i am just so proud of this card game i made with @plum almost a year ago. literally the perfect combination of probability, deduction, risk management, and bluffing that gives me this very specific feeling of it being incredibly tight, and just chasing that design high since
gonna ramble about another playing card game ive been working on, slay the spire, and stacking mechanics on few mechanical devices now :)
since then i've also had this idea for a game i've been tentatively calling SHOOT! (thank u @lake-scum) that's played with 3+ players where you're all bounty hunters sitting around a table drawing cards to build hands that can survive a shootout. it's a game about the tension of trying to build points in your hand as fast as you can, without waiting took long and letting someone else maybe get the jump on you. i've play tested it with a bunch of pals and made some changes since and it feels like it might be getting close to that same feeling of tightness that demon's dozen has, but i'll have to wait until i'm around more than 1 other person again to find out
i've been playing a lot of slay the spire recently too and i know sts is every designers' dream to make something like it but ive been bouncing ideas around in my head and for some reason i keep feeling like i get hung up on feeling like the things i'd like to explore with a game like that quickly degrades that feeling of tightness that i'm looking for. like it feels like the designer brain high i got from demon's dozen came from that really special and tricky ratio of low complexity to high depth, and when i think of the mechanics that feel like that in slay the spire and the things i've been trying to think up, they just feel solid on their own but not necessarily like.... cohesive or interconnected with each other? like the strength and poison systems are two of my favourite scaling systems in the game and they just sorta don't touch each other in any way. which is perfectly fine in slay the spire cause they're never both viable options at the same time due to those cards being split between characters.
i think maybe the thing i'm looking for is something where the systems are all sorta connected a little more strongly which i think is easy to let get away from me when i think about independent mechanics. a lot of the depth from demon's dozen comes from the fact that there is only 1 mechanical device you interact with which are the cards. all of the rules revolve around the relationship between each card's position, visibility/known status, and value, which i feel like makes it a lot simpler? like with so few moving parts (card up or down, which of 12 positions is it in) the balancing of complexity feels like how much you're allowed to manipulate them? im absolutely still a baby when it comes to card game design so i dont know shit about theory but the vibe i get when thinking about hitting that ratio of low complexity his depth feels like it comes from how many mechanics are tied to mechanical devices?
there was a strategy tactics/card game i was building a few years back that was played on a grid where each tile was 1 of 4 magic types, and decks were made of cards that had a suit/magic type and a value (1-12), and those cards were either in your hand or placed on the ground. my goal was to tie as much to those card attributes as possible, so we had:
- the magic type determined the passive map effect the card had when placed on the ground
- there were 2 variations on the passive effect, one if the card's value was high (>6) or low (<=6)
- the card's AOE shape on the ground was determined by whether or not the card's value was even or odd
- each possible value (1-12) had a unique effect that would effect which card would win when fought against another
- the magic type of the ground tile the fight happened on effects what happens when a fight is won/lost
- the magic type of the ground also has a passive effect when you move your player in it
- there were also bonuses given to a single card based on the character you chose (36 characters, each with one of the RPS magic types and a 1-12 value)
and it didn't work!!! i don't think because i had so much stacked on such few mechanical devices, but i think too many of them were muddled together and there weren't enough incentives to lean into any of these mechanics too hard. designing this kinda shit is hard!!
anyways thanks for reading this far, if anyone's got any cool resources for card/board game design that tackles this kinda stuff i'd love to see it cause i dont know shit and am just sorta poking around at things without any kinda hard direction trying to come up with stuff for vides games 
