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Greetings,

Another growing trend I am seeing in Game Design is the roll of cards randomly drawn from a deck. Now, I know these existed long before in historical games for Initiative order, but they have also been growing in popularity as a way to determine outcomes/chance in the game and completing outcomes. I have seen cards to impact the game outcomes in the following games:

1. Malifaux- Determine action outcomes. Draw from a deck.
2. Jugula- Determine action outcomes and play from a hand of cards with different moves/results
3. Longstreet- The cards activate units and give different modifiers that you can play on yourself/opponents during the game. Again, you use a hand of cards.
4. Muskets and Tomahawks- The cards are activation cards, but may allow some actions like re-loading
5. Force-on-Force- When a 1 is rolled completing an action a Fog-Of-War card is drawn from a deck. A random event has occurred.

Let's discuss some of the advantages/disadvantages of replacing dice with cards. What games use this system or use a hybrid card/dice system? How and why? is it effective?

In my opinion, I have yet to see a game system that satisfy me with card driven combat, cards have been used for randomization and events as well as strategy and objectives, but for combat I have yet to see a satisfactory result, most systems seem to be better fit for a duel type system.

I would add to the list of games including some form of card system Relik Knights, Myth and warzone resurrection.

I think you're under-selling some of the interesting ways these games use cards. Think of what cards can do. For example there's a card expansion for Settlers of Catan that uses a cards to both create a pseudo-random distribution of what would have been the dice results (plus one standard deviation), and bonuses to level out the 'rich-get-richer' effects in Settlers of Catan.

Here's a link to the Ludology podcast on cards in games: House of Cards

I steer clear of games wit fiddly card draw mechanics. I just don't care for it. I'd rather roll on a table.

I like decks of cards in game designs. You can get alot of special rules and a variety of effects in a game for little added complexity.

For example, the various flight path game designs (X-wing, Star Trek Attack Wing, Wings of War) all have damage deck mechanics which work extremely well. When you inflict damage you deal a number of damage cards equal to the hits to the ship card. If it is a normal hit, it remains face down. For a critical hit, it is dealt face up where a there are a multitude of special effects that can be applied. In essense, the damage cards serve as the damage markers. Clean, effective, quick. No looking up critical hit tables or using special tokens. There are a number of skills and abilities that can interact with the damage deck in interesting way also.

Drawing from a deck of cards can do things that rolling on a table can't. Firstly, if you have a hand of cards, you're assembling options - in games where they're "command" cards or similar, it can represent the skill of the general, for example.

Secondly, drawing from a card deck means the probabilities change over time.

Thirdly, you can use cards to add unforseen options that the players have no way of foreseeing. If you're rolling on a table, you always know the entire possible event space. If, on the other hand, you have a deck of event cards drawn from a larger pool (say the full event deck is 60 cards, and at the start of each game you randomly deal a deck of 20 for that game), you add an extra layer of obscurement.

Finally, it makes it easier to tweak things depending on the armies, by adding or subtracting cards - by letting the players choose, by adding cards depending on what models they use or based on environmental conditions.

Adding a deck of cards because it's the cool thing to do probably won't work, but they have their place.

As an example, consider the Command and Colours games, including Memoir '44. Those games split the battlefield up into Left, Centre and Right zones. Each player draws a hand of cards from a deck of command cards, and uses those to activate units (for example, "move one unit on the Right", move three units in the centre", etc, plus some special actions). That way, you don't have complete control over your army, but you should have a range of options available to you. In addition, the rules allow you to discard cards to draw new ones, so you can try to get less-useful cards out your hand, at the risk of drawing the "advance the time counter" cards more often.

One possible problem with cards is that as the deck is depleted, the selection of cards and therefore game results still available becomes more restricted. Unlike with dice, which roll randomly every time.

For example, if there are a limited number of "firing" cards in the deck, if one player gets hold of all of them he knows the other player cannot shoot at him. (Made up example, but situations like this can arise in games like Up Front.)

That said, there are various advantages of cards over dice. One is that you can include a lot of different game factors and options on a single card, with explanations.

