The only way to do good design work is to think about design, and, to quote Disco Elysium:
CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] —
“We all have our different mediums. His is written.”
Sometimes thinking about something needs to be writing about something. Since I cannot write about design things I work on, I can write about design things I do for fun (read: that are my godforsaken curses as my special interests). I will quote this post with writing about mostly games, specifically board games, more specifically TCG/CCGs, and you can read along if you like.
Part 1: The Cautious Praise
Marvel Snap has earned a spot on my (very tightly managed) phone home screen and I want to describe what it is and the ways it works with you and your time, because I’m liking it a ton.
Marvel Snap is a new digital card game. While the copyright is assigned to Marvel, it is developed by Second Dinner, whose Team page is a cavalcade of ex-Blizzard (specifically Hearthstone) and ex-Wizards of the Coast names. When news reached me that a team like this was developing a game, I had my reservations; Hearthstone, bless its heart, for the intense amount of innovation it injected into the scene and all the trope-making as the grandaddy of modern digital CCGs, never quite managed to ameliorate the fact that it is just Magic, without: Magic: the Gathering’s bones stripped of so much that doesn’t feel fun with it (but sometimes also stripping bits that do feel fun alongside).
And you know what’s the most boring thing you can do to a world where Magic has defined the entire genre? Making more Magic.
This time, however, they kind of did not. Marvel Snap is its own beast in a number of intensely interesting ways. The cutting approach continued, but this time the cuts went so deep that the game as is bears little in the way of resemblance to anything else, other than perhaps passingly to the three-lane play of late Artifact or the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars Trading Card Game1.
Let me describe the game to you, in only as much you need to know to play it:
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Marvel Snap is a digital card game distributed as an iOS, Android and Windows application (via Steam).
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In Snap, you have a digital collection of cards which represent Marvel characters. Unlike other TCGs, there is only one card type. Cards have a cost stat, a strength stat, and usually up to one ability. You build a singleton deck with 10 of these cards.
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When the game begins, there is a field of three secret Locations. Players draw three cards.
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Each turn, players’ energy resets to the number of turns that have passed. (1 for turn 1, 2 for turn 2 and so on.) They draw a card, then simultaneously choose which cards to play from their hand, spending their cost in energy to play them freely at the three locations. When both have chosen, they reveal where the cards were played and reveal them one by one, and the game shows a running total of the strength on each side of each location — and who has the most.
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One thing that happens in parallel with this is that at the beginning of each turn, one location’s text is revealed — the leftmost on turn 1, the center one on turn 2 and the last one on turn 3. Locations are drawn at random and each may have an effect that deeply changes the game.
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The game lasts exactly 6 turns. At the end of the last turn, the player with the most strength on their side of a location has conquered it, and a player that conquers two locations out of three wins the game.
That’s it. This is a horrifyingly compact TCG ruleset, even when you add in the few complications I have elided — though the trick is of course that this is a digital game and most of this is administered by the app on your behalf. An intense amount of work has been done to reduce your cognitive load so much that mechanical learning is removed from the upfront cost; instead, every time you see a new card, you get a cool animation and it tells you what’s about to happen.
Learning becomes exploration. Complexity does not have to be brought to the forefront — instead it can be learned as you go. In fact, you won't even encounter it in the traditional setup of trial-and-error (which can turn you off the game when it is unclear what to try or frustrating when you err a lot), but by the purely positive process of Trying Shit ™. There are ways to play the game that are more optimal than others, and concepts like value, synergy and tempo still apply2, but the variance of the game is high enough that a single action can only screw you up so much. Going for it often just means a less successful game, not a completely ruined one. You can just do the chaos move and see what happens!
In fact, a thing I didn’t notice until a while into the game is that when you start playing you do not get paired at all with humans — you get to play against purposefully poor bots that are made to look more or less like regular users. This means that the trial-and-error part of the loop is completely removed for at least your first few casual days of play, and all the feel-bad this could otherwise have: it's just sparring that makes you feel like you Get It.
