Popular Mechanics

[Navaren]

So where do "card tracks" fall on your randomness spectuen. Its still a deck but multiple cards on the table gives some player choice in how and when to deal with things.

[SALLstice]

"card tracks"

Assuming you mean what I think you mean, yeah, that's definitely a good way to give the players some control over how RUGRATs will affect the game.
Depending on how the game functions, it's just giving the players futuresight and give them time to prepare ahead of time, knowing what is coming next. So like lets say that you have a game with a card track and you have to deal with the leftmost card, then all the other cards shift down. Figure a game set up this way has to have the cards themselves be be pretty difficult to deal with because if there are no surprises then the difficulty of the game has to stem from the difficulty of collecting and/or distributing the appropriate resources or getting the player's meeples where they need to be or whatever.

One thing I kinda dislike (but realize it's not the big a deal) about a lot of cooperative games is when players try to math out if/how they can win or lose. Personally, I care more about the gaming experience more than the actual outcome of the game. I think having a card track would give players too much ability to do that. Like imagine because whatever game has a card track, you know 3 turns ahead of time what your turn is going to have to be for optimal play. The good thing about having a fully hidden RUGRAT is it does a fantastic job of requiring players to think on their feet. You flip over whatever card on your turn and you have an immediate threat to deal with and you might not be prepared. I know I said this is overall bad design, but it's still not all bad.

Okay cool. But what if players are allowed to deal with the cards on the track in any order? This is much more freeform or whatever because it gives more options which is almost always a better thing. I think it's probably not a big difference but it will let players maximize the effectiveness of their turn. Like if there's a monster card track and it's full of 1 Hit Point goblins and one Giant with 10 Hit Points and I have a Death Ray which does 10 damage, I have a pretty clear target. If I'm allowed to attack any monster on the track, great for me. If I have to attack the leftmost goblin because it's in the first slot, that's less good for me because that's massive overkill and that means I'm probably going to be way less prepared when the giant does show up.

So all things considered having a card track is probably mathematically not super different. It just gives players additional time to deal with the threats. It's playing on easy mode.

[Navaren]

Hmmm makes sense. We recently bought Clank! Its a board exploration game AND a deck builder but it uses a random card track to control both the RUGRAT of the game (dragon attack icons on certain cards) and ALSO what you can purchase for your deck. Its a really interesting tweak on both of those concepts using 1 single deck. Do I buy 3 cheap cards from the track to increase my deck's options and have 3 chances for the dragon to attack or do I buy one powerful card but limit my options each turn.

It just feels BETTER to have a mutable and ultimately game affecting card pool vs a pure deck builder like Dominion. Sometimes Dominion feels like a solved game. There are literally optimal builds for every turn stage and expansion because all cards are knows from the jump.

[SALLstice]

Dominion.

Dominion still has the randomness of shuffling your deck each time around but yeah it definitely is very un-random overall. It's the grandfather of deckbuilders so I can't talk too bad about it. But yeah, there are better, more robust deckbuilders out there now.

I really like Thunderstone Advance with the Epic variant from the Dice Tower guys. It's like shuffling EVERY card together and dealing them out in a dozen or so piles. So you never know what cards will pop up. Really adds a new flavor to the game.

[Navaren]

Looking forward to your cedar vs white pine battle royal next week.

[SALLstice]

Laminate wood panelling is like Imperial Guard. Cheap, efficient and plentiful.

[Navaren]

I have decided what my dream game would be. A worker placement game that uses a deck building mechanic with a shared draw deck a la Clank. Then your deck generates your workers and resoruces for a given turn

[SALLstice]

I have decided what my dream game would be.

So actually the game we're designing this week is something I've already worked on for a while, with some modifications to fit the Popular Mechanics theme better. But it's similar-ish to what you're saying.

Also, one of the weird things I've noticed is I've sort of painted myself into a corner with this series. Like, for example, when I was designing Meltdown, I had a few more ideas I wanted to throw in, but the point of the article is to design a game that shows off the mechanic in question, not design the best possible game. So, I might at some point try to make one of my "dream games", but idk lol

[Navaren]

interesting. Maybe once you have 2 or 3 more Pop Mechanics sets under the proverbial belt you could do your own personal "bottle episode" and design a game integrating multiple mechanics.

[SALLstice]

Probably!