I've recently picked up the design for my sexy card game again. I've been stuck on it for a long time, and something dislodged in my brain recently that made me think I could actually pull this off. I was playing a pretty average adult game called Bareback Reincarnation, and I realized that it makes some pretty egregious design mistakes. Here's why that game doesn't work and how it helped me.
Bareback Reincarnation is ambitious in neither its scope nor its game design, and I respect the hell out of it for that. Storywise, none of it fucking matters. You died, and you're reincarnated into a fantasy world, blah blah. The gameplay then. There's an inner gameplay loop, which we'll call the Card Battles, and a progression loop, which we'll call Deck Building. Finally, there's a surrounding narrative loop that progresses the story.
Card Battles
Your first action is decided immediately after choosing a Lady to do Card Combat with. Either you will be Defending or Attacking on your turn. When you Defend, you fill three slots with one of three card types: Red, Green, or Blue. (I'm sure they have names in the game but it also doesn't fucking matter.) Your opponent then plays three cards from her hand that are also Red, Green, or Blue. These cards are then played in sequence. If the color of the Attack card matches the color of the Defend card, the attack is nullified.
After a Defense turn, the roles switch, and you will Attack while she Defends, or vice versa. But your opponent's hand is secret. How do you know what attacks will work against her? Well, the game just straight-up gives you a hint. At the top of the screen, two cards will glow in Red, Green, or Blue, giving you an idea about two of the cards she will play. Crucially, you don't know the color of the third card, and you don't know in what order she will play them. If you pay attention, this gives you a more-than-random chance to score a hit.
Deck Building
Before you can go into the Card Battles, you need to build a deck. The requirement is that every deck must contain exactly fifteen cards, but the color doesn't matter. You can purchase new cards with the money you've earned from battles and upgrade them by merging multiple cards of the same type together into a new higher-quality card.
I like this a lot. It's easy to understand and a very straightforward way to implement a progression loop. My first thought was: I need to find a way to steal this for my own game.
What doesn't work
Okay, I lied before when I said that the color of the cards doesn't matter. It matters a lot, actually. Red cards are damage dealers, Green cards recover health and gain energy, and Blue cards do low damage that increases with your energy.
The Green cards are a ridiculously bad idea because recovering health means prolonging the game. You reach a hard limit of five turns when you run out of cards to play. This is good. I ran into this limit three times before beating the very first level in the game. This is really bad.
The problem with recovering health is that your attacks can miss. You can have turns where you do zero damage, gain zero energy, and recover zero health because all your cards were rebuffed by your opponent. They can then recover health in their own turn, while doing damage to you, and now you have one less turn to claw your way back to chipping away their healthbar.
Either of these mechanics would have been fine, but not both. Allowing health recovery without cards being blocked means your opponent loses an opportunity to do damage. That's a good trade-off! And not allowing health recovery while allowing blocking means a bit of randomness to how turns will play out. That's what you want out of a card battler!
The energy system is another frustrating design wrinkle. The idea is that you play cards that raise your energy and follow that up with a card that does more damage than normal. That's great, except the "raise energy" card can be blocked, and now your follow-up attacks are spoiled. The whole blocking mechanic feels bad in practice. You can't really play your hand strategically since you're always fighting against random chance. I don't see a good way out of this.
How this helped
Honestly, playing this game made me realize I was overthinking things. It showed me I should remove the cards that recover health, or lower Arousal in my game design. All these cards do is prolong the game and frustrate the player. I also removed the cards that change your partner's Mood, as they always felt like a bad choice when you could be doing damage (raising Arousal) instead. I then added a mechanic where your partner's mood changes predictably every three cards played. And this feels great to play now!
My advice then, if you want to become a better designer, is to play more "bad" games. Their problems are often so surface-level that they are easy to analyze, and yet I still had a good time with the game overall.