A lot of this relies on the software doing its magic. This is a digital card game, which means that it can do fairly things that are impossible in person — I loved reading about how requests for a mulligan rule were entirely silenced by just moving Quicksilver to the starter deck, who has an ability that says ‘You always draw this in your opening hand’. Randomness, triggers coming from the deck and drawing a card only at a certain turn and not before are all fair game; the ability to do things like these fairly allows the game to have a measure of draw smoothing, selection and tutoring without having to implement these mechanics in the game at all.
And all of this built expressely so that each game takes only five or so minutes. Every choice impactful, few choices truly game-ruining. Jam a game or fifteen, and the challenge is always on-par with your capabilities — the full card collection in the game is segmented into ‘pools’ and the server only matches you with people in your same pool, meaning that you only ever play against comparable decks.
This extends even to the quest design for the omnipresent daily quests/season pass setup. It’s easy to get in a situation where you keep playing your starter deck, farming progression, and then end up playing humans and start losing. But two of the quests you get as soon as you start facing human give you rewards for winning a game while having played respectively two different heroes, Spectrum and Odin. Spectrum3 is a 6-cost card that boosts the power to all cards that have an ‘Ongoing’ ability; Odin causes all the ‘On Reveal’ abilities to occur again. The starter deck has neither, but your starting pool by that point has enough Ongoings and On Reveals to make decks that maximize their values — and in so doing, you are then gently pushed to:
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Make a new deck (and thus become familiar with the deck editor);
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Learn that a fundamental mechanic in the game is setting up smaller plays, then capping it off with a late-game payoff that provides synergistic value;
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In so learning, also learn to spot what your opponent is doing in early turns, thus starting to predict what the actual final state will be and react consequently (for instance, if you spot a lot of ‘On Reveal’ cards early on, you can predict an Odin may be played soon, and thus figure out how the second trigger will change the field on the very last turn and move to put strength where you may be behind!);
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Eventually, the game gives you multiple payoffs for a specific deck. For example, you eventually unlock Onslaught, a card whose ability is to make all ‘Ongoing’ effects apply twice. Will a deck that’s playing a lot of Ongoing tribal eventually cap it off with a Spectrum, or an Onslaught? How does it change the final strength? If you’re making this deck, which one do you play — and do you include both, perhaps, at the cost of possibly making one of your draws a dead card (a big deal since you will draw 9 of your 10 cards)?
This game is the Smooth Brain Experience ™ of collectible card games. It has sanded down every rough edge so that you can rarely stub your toe on the twin ghosts of card game bad feels, “This game is bullshit and cannot be won” and “I cannot believe I was so stupid to lose it all”. And yet it still affords depth and rewards thoughtful action. It basically aces the Iron Laws with flying colors, which is an impressive feat that I have not seen replicated in paper yet.
All of this is just mechanical — it doesn't even include the titular mechanic, snapping, which is basically raising the stakes, Poker-like, and thus playing another layer of the game with your opponent — once a player snaps, there's a short time window in which your opponent can retreat and only lose half of their standing. All the mind games you can imagine are in fact available to you, despite the game having no voice or text chat.
This design kind of rules, y’all.
It is a pity that its monetization sucks. :(
(Part 2: 'The Anticapitalist Contempt' — coming when I’m less sleepy.)
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In the course of looking up what the official name was, I found out that there is a fan-driven Independent Development Committee for this game. It really looks like most beloved games from the 2000s that died were picked up by enterprising fan groups, which warms my heart — especially given the anticapitalist bit below.
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Despite the protestations of Ben Brode, who leads design on the game, you can absolutely miss out on value and position, usually specifically in one location, in a way that looks a lot like a tempo loss in MtG. Unlike MtG, you can recover from this pretty trivially, either by splitting your efforts so that you add power to multiple locations or by choosing which locations to fight for and which locations to abandon. I grew up with the Pokémon TCG, and so risk management is a mechanic I grok a lot more than position and tempo management, which is contributing to making this game a welcome respite in between me puzzling over hard-to-parse MtG reps for the VML.
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That’s Monica Rambeau, aka Photon, aka Captain Marvel. She rocks.