Developers log, game date 20250705.8. Having worked out the basic placement rules for this game (tentatively called “Spore-adic”), it was time to figure out the interactions. I decided to go with the tried and true method of card drawing, and started to design cards that would have both positive and negative effects. There were initially three positive effect card types and six negative effect card types. I ended up adding three more negative effect card types for more play variety, and began testing the card counts and balance.
This is tricky. See, the chance of drawing a particular card isn’t just affected by the number of copies in the deck and the number of total cards in the deck. It’s also affected by the number of players. You might also end up with a perfect ratio of cards, but all your attack or defense cards might end up shuffled next to one another. So you could end up just pulling all attack cards, or all defense cards. There’s no real way to prevent this. You can balance and rebalance the numbers and types of cards all you want, but if you’re working from a single deck, the distribution can always give you unbalanced scenarios.
Think of it like poker: once in a while you can be dealt a straight flush or four of a kind (without cheating). Just happens to be how the cards are ordered for that particular round of play. So the only thing I can do is balance the probability of particular cards appearing relative to other cards, then balance the deck size based on how many cards are drawn per game, how many cards players can hold at once, and how many players there are.
There’s no real shortcutting this process. You need to test each card and how it’ll work in a real game. How often do the cards come up. How they’re balanced by other cards. And since card effects sometimes don’t work, you need to change those as well. That means you end up with multiple versions of each card where the rules or effects are slightly different over time and in different games.
To make things simpler, I have a spreadsheet that keeps a list of all the individual cards, their different versions, what changed from one version to the next, and another spreadsheet that shows the distribution of the games. I label these decks of cards and record the deck that was used for each playtest. This way if something really works well I can quickly go back to that deck.
I’m not on the 5th deck version, along with multiple versions of most of the cards. Some have proven too powerful, others too repetitive. But we’re almost at as solid set. More testing to come…