3 Lessons from Designing my First Card Game

I recently started pursuing an MFA in Game Design at DePaul University. Royal Match was a game I developed during my first term there. The assignment was to develop a game based on a concept from one of the scholarly articles about games we were reading and discussing in our Games Studies class.

I learned a lot over the course of designing, playtesting and iterating Royal Match. Some of those lessons were small lessons about which specific mechanics are fun or confusing or inefficient. Other lessons were broader observations about game theory, how people play and playing card design. Here are my major takeaways:

1 - “Housekeeping” design is really important

On the very first playtest I ran, as soon as we finished the first round and needed to reset for the second round, I realized I hadn’t planned for that in my initial game design. We needed to sort all the cards by suit and give each player the cards of one suit, but there was no clear order of operations. Should one person take all the cards and sort and redistribute them (like a dealer)? Who got which suit? Did it matter?

I used to take shuffling and dealing for granted, but now I recognize how elegant they are and why they are such common fixtures of card games. The Family Crests were my attempt to solve this issue, but they are not a perfect fix. Resetting between rounds is cumbersome and short of moving the whole game to a digital space, I can’t think of better way to expedite it.

2 - “Spoilsports” are hard to design for, but rewarding to accommodate

Given that one of my guiding concepts for the game was trying to make a game that allowed spoilsports to “ruin” the game for everyone, you might think I’d be extra cognizant of not shaming players for having unorthodox approaches to my game. However, several times while running playtests, I encountered players who made choices or expressed desires that I had not accounted for and at least on one occasion, I actively tried to prevent them from doing what they wanted because it would “break the game” for everyone else. But if spoilsports can’t break my game, then my game is already broken!

Once I was able to recognize this own tendency in myself, I was able to better step back and understand the emotions and desires behind the various spoilsport playtesters and then try to change my game to enable them to act upon their spoilsport desires.

I also discovered that spoilsports come in a wide variety of flavors. Some spoilsports just aren’t interested in whatever the dominant playstyle of a game is and don’t want to engage with the game at all, others are annoyed at their current situation within the game and will do anything to change it, others are just bored. The unintended spoilsports in my game ended up teaching me the most about it.

The condition of being a spoilsport could be seen as similar to the condition of being a disabled gamer, in that it’s a condition that is created by the normative assumptions of the game system at the place where it interfaces with a player who doesn’t conform to those assumptions.

3 - Simplicity is key in multiplayer tabletop games

The more convoluted my rules were, the less fun the game became. If players don’t immediately understand the utility of a rule, they will ignore it. In a modality where players internalize and enforce the rules, this means the game only exists to the extent that players get it. Keep it simple.

If you’re interested in hearing more about what I learned during this design process, check out this video where I talk at length about it: