Faction Wars
Faction Wars is a drafting card game I started creating awhile back. The core concept for the game was that the players would draft a deck they would use to battle other players for territory on a new and unknown world. It still in the early stages as only the initial prototype is completed. Below I'll link to a zip folder with some of the assets and documentation. The gameplay is broken down into a few stages.
Drafting - Players draft the cards, passing them around and only adding one card per pile to their hand. This is then repeated until the deck is exhausted.
Deck Building - Players build decks with the cards they drafted
Fighting - Players occupy locations and fight for their land to try and earn victory points.
Overall from play testing it seemed like people enjoyed it and had a fun time. Looking to the future, I need to finish the rest of the factions and clean up some of the card abilities. Then I need to get the cards actual art as I did not make any of art on the current cards.
Possibility Storm
A Choice or a Decision
This all started when a friend of mine wanted to work on a card game. It seemed like a good way to blow off some steam so we sat down and tried to come up with an idea. It wasn't until it hit me out of the blue that I came up with the idea. The game was all about taking different territories to gain power in a new and ancient land where several factions all awoke on. From there we built the core gameplay and worked off from there. We ended up starting with three factions but planned on making more as time went on. Each faction needed something to make them unique so we gave them all themes. The first three factions are as follows.
Feudal Japan - Fast and strong units with special abilities to move or attack where they aren't placed.
Medival Fantasy - Weaker units that specialized in underhanded tactics or just bending the rules of gameplay.
Sentient Monster - Powerful units with the ability to grow faster than the other factions.
This was so much fun to mess around with as I have always been into card games but I have never really tried to make one before. I learned a lot about system design and how to balance numbers. Before this project went dark for a year, we knew that the cards were unbalanced and we even ended up losing some in drive and filing issues. It was still an awesome experience to work with some close friends and learn more about balancing as a concept. I do plan on returning to this game and making it something much better though.
While working on Faction Wars, I spent a lot of time working on trying to make both interesting cards/mechanics and creating something with some sense of balance for each faction. To try and achieve this we came up with some standards for cards.
High power cards were to be limited in the deck. (Two max)
All cards should always be playable in any archetype.
Territories should be valuable to any faction not just their preferred one.
High powered cards should all have a combined Cost/Power/Health of around 13. (This was added later on but proved to help with balancing.)
During our first playtest, I remember a big accident. We ended up making some cards just way too strong. There were too many cards that I'd call "Unique" meaning they were always played and constantly used to mess with the game. The second iteration balanced out the amount of "vanilla" cards or cards with no abilities. Then it was just an iteration after iteration to try and make something we were proud of.