arborelia

@arborelia

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Everything got better when I became a green-haired 2D girl. I do fun and unusual things with video games and pinball.

cohost inspired me to do more. Thank you

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arborelia @arborelia11/27/2023, 5:52 AM

The genre of “deckbuilder” used to mean “Dominion and its clones”, games where cards do some combination of letting you get better cards, letting you play more cards, or letting you win.

I like Dominion, but I think it’s okay that game design has moved beyond trying to clone Dominion and usually failing.

But when did “deckbuilder” start to refer only to games where the cards are about combat?

There have to be games you can make with a progressively changing deck of cards that aren’t Dominion or Slay the Spire.

edit: now that I've posted this and checked the tags, I have to find out about Blackjack for Perverts, a game that is not actually called that

edit 2: shit. it's still about combat

#deckbuilder #deckbuilders #game design

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in reply to @arborelia's post:

Remi Erin Autor the remeranAuthor @remeranAuthor11/27/2023, 7:05 AM

Well there's Balatro, I guess.

Pixievolt No. 1 @PixievoltNo111/27/2023, 7:43 AM

fwiw Yamafuda 2nd Station is the literal thing you asked for in that it is thematically about cute girls climbing mountains, not fighting. tho gameplay-wise, Hike and Care are pretty thinly-veiled pseudonyms for Attack and Defense. i agree that a deckbuilder that escaped both the kingdom-building and combat framings completely would be interesting.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1727520/Yamafuda_2nd_station/

@Fachewachewa11/27/2023, 10:59 AM

Balatro is similar to D&DG but isn't about combat, it's poker and you're trying to get to a certain score in a few turns!

There's also the upcoming WAGON which is deckbuilder Stacklands, kinda?

Tyler Robertson @tylerrhys11/27/2023, 11:52 AM

I’ve been playing a lot of Luck Be a Landlord lately, and I think it counts as a deckbuilder? There aren’t cards necessarily but it is about selecting symbols that will work together in interesting ways, and besides an end-of-level health bar there isn’t any combat to my knowledge.

Talen Lee @TalenLee11/27/2023, 2:45 PM

Can you possibly unpack what you mean, like, where you're looking for for this? Because I went to boardgamegeek to see if there was this recent rash of combat-only deckbuilders and I feel like you must not be talking about physical card games?

arborelia @arborelia11/27/2023, 2:59 PM

okay, that is true, I've been conflating tabletop games with computer games.

Someone asked me recently if I liked "deckbuilders", which I said I did, and then the conversation turned to a genre of computer games that I have had no interest in since I burned out on Slay the Spire. It seems to me that the genre of computer games where where you fight a sequence of things, and your reward for finishing a battle is to upgrade your deck of actions that you use to fight things, is now the more common meaning of "deckbuilder".

The lines are blurred for me because (a) I believe Dominion is best played on a computer, despite the several years in the digital wilderness where that was hilariously untrue, and (b) I recently played Paperback Adventures, a tabletop game that emulates Slay the Spire in the same way Paperback emulates Dominion.

Talen Lee @TalenLee11/27/2023, 3:04 PM

Ahah, I see, okay! You can see how I was so confused!

I don't know spoot nothing about Slay the Spire, which kinda stunned a friend of mine.

I did think of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist as a deck builder, if you're actually courting suggestions.

arborelia @arborelia11/27/2023, 3:37 PM

oh! I had no idea that's what the game was like. That seems really cool

coten @coten11/27/2023, 6:44 PM

i don't engage with this genre much at all, but i did catch a glimpse of a deckbuilder game called "Potionomics," where you play as a potion seller talking one-on-one with customers.
the card deck represents different sales pitches and conversational techniques, and the goal is to finalize sales after haggling up a potion's price as much as possible.
seems very reminescent of "Recettear," including talking with the adventurers around town to befriend them and hire them to retrieve materials for different potions. (no dungeon-crawling, simply send folks away on a task and wait for them to return with the loot)

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