Lost in Lualand

Pokémon Card Game vs. Magic the Gathering: A Cursory Comparison

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 21:26:27 GMT

so, i played a couple rounds of the Pokémon TCG with the boy a while back.

in particular, the 2018 World Championship decks were on sale right next to the cash register at Kinokuniya, and in general i'd rather dive straight into the deep end of "intense competitive play" rather than fuck around with "starter decks", so i bought a couple and we both plunged in without any previous knowledge of the game.

and from a game design point of view, the contrast with Magic the Gathering is fascinating.

(i'll attempt to write about this in a way that makes sense even if you're not familiar with Magic, but uh, no promises.)

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anyway, tl;dr "card advantage" is not a concept that applies equally to all trading card games! which is obvious in hindsight, but was really fun to experience in such a direct way.

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programming games! (and: writing games, art games, etc)

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 09:40:25 GMT

so the other day at work my team played this really cute programming game!

( cute programming game yay )

anyway, it got me thinking. programming, visual art, writing, music: all are art forms or crafts of some sort. and i like my games to have a bit of craft in them. it lets you practice; it lets you delight the other players in unexpected ways; it's fun because art is fun.

unfortunately, most games are not particularly craft-driven in and of themselves—board games mostly lie on an axis between "randomness" and "skill/strategy," most video games are based on mastery of the game's particular combat system, and so on. and, to be fair, it's super-hard to design engaging experiences that are just based on "everyone does an artsy thing," since everyone's skill levels vary. (for instance, as a classically-trained pianist, i'm really weak on improv/freeform type stuff, and thus could only handle the basics of jazz sessions, which often consist of a lot of this sort of play. similarly, you have to be at least an okay programmer to do the programming game i described, and you'll have far more fun with it if you've done a bit of mischievous programming before.)

but. i want to collect a list of such craft/art-based games. because they are fun, and because maybe they will help me generate ideas for more ~~and then i can badger all my friends into playing with me yaaaay~~.

i can name a few off the top of my head:

( example games! )

i am actually quite curious if anyone else knows of such games! if so, please share them :)

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Game Design in Gungnir and Elsewhere

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 09:29:59 GMT

So I started playing Gungnir, at amielleon and intaglionyx's urging, and it got me thinking about game design in general—in particular, it reminded me of this column by the head designer of Magic: the Gathering.

I think the column's reasonably comprehensible even for those without a M:tG background, but the main points I want to talk about here are the different types of game complexity he describes:

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As an aside: having played with Gungnir's beat/team attack system, I'm now quite excited to see what FE13's team attack system will be like—when I first saw it, my knee-jerk reaction was "that looks gimmicky and silly," but the way Gungnir's implemented it is really quite fun, and I'm hoping FE13 can accomplish something similar.

As another aside, that columnist has written a lot about game design, and though most of it's focused on M:tG, he'll occasionally talk about design issues in the general case, and they're well worth reading—I could probably dig up some specific columns as recommended reading, if you happen to be interested.

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