands", at least during the seasons with Yugi and Yami-Yugi.

    When they released the real-world Dueling Monsters card game, they tried to keep the rules consistent with the manga/series, but changed them in places to make a more playable game. Ex.: there is an upper limit to the damage you can do with the Berserker Soul ability.

  • trevyn  2 years ago

    There's a huge genre of computer-only card games now, many of which implement these kind of "card evolution" mechanics.

    If you're into this sort of thing, I highly recommend checking out Inscryption, it has some really fun twists on this idea.

  • prox  2 years ago

    Perhaps you should reach out to Prozd (suong won) if you got something solid to promote, or even discuss, he is a huge board game enthusiast.

  • steve_mcdougall  2 years ago

    The thing about that is, now instead of just printing cards and some rules, interested parties now need to program at least a large portion of the game logic to make this work which increases their cost a large amount. (Not to mention that most trading card companies would not have the in-house capabilities to do that.) The thing that makes trading cards so popular for kids is that they are cheap. When I was at school the Kaiba starter deck for Yu-Gi-Oh was $30 and I got 50 cards, a mat for the game area, instructions and some art. A 2" e-ink display is like $10-15 wholesale which means for the same price (even adjusted for inflation) I'd receive maybe two cards at cost price. That would not be enough to keep 11 year old me entertained and as a parent I would not buy things that can be easily broken for my kids.

    For what it's worth, the actual Yu-Gi-Oh trading card games has rules and the anime uses a very loose interpretation of those rules.

    • jonahss  2 years ago

      Yeah, I know. I've been trying to design it in a way to push costs down the whole time, but it's still a far cry from paper. My idea was to target $80 for a "starter kit", making it the equivalent purchase of a video game.

      For interested parties needing to program, I could probably partner with them and do the development myself (or have employees do it). The real hard part is designing a game, the software to run it will be pretty basic to start with, once I write the general framework for taking turns, etc.

      2 replies →

  • masklinn  2 years ago

    All of those are existing TCG mechanics, though easier and more flexible in digital-only TCG (hearthstone, snap).

    For instance in MTG day/night cycles were featured in the original werewolves (I want to say innistrad), location mechanics can be continuous effects on lands or ETBs, likewise for reaction to other cards in play.

  • sdenton4  2 years ago

    Some of the most effective app-asssisted games I've played involved hidden knowledge. Alchemists and Mansions of Madness in particular.