Week 10

The game Devil's Hand is a card game that is themed around the devil as the players attempt to win his favor by getting three sixes in their hand. There are number cards one through six, which don’t do anything throughout the game. The gameplay consists of shedding number cards in order to end up with three of the six available six cards in the deck in order to win. Players do this by using action cards. Action cards instruct the player to perform an action, such as looking at another player's hand, discarding number cards from your hand to get new ones, or searching through the deck to draw new cards. The more powerful a card, the fewer of them are in a deck. Each player takes turns playing action cards and trying to locate at least three six cards, while also trying to keep other players from finding the six cards. 

One of the issues we had while designing our game was making all the cards do something, and all the cards need to have equal value. According to Richard Garfield in The Design Evolution of Magic: The Gathering - the first designs, “You can't have any bad cards--people wouldn't play with them.” What would be the point of playing a bad card when I have a good card? If a card has no advantages in play, why is it in the game, other than to be filler? Now, Devil’s Hand is not a trading card game, so you don’t have the issue of people simply buying all the best cards so they can always win. Everyone playing uses the same deck and has an equal opportunity of drawing any of the cards. One way I think we could remedy this is to use tokens, where some non-six number cards can let the player earn tokens (like by matching the numbers or having consecutive numbers), and then the player could spend tokens to use the action cards. The more powerful the action card, the more tokens it would cost to play it. 

Another problem was making the game interesting and varied, but not too complicated. Later in his book in the section - Binding the Unbounded, Garfield said “Players wouldn't want to enter a game where they were thousands of cards behind.” I think this can be remedied by making sure what exactly the card can do is written clearly and concisely on the card. Having enough action cards to make the game fun while not overly complex. 

Another thing we were discussing was how to make every card uniform in size and shape. In his book The "Playing Card Platform" from Analog Game Studies Vol. 1 section Ordinal, Nathan Atlice said, “Since cards are planar and uniform, they can be grouped into sets, counted, sorted, ranked, indexed, and ordered.” Taping paper onto a deck of cards would make the cards uneven and difficult to shuffle. Using only paper would not leave the cards with enough structural integrity. Our group decided on index cards to write and draw on for our game.