Combat in Games 2: Cards vs Dice

In my previous musings about combat in games, I talked about how uncertainty in combat is a good thing, but so is having control. That is, the outcome of an attack shouldn't be a complete certainty, but at the same time the players should feel like their decisions really affected the outcome.

In designing Pack of Heroes, I naturally thought I would be using dice for combat resolution. Dice are great at bringing uncertainty into a game, but control - not so much. I tried a whole bunch of ways of using dice that mitigated their natural randomness: rolling heaps of dice, being able to affect results after rolling, etc, etc. But I finally came to the conclusion that no matter what I did, a random number generated in an instant would never give me the decision points I wanted to be in Pack of Heroes.

When I finally made my peace with axing the dice, I of course had to come up with some replacement mechanic for managing combat. Enter: cards. Yes cards! You may have heard of them! They are that other classic age-old randomiser in the game designer's toolkit.

Cards. Yes, cards.

Now, since the German design renaissance of the 90s, there have been many games that essentially use cards as a randomiser where perhaps dice may have once been. A classic example is the Spiel des Jahres winning Niagara. If the game had been designed in the 70s, I am pretty sure you would move your boats by rolling a six-sided die. But instead, each player has movement tiles numbered 1-6 in their hand. The player can choose one to play to move their boat that many spaces, but must play each of them before they can take all 6 back into their hand again. So it's kind of like having a perfectly weighted 6-sided die and getting to control which number comes up when. This gives the players plenty of control, but they still need to play the low numbers sometime. Ideas like this one popped into my head, and I started to consider how a set of cards could be used to trigger attacks and blocks in my game.

And so, after plenty of scribbling in notebooks and play-testing... I give you:

THE WALKER-HARDING ACTION DECK SYSTEM (TM). 

Okay, okay, it's not as ground-breaking as the name suggests, but how cool would it be to invent something that one day might be called a SYSTEM by someone!?

Here's the basic idea. Each player has a deck of nine cards called energy cards. Each card is one of three colours, and there are three cards of each icon. Each power that your heroes can do requires spending one or more of your energy cards of a specific type. For example, punching with one hero might cost 1 red energy, while defending with another might cost 1 blue. On your turn you can either spend energy to use a power, or draw more energy into your hand.

This is a really simple way of triggering actions in combat, but I found it brings a whole lot to the game. Most importantly, your combat abilities are always constant and known. You can choose when and how to attack. However, the timing of when you can pull them off is kind of uncertain to you, and a little more uncertain to your opponent.

There is lots more to say about this design choice, but I better stop for now. In my next post, I'll talk through a few rounds of combat and show exactly how these energy cards work!