Sorry this one’s late fam, but happy belated MECHANIC MONDAY
Today I want to talk about something that’s poked its nose into my thoughts every once in a while - a distant great niece of the very hot mechanic, I Cut You Choose. In ICYC, one player divides up a lot, and the other player(s?) selects which lot to take. It encourages the Cut player to balance what they want with what their opponent wants, and keeps a game tight throughout. You can tinker with actions, lot manipulation, hidden resources, poison pills. It’s a fertile family of mechanics.
Now let’s take that, flip it over, move it North, and make it weird.
What happens if we take the part where an opponent has agency over your options, and blow that up big? What if you and your opponents exchanged collections (card collections, say, because I’m basic afffff), and made each other’s decks? Or, if that’s too radical, you each build your deck, but instead of shuffling, you order the cards in one another’s decks?
Worst-Case Ontario
In GREEM, you construct a 40-card deck from all the cards available to you. Prior to the match starting, you exchange decks with your opponent. Arrange the order of the cards as you wish, and return the deck to them face-down, and they will do the same with your deck. Draw your starting hand, determine starting player, and begin the match.
This episode introduces GREEM, which will be the name for any example game for when I have a mechanic that’s not actually in any of my designs. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just GREEM. Anyway, what intrigues me about this mechanic is that it does a couple of things at once.
1) It encourages very utilitarian deck-building. You can’t count on situational combos, you need to plan for every card somehow being as far apart as possible from the card that maximizes its potential.
2) It removes randomness, but not uncertainty. You know what your deck is, and you can try and second-guess your opponent’s deck-stacking strategy, but you still don’t know which card you’re going to draw, but you can’t praise or curse Lady Luck for it.
3) Depending on how good your memory is, you can use your knowledge of the way you stacked your opponent’s deck to plan your own strategy.
A couple of things to note, though: This rules out shuffle-your-deck mechanics, massively inflates the advantage of scrying, and you can’t really do this for a game like M:tG where the resources are on separate cards, as one’s opponent could simply bury all the mana or mana-equivalent on the bottom. But you could field-test this on other existing CCGs like Keyforge, Magi-Nation, etc. This mechanic is also somewhat comparable to hate-drafting, and you could dip into this, drafting one another's decks instead of building them. You can also soften this by having both players have to play with the same "bad" loaded deck - I'm reminded of, I think, a shatranj variant, where each player's pawn row was like normal, but for all the non-King pieces, players alternated choosing what piece would be used, and then both players would have to use it.
This week’s MM is gonna be short in addition to late, as I’ve done a lot of other writing this week and it’s for a project I need to get back to. But I hope you’ve enjoyed this fun little deviation from all that is right and good and just in the eyes of God and Game Design. Ok bye!
Today I want to talk about something that’s poked its nose into my thoughts every once in a while - a distant great niece of the very hot mechanic, I Cut You Choose. In ICYC, one player divides up a lot, and the other player(s?) selects which lot to take. It encourages the Cut player to balance what they want with what their opponent wants, and keeps a game tight throughout. You can tinker with actions, lot manipulation, hidden resources, poison pills. It’s a fertile family of mechanics.
Now let’s take that, flip it over, move it North, and make it weird.
What happens if we take the part where an opponent has agency over your options, and blow that up big? What if you and your opponents exchanged collections (card collections, say, because I’m basic afffff), and made each other’s decks? Or, if that’s too radical, you each build your deck, but instead of shuffling, you order the cards in one another’s decks?
Worst-Case Ontario
In GREEM, you construct a 40-card deck from all the cards available to you. Prior to the match starting, you exchange decks with your opponent. Arrange the order of the cards as you wish, and return the deck to them face-down, and they will do the same with your deck. Draw your starting hand, determine starting player, and begin the match.
This episode introduces GREEM, which will be the name for any example game for when I have a mechanic that’s not actually in any of my designs. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just GREEM. Anyway, what intrigues me about this mechanic is that it does a couple of things at once.
1) It encourages very utilitarian deck-building. You can’t count on situational combos, you need to plan for every card somehow being as far apart as possible from the card that maximizes its potential.
2) It removes randomness, but not uncertainty. You know what your deck is, and you can try and second-guess your opponent’s deck-stacking strategy, but you still don’t know which card you’re going to draw, but you can’t praise or curse Lady Luck for it.
3) Depending on how good your memory is, you can use your knowledge of the way you stacked your opponent’s deck to plan your own strategy.
A couple of things to note, though: This rules out shuffle-your-deck mechanics, massively inflates the advantage of scrying, and you can’t really do this for a game like M:tG where the resources are on separate cards, as one’s opponent could simply bury all the mana or mana-equivalent on the bottom. But you could field-test this on other existing CCGs like Keyforge, Magi-Nation, etc. This mechanic is also somewhat comparable to hate-drafting, and you could dip into this, drafting one another's decks instead of building them. You can also soften this by having both players have to play with the same "bad" loaded deck - I'm reminded of, I think, a shatranj variant, where each player's pawn row was like normal, but for all the non-King pieces, players alternated choosing what piece would be used, and then both players would have to use it.
This week’s MM is gonna be short in addition to late, as I’ve done a lot of other writing this week and it’s for a project I need to get back to. But I hope you’ve enjoyed this fun little deviation from all that is right and good and just in the eyes of God and Game Design. Ok bye!
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