Sometimes… ok, most of the time… you won’t have a complete game. You’ll have a type of game, or a theme, or a mechanic. And sometimes with that mechanic, you’ll need some other mechanics to actually make a game.
This happened to a game designer friend of mine recently who had a group of crazy-good ideas about drafting mechanisms for card games (the process by which people acquire cards) but no idea what to do with what cards you’re actually collecting.
There’s a genre of game called “Set Collection.” In it, people are collecting cards in the hope of grouping them somehow to score. I.E. you’re trying to collect a set. The drafting mechanisms my friend proposed were all for a set collection game, so he asked a group of us to brainstorm some scoring mechanics for set collection games in the hope that one of his ideas and one of ours would click. Here’s what I came up with (and by came up with, I mean I looked at a bunch of games and see what they did.)
The first category are sets that do not have special scoring per suit, but are lumps of different types that score based on overall rules. Some examples should clear this up:
-In Coloretto, there are different colors of chameleons. The more you have of a particular color, the higher it scores… but if you get too many colors, the extras start to count against you. In this game, you are often forced to take cards that you do not want along with cards you do want.
-In Klunker (AKA Schaufenster) there are different colors of jewels. When you collect four of a kind of jewel it becomes points… but it is devalued if you are collecting other colors of jewels. (Except for the special cat cards, which are more rare but are never devalued.) In this game, you often forced to take cards you do not want along with cards you do want.
-In No Thanks!, there are numbers from 3-35, and they’re all negative points, but they can be less negative points if you assemble them into a run. Though every card is unique, they still all operate the same way. In this game, you will at some point be forced to take a card that is bad for you, and sometimes, you will be forced to take a card that is REALLY bad for you.
-In King’s Breakfast, you collect different kinds of foods, but must be careful to let some go untaken (for the King.) You are sometimes forced to take cards you don’t want, but you often get some power to decide what goes to the king in that case.
-In Ticket to Ride, there are different colors of trains. If you collect enough of a color, you can play multiples of that color to lay out track and score points which also helps towards your long term goals or to block other players. In this game, you are never forced to take any cards, and having cards is never bad for you, but you may not have access to the cards you want.
(There is also a distinction between a game whose set collecting drives the entire game, like Coloretto and Klunker, versus a game where set collecting is only a piece of a bigger game, like Ticket to Ride.)
Then there are games where the sets you collect have different properties to each other. In these, you are not, say, just trying to corner the market on red cards, but instead each color/suit of cards has its own properties that makes them different to score.
-In Tutankhamen, each item along your path has a different number that is both how many of them there are (which is the same as how easy it is to get them to score) and how many points they’re worth. The larger numbers are harder to collect but worth more points. In this game tiles are never bad for you to collect, except in opportunity cost of your turn (which is the case with most games.)
-In Traumfabrik, each tile is in the movie biz and has a specific role and also a point value. People are trying to fill their movies which each have different requirements but also make high scoring films. However, since it is a straight numbers bidding game, more valuable sets are more expensive. Some times it is bad to take tiles, but you are never forced to bid on a set.
-In RA, every tile has a different scoring rule, which gives each set of tiles you’re bidding on a different texture to how good it is. Some examples:
-Civilizations. Everybody wants to have at least 1, and they score extra for having different ones. Duplicates of the same one do nothing extra.
-Pharohs: You want to have the most, and you don’t want to have the least.
-Monuments. You want both a diverse number of monuments and duplicates of monuments.
-Gold. A flat 3 point score no matter what.
-Rivers. A point each, but only if you collect another kind of tile (the flood.)
While there are some “killing tiles”, any kind of tile in a set is never bad for you to take.
There are also some other mechanics that I won’t pin down to specific games:
-Whoever has the most of X commodity scores
-Whoever has the least of X commodity scores
-Sliding scale, the more of X the better
-a little of X is good, too much of X is bad, the point right before it becomes bad is the best score
-A little of X is bad, but collect enough of X and it’s good.
And many more. Set Collection is a big genre, especially in lighter card games. Even Monopoly and Settlers of Catan have set collection elements. But if the scoring mechanism and drafting mechanism are interesting enough, it’s easy to create a game filled with tension and interesting decisions.
What are your favorite set collection games?
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