What makes the perfect CCG?

[House of Mustard]

Fell and I have been talking about this lately, and I wanted to know what you guys think.  What makes or breaks a CCG?

Just to start the conversation, I think that any kind of 'board' is a pain in the neck (like Star Trek's space line or the path the fellowship follows in LotR).  The most important thing to me in a CCG is that you can just shuffle your deck and play - you don't need this card or that card to be pulled out first.

Any thoughts?

[Fellfrosch]

I have a lot, but you've heard them all in our recent discussions. I'm interested to hear what other people say, and then I'll repeat myself.

[Lord_of_Me]

hmmm... boards can be involved in many CCG's, i mean you don't need a board or playmat for magic but using one does tidy it up a little

[Fellfrosch]

He's talking about a game board in the more traditional sense, as a sort of map you move pieces around on. In First Edition Star Trek, for example, you had to dedicate half your deck (and half of your game time) to setting up a "spaceline" of missions for your ships to fly around on, and loading each mission with dilemmas to stop the other guy.

One big mistake that a lot of CCG companies make (Decipher in particular) is to limit the connections between cards. Imagine the cards in a big web, with a strand running from each card to every other card it can interact with. The more such connections there are, the greater the synergy in the card set and the more possibilities you have to combine the cards in clever new ways. This is one of the reasons that WotC started consolidating creature type: with a ton of creatures in a few creature types, you get more cards that can interact with each other. For example, let's look at the Magic card Cloudreach Cavalry: it's a 1/1 that gains +2/+2 and flying when you control a bird. You can use that card with any bird whatsoever. If it was limited to vultures or falcons or something, it would be a much less interesting card.

As I said, Decipher is one of the big perpetrators in this area. In some cases they do a pretty good job--a pilot can fly any ship in the game, though they become more powerful if flying their own ship. In other cases it just gets kind of silly. In the Theed Palace set they focused on battle droids and gungans, and most of their support cards are very limited. The Trade Federation dropship helps you pull battle droids from your deck; this is very true to the storyline, but wouldn't it be more interesting if it allowed you to pull any droid? The gungan energy shield only works if you have a Fambaa in play (that's the big lizardy thing that carried the shield), but wouldn't it be more interesting if any riding beast or vehicle could carry the shield? In some cases it gets even worse, with one card that can only interacts with one or two very specific cards, as named right on the card itself. Imagine playing a game of Magic and playing Living Wish, but instead of searching out any creature it can only find Force of Nature? Sure, it would be nice to search out a Force of Nature, but what if you want something else? Wider options allow for more creative deck designs.

The obvious difference here is story. CCGs that focus around story (such as all of Decipher's games) want to make it easy to play that story; in many ways this is a good thing. By doing so, however, you sacrifice a lot of the customizability that attracts us to CCGs in the first place.

Man, I'm long winded. I'm very interested in this topic, however, and I'd like to spark some discussion. What do you guys think?

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

It's slightly off subject, but some time back I wrote a review of The Gregory Horror Show. I have no idea if they continue to produce it, but it was a manically fun idea. The "collectible" aspect were playing pieces. Why I bring it up was that it had a board. ANd uh... really that's all.

I know that Card Captors drove me insane when I playtested it, mostly because it sucked, but it sucked at least in part because it required this freakish layout.

On the other hand, The SUrvivor CCG (i know, I know) also requires a certain amount of specific layout (more than magic, but not so much as Star Wars or Card Captors) and it's actually the best CCG that Upperdeck makes/made. The branding is crappy, but the game was pretty fun. I'll review them soon, I guess.

[Fellfrosch]

Speaking of Star Wars, I think they they were able to do the "game board" idea pretty well, in keeping with the spirit of a card game. Each player starts with only one site in play, and the rest are all shuffled into your deck. If you need more sites in play, you have to draw them and play them just like any other card. I like this balance because it keeps set-up time to a minimum and forces you to consider sites as a deckbuilding issue instead of just a game board.

Would it be possible to use a similar system that doesn't require you to start with a location? A true "shuffle and play" game that uses sites? You'd need a lot of sites, and you'd probably need some other way of doing things that don't revolve around sites, so that you wouldn't waste your early turns waiting to draw one.

[House of Mustard]

I heartily agree with you Ehlers about the card types.  One thing I really dislike about Star Wars is that the expansions all greatly change the play of the game: if you play the Senate card, you have to win the Senate way, etc.  Two players can't just sit down with whatever deck they have and play.  You have to agree "We're going to play Senate", and then organize your deck to do so.

[Fellfrosch]

I completely disagree. A senate deck can play against any kind of deck you want; it will have some big advantages (it's better at politics than any other deck) and some big disadvanages (it's worse at almost everything non-political), but that's what we call balance. That's the beauty of the game: there is a simple win condition (deplete the opponent's deck) and hundreds of ways of going about them.