Another is that cards, unlike dice rolls, can be held over to "save up" for making a special move. This cross-references with the ability to give different sides different hand sizes and discard/pickup rules, to reflect national characteristics. For example, again in Up Front, the Russians can only hold a hand of four, compared to five for Germans, but unlike the Germans, the Russians can discard their entire hand for a new one every turn. The Germans are only allowed to discard up to two cards a turn (if I remember it correctly.) This means that while the Russians are more limited in their ability to save up for a really good combo, they can dump crappy hands immediately in the hope of getting something better.

Cards can also be used as playing pieces, which again we see in Up Front, where you "play" terrain cards on to the table to allow your men to move into cover.

Of course, building this much functionality into a deck of cards takes a lot of skill and is expensive, which probably helps explain the relatively few games that use cards as a central mechanism.

That's why the details of how cards are used really matters. Malifaux, for example, builds some neat 'brakes' into how the cards are used. I played a game called Combat Cards a while back which was entirely driven by cards in that each player had a thick deck of cards, which could be used for about four different things. What the game hinged on, however, was a card that allowed a "Counter-Battery" action with either flyers or artillery. Then you bombed your opponent's artillery out of the game, and proceeded to carpet bomb your opponent's army out of the game using artillery. The concept seemed sound, but the distribution and balance of the cards really wasn't.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Of course, building this much functionality into a deck of cards takes a lot of skill and is expensive, which probably helps explain the relatively few games that use cards as a central mechanism.

I can only agree with this, tried a few times using cards in functionality of a game system, never was satisfied with it, it usually lacked something.

The advantage of a card deck is that you can create consistency thereby reducing the amount of randomness that happens. Whether that is a bad thing or a good thing is subjective. I believe some games do require a certain set of unbalance to properly function. The advantage of a card deck is that the numbers or cards you need will eventually come up as you go through the deck. For example if you wanted to draw numbers 9+ the consistency you will do so in a deck cards as you peel cards off the deck, it will happen. In theory you could roll a D10 50 times and 9+ would never show up.

Dice have a stigma and perception around them because honestly no one likes to lose. When people lose something it doesn't like to because it is the fault of the player, even schools today teach children that when they make a mistake it isn't truly their fault. As players we blame the losses on dice rolls. If I would have rolled what I need, I would have won. Even in the TCG world of Magic, they blame "Mana Screw/Flood" on just not drawing the card. Unfortunately the truth is if you encounter that, it tends to be usually because the deck was poorly designed or the player didn't understand the mechanics and know what to mulligan for. Most people don't keep track of the 50 times they won, but they'll remember the 2 times they lost and the blame goes to bad rolling or bad draw usually.

It really depends on the system. It would be interesting to see a system that utilizes dice, combined with a card mechanic to help make dice rolling more consistency but still provide that bit of edge in a conflict.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Drawing from a deck of cards can do things that rolling on a table can't. Firstly, if you have a hand of cards, you're assembling options - in games where they're "command" cards or similar, it can represent the skill of the general, for example.

Secondly, drawing from a card deck means the probabilities change over time.

Thirdly, you can use cards to add unforseen options that the players have no way of foreseeing. If you're rolling on a table, you always know the entire possible event space. If, on the other hand, you have a deck of event cards drawn from a larger pool (say the full event deck is 60 cards, and at the start of each game you randomly deal a deck of 20 for that game), you add an extra layer of obscurement.

Finally, it makes it easier to tweak things depending on the armies, by adding or subtracting cards - by letting the players choose, by adding cards depending on what models they use or based on environmental conditions.

Adding a deck of cards because it's the cool thing to do probably won't work, but they have their place.

Thank you. I found this post really useful. I had never really considered your third point. Excellent.

I also, like the post above it from Holden88 where they talk about the Flight Path damage deck. I liked that mechanic when I played those games, but I don't like the CCG/Clix style of collecting the cards to play in the first place. I.e. Get certain cards with upgrades from Tie Fighter, and certain cards with upgrades from the X-wing. It put too heavy of an influence on the Strategic (list-building) than the Tactical (Gameplay) for my taste and was too nblatant of a buying "nudge" for me.

However, a deck of cards could lead to potnetial ways for additional monetization, which if you want to make money on your games is somethign to consider.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
One possible problem with cards is that as the deck is depleted, the selection of cards and therefore game results still available becomes more restricted. Unlike with dice, which roll randomly every time.

That's not necessarily a problem, just a difference. A decent game designer will take that into account - either by using the changing probabilities to their advantage, or by including "discard your hand and reshuffle" effects. Or by making sure that the distribution of cards and other rules don't allow for such things. Having said that, it's not unreasonable in historical games to get a total failure of C&C like that - the challenge is then how to get out of that, even if that's just by conducting a fighting withdrawal and extricating as many of your troops as you can.

Then again, if you have the one-per-deck "your general falls down a hole" card, you know that your opponent doesn't have it, and you can thus play accordingly, perhaps being more reckless than you would otherwise be. In that way, different commanders having differing numbers of command cards can be used to demonstrate a particular general's personality.

Another idea; plenty of games use cards for special actions and as random number generators. The old Deadlands CCG put low numbers of cards with powerful effects, so when you built your deck, you had to include a good number of "poor" cards because they were the ones which contributed the high numbers required to get the actions on the "good" cards to work! Alternatively, the Battlestar Galactica boardgame put high numbers on cards with good effects, so you had to decide whether to use the card for its effect or for the value.

Malifaux is an interesting game; at the core, you use an ordinary deck of cards instead of dice to generate random numbers. But then you also have a hand of cards, so you have an opportunity to affect the randomness to your advantage (even if you end up with hand of 2s and 3s, you can still improve your odds by simply not playing any of them, making the average value of the rest of the deck higher). Then, you have a limited number of opportunities to draw a second card to replace the first. Effectively, the game makes luck an expendable resource, both within a turn (your hand of cards) and across the whole game (your soulstones allowing you to draw a new card). Interesting, and quite thematic too. A pity the profusion of fiddly special abilities ruins it all.

If you've not done so, have a look at Malifaux, any of the Command and Colours games (my favourite is Ancients) and a friend of mine used to rave about Combat Commander (A ww2 small-unit game). I've never played it, but he used to go on at length about the elegant card-driven gameplay, so there's probably something there.

Some games use card draws as a timer; either by having a number of "advance the time clock now" cards or by using the depletion of the deck as a victory condition for one side. FFG's Doom, Descent and Imperial Assault all do this in different ways; in Doom, killing a Marine or running through the Alien Event card deck gave the Alien player a VP; six VPs meant the Alien player won. In Descent 1st edition, players started with a number of tokens depending on the scenario - usually four or 5. Running through the deck removed some, as did killing heroes. Exploring the dungeon added some back, so it discouraged lingering too long in one place.

I must admit, I like the idea of the upgrade cards for X-Wing, although there's nothing there that's specifically card-driven. It would work identically if you just wrote out a roster like you do for 40k. My problem is that there's too many options for me; I end up with two or three "go-to" abilities, and stick with them. For example, Luke Skywalker usually gets R2-D2, and Han usually flies with Chewie, because that's how it [should be. I don't worry about buying ships just for the cards, because they end up on the internet soon enough.

Cards can offer alternative play methods for sure but I do have two gripes with them;

1) for practical reasons having a deck and hand of cards on top of what may already be a full table can be logistically a pain unless your game of choice is small enough (table big enough). I like XWing but find the preponderance of cards and tokens a bit excessive which can limit the size of games/extend playtime to the point where you are dealing with paperwork rather than the game.

2) The tabletop game becomes about the cards rather than the little mandollies I painted or you are playing two games (the tabletop and a card game) at the same time.

Now this may be part of the challenge of the game (Chainsaw Warrior was sort of like this) but can be distracting if it is just supposed to be an element of gameplay/management.

