New Project! Deck Building Adventure Game, Part 1

This post is about another project I'm starting. The goal is to combine the play mechanics of a deck building game with the character progression and exploration mechanics from an adventure or dungeon crawler game, with a narrative generating bent.

I've enjoyed deck building games since I first tried Dominion a few years ago. I like that deck builders combine the tactics of playing Collectible Card Games (Magic the Gathering, YuGiOh, Shadowverse) and the strategy of assembling a deck beforehand.

I also enjoyed the stories that are generated by playing through strongly themed deck building games like Legendary Encounters: Alien, and other games like Imperial Assault and Hand of Fate.

I want to fuse the two in order to create a hybrid experience.


Deck Builder Mechanics

---

Players start with identical starting cards that form their deck. They draw a hand of cards from their deck and discard cards that are used on their turn into the discard pile. When the player cannot draw more cards, they shuffle their discard pile into a new deck.

Cards are spent to generate various effects. Common effects are to generate resources, purchase new cards, drawing cards, forcing others to discard cards, clearing penalties for you, adding penalties to other players, etc.

Cooperative Deck Builders like Legendary have an antagonist deck that acts as an opponent to challenge the players. The antagonist deck works in concert with a scenario that acts as a time limit and also provides a win condition for the players.

Competitive Deck Builders tend to have a timed end condition and determine a winner by points.

Adventure Games / Dungeon Crawler Mechanics

---

Adventure games pit a group of player characters against a series of escalating challenges. Overcoming challenges rewards players with increased power and capability. The opposition is provided either by a player acting as the environment and enemies, or an automated system provided by the game.

The environment provides exploration and challenge. It usually is represented by a map; either on a board (Hero Quest) or made of tiles (Gears of War, DOOM) or made of cards (Elder Sign). The environment provides obstacles and mechanical hooks that players can use in their interactions with antagonists. Movement, ranged attacks and abilities are all built around the environment that the game takes place in.

Like deck builders, cooperative adventure games rely on an automated system to provide opposition while competitive ones assign one player as the opposition who controls each of them.