A stack of cards is a dice roll but with all the rules printed on the card. How great is it to not go scouring through a book to find out what the die roll means when you could just have your opponent spread the cards out in his hand and you pick one.

They're really not the same, beyond cards having more space for information. For example, imagine either rolling 1D6 six times, or taking six cards, numbered 1-6, from a six card deck. The odds are very different. You can get broadly similar results, like with Settlers of Catan substituting a 37 card deck for a 2D6 roll: There's 36 cards mapping all combinations of 2D6, and then a 'Year End' card that's put in between the first 31 cards and the last 5, signaling the time to reshuffle the deck. This makes it impossible, for instance, to play in the shallow ends of the bell curve when using the cards.

Do cards allow better in-game resource management than dice or tokens?

I think the question is too broad to be easily answered. Depending on the design of the game, tokens or cards or dice could be resources to be managed.

There are various so-calld deck buildng games like Dominion or Race For The Galaxy in which the cards you hold give you different options for collecting other cards and making different groupings that are more or less effective in the game. However these games are entirely about the cards. The mechanism may be too time consuming to implement iun a wargame with figures.

Yep, the actual design and implementation matters more than whether or not cards exist.

In particular however, I do dislike games that include a card deck construction on top of minaiture army list construction, mainly because it compounds the amount of variables so high that no designer could manage that balance, and it's worse for players despite the allure of extra customization.

I also don't like games that waste the potential of cards and just use a standard poker deck and try to wrap the rules around that instead of the deck to the rules. The poker deck works great for card games, but this is a miniature game.

 Dark Severance wrote:


It really depends on the system. It would be interesting to see a system that utilizes dice, combined with a card mechanic to help make dice rolling more consistency but still provide that bit of edge in a conflict.

Way ahead of you The way I'm treating it is that the dice rolls provide a random number generator ala your standard dice based game, while a malifaux-esque hand of cards you draw each round provides you with a limited number of 'cheats' which you can use each round, either replacing individual die results outright with the value of a card (its a d10 system), modify the value of a die result by adding or subtracting the value of a card, or reroll a number of dice equal to the value of the card. On top of this is a 'karma' mechanic, each of those actions generates a certain number of karma points, which your opponent can spend to modify either his own die results (without using cards/generating karma of his own) or your die results (the 'cant reroll a reroll' rule applies however, so no modifying something that has already been modified), or produce certain other effects on the battlefield. On top of all that are certain faction-specific special rules, primarily dealing with how they play cards (for example, one faction can play the top card of their deck instead of a card from their hand without incurring a karma point, but if the flipped card isn't of a specific suit, they have to discard their hand for the rest of the round. Another faction may play a card from their hand and the top card of their deck. If the total value of the cards is 21 or less, they keep one of the cards and use the other, if it exceeds 21 then both cards are discarded).

The idea is that dice rolls will be the primary source of randomization for the game, while the cards will provide a limited ability to the player to alter those results and control the resulting probability distribution, minimizing the impact that consistently below average dice rolling has on the game outcome. This is counterbalanced by the karma system which keeps the use of cards in check and prevents it from getting out of hand (in this game in particular, if your karma builds up too much your opponent can spend the points to directly force effects against you, such as forcing a critical hit against you without having to initiate an attack, we assume that any damage sustained is the result of environmental factors, such as suddenly being struck by lightning), as well as being used as a means to help mitigate consistently above average dice rolling. The cards are not intended for regular use, I imagine they will only be popped 1-2 times per player per round at most given the potential consequences of overusing them, and are intended more for those "pivotal moments" that happen maybe a half dozen times every game where you need to accomplish something (often only needing statistically average dice rolls that never seem to materialize) or risk the game.

I like cards when they represent character and equipment options, or random events. (A la Blood Bowl, f'rex.) Using cards to replace die rolling or to resolve combat is less palatable to me.

Hey guys,

I wasn't going to jump in as I am pretty new to these forums. However this topic is fairly near and dear to my heart.

I am a game designer with O2 Games (Duh Rob, they can read the username....), anyway we are working on releasing a miniatures game called 'Aethersteel". Which we hope is a strong blend of CCG mechanics and Miniatures games mechanics. Unlike games like Malifaux we dont use cards too control the random nature of the game (we still use dice) but what we do is let each player build a customized deck of cards that play to their play style and actively change the stats of the game for or against each player. You can find some information about us at http://www.aethersteel.com/. But to keep it simple imagine you build a very agressive army, with lots of fast moving yet weak units. You can custom build a power up deck with defencive cards, armor cards, and reroll cards. Or you could commit to your theme and add in even more offencive and movement cards. Maybe you just like to mess with your opponents and enjoy card locking them. We designed the game with a lot of options.

The game isn't available yet but we are very close to making it available to launch, judging by some of the comments in this thread it might be something up your alleys.

Cosmic Envounter has kind of a cool card based combat system.


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Cosmic Encounter

I like the use of cards in games (like event cards) where the card itself has the information on it and doesn't need a pause to refer to a table. But not a big fan of them as the primary resolution where random is required. Having the potential outcomes be reduced as cards are drawn and played makes the whole 'random' element feel gamey, and not truely random. I guess there are people who like that sort of thing (malifaux), but to me it makes it more of a subgame or game within a game and detracts from the overall experience. Strategy and tactics should apply to the game itself, not the random number generator.

Once again, it is all a question of function.

Dice and cards are often used to add a measure of uncertainty. Card mechanics can vary wildly, but for randomization, the big issues are construction and replacement.

Allowing players to construct card choices allows greater agency and reduces randomness. Since cards draw from a pool of results, whether cards are immediately replaced or not greatly impacts the variability. Say I have a deck of cards 1-100. If I draw 5 cards without replacement, each draw will be less random than the last. If I first draw a 20, for example, I know that none of my remaining draws will be a 20. If I keep the hand and then future draws are made from the deck, I know that no draws will be any of the cards I hold.

Drawing with replacement makes it closer to dice. If I draw a card and then immediately reshuffle it into the deck, my next draw is still 1% of drawing any particular card, exactly the same as rolling a 100 sided dice.

Card mechanics generally involve more statistical complexity, however, if based on a standard card deck, it may not necessarily raise a barrier for newer players as most people are familiar with such a deck.

Most of the critiques expressed are of implementations of cards or a fundamental misunderstanding of how probabilities function. However, given the user base of Dakka (mostly 40k players, smaller number with wider exposure), I would expect a preference for dice simply due to familiarity (similar to a preference for scale, style, etc.). I would not think that bias would extend to new gamers generally (IE little/no experience with miniature war-games). I don't know that there is any inherent disadvantage to using cards as a resolution mechanic and it has been used in various miniature war-games. That is a factor to be considered with target players.

It is odd not to see mention of Richard Borg's Command and Colors, nor Richard Garfield's Magic : the Gathering in here, both being excellent implementation of card mechanics.

MTG is a "ding an sich", meaning it is its own justification for existence, rather than being a mechanism for simulating something else.

From this viewpoint, although it's a very clever game, it may not be a good guide for how cards can be used as a mechanism within a game.

Compare Statis Pro Football (NFL simulation) which is played almost entirely with cards but isn't a card game.

I prefer the implementation of a depleted deck, it gives the predictability dice never have with enough randomness to be worthwhile (given enough size).

The battlecon system is a nice implementation of a card system, I toyed enough with the idea but unfortunately it is for duels, Myth has a nice idea but it is a hybrid system.

Deck deplation could represent the tide of battle (morale, etc) flowing in one direction. This is a real thing in war.

Yes it could, but makes the reset points important.

I had a fun thought for using cards in a miniatures game- have the game be framed as a clash of Gods using mortal proxies, and let a small deck of cards (say, 20 cards) represent the Gods Favor/Wrath. Players may build their decks with certain rules depending on gods (so, say, having a priest of a certain god lets you take more of certain cards). However, the gods are fickle, so you draw cards randomly. This would be great for a setting based off of various "Myth Ages" (Greeks, Norse, Babylonian, etc.).