First, I want to commend the developers for creating a high-quality, inventive, enjoyable game. I'm very impressed, and would definitely play the game after release. A few particular points of praise: the graphics and aesthetics are exceptional - clean, whimsical, and polished. The add to gameplay rather than detract from it by clearly showing important gameplay elements without cluttering up the screen. The gameplay is also very inventive. I very much like the concept of deck-building by item choice. The gameplay in combat is intuitive, very tactical, and surprisingly deep. Overall, I think the developers have created a great product. I'll offer some criticisms and suggestions, though my overall impression is very positive. 1) The deck building mechanic. If you've played deck building games like Dominion or MtG, you know that one of the most important lessons is that the average power of your deck is far more important than the total number of powerful cards. Deck-thinning for efficiency is a fundamental principle of deck building, but it clashes with a couple of the mechanics in Card Hunter. First, when acquiring new item slots upon leveling up, it can often reduce the power of your deck. If your character is currently equipped with high quality gear, adding a slot - and the cards that go with it - initially clutters up your deck and reduces your power, unless you have an equally high-quality item to immediately put in that slot. Second, regardless of gear quality, adding slots reduces consistency. The variance of your draws is proportional to your deck size, so as a player levels up and has a larger and larger deck, their draws become more and more inconsistent. This leads to a lot of situations with only movement cards and no attack cards, only armor cards and no movement or attack cards, or only attack cards with no movement cards. Statistically, your hands are more and more likely to have "runs" of cards as your deck size increases, making combat more luck-based. The character that gets a balanced hand is much more effective than the one without. This has the curious result where my combat experiences at lower level were more "fun". Even though the abilities are not as powerful, you get more consistent hands and can act like a normal person (move, then attack) more consistently. As I leveled up and acquired new slots, I noticed more and more turns where my hands were overloaded with a single type of card, and these turns are simply not a lot of fun. Both of these problems are symptoms in search of a mechanic to fix them. I don't know what the best mechanical fix for this would be, but here are a few ideas. The most basic way to fix them would be a deck-thinning mechanic. This can either be at the equipping stage or based on card abilities in combat. At the equipping/deck-building stage, an example fix is allowing players to remove cards from their deck, either by giving a choice of which cards from an item to include, or by making some slots truly "empty" if no item is equipped, rather than contributing crappy cards. For in-combat card abilities, card draw helps somewhat, but more importantly deck-filtering or searching. Give some cards the ability to draw the next card of a specific type, like a move that draws the next attack card, or an attack that draws the next move card. Allow players the opportunity to look at their top N cards and choose M of them. Allow players to discard cards as a cantrip to draw another one. These are all tried and true mechanics from other games. There is also a brute force fix - always giving the player a particular type of card if they don't already have one. However, this is a lot less elegant and doesn't reward player skill as much. Overall, the game is still fun, but this deck management side and how it impacts luck and combat is a bit lacking without a true deck-thinning mechanic. Improving this aspect will take the game to the "next level" of strategic depth. 2) Power tokens should correlate more closely to the acquisition of items that require tokens. I began receiving items that require power tokens somewhere around level 3-4, but it seems I won't get my first power token until level 7 (I'm at level 6 now). This is frustrating for the player. Giving the player a lot of items that they can't use for a long time is not a good item reward system. At this point, half or more of the items I receive require tokens and can't be used. I'm already seeing items with double-clear or even bronze token requirements, before I've even received a single clear token at all. I won't be able to use the bronze items until level 15. Now, I understand that you want to instill a sense of reward when the player does obtain tokens, but this requires some finesse in balance. Making these items highly available, but unusable, just causes repeated frustration. The player repeatedly acquires an item, sees its abilities, and thinks, "Oh cool!" only to realize moments later that it isn't usable for a long time and thinks "that sucks". A good reward mechanic gives a balanced amount of reward after a challenge or struggle - right now, the reward part of it is often frustrating, which can turn off players. If you look at games like Diablo I&II or Torchlight I&II, both of which I would argue have good reward mechanics, you do acquire temporarily unusable items, but only just a little bit shy of when you could use them. This allows players to repeatedly experience the joy of gaining new loot, and also leveling enough to use them, instead of constantly being taunted by items that they can't use. Perhaps a quirk of human nature, it would actually be better to NOT give players these items until later, closer to the time when they become usable, than to give them early with the promise of usability so far off. As it stands, these items just continue to clutter up the inventory, making equipping your characters a frustration when you accidentally think an item is usable but it isn't. Anyway, the overall message is: make usability correlate better with availability. Those are all my comments for now. Thanks for taking the time to read. I'd appreciate any comments or discussion about these points.
After playing until level 12, and getting a better idea of the game, I wanted to add comments to my previous post. With regards to deck thinning, I am more convinced that inconsistency from a large deck size is a bad thing. There are simply a lot of turns where my characters can't do very much at all, often important encounter-deciding turns. I have not equipped them in any particularly detrimental way. As an example, even though the vast majority of cards in a deck are attack cards, there are plenty of turns where I don't get any. This is simply a fluke of large deck sizes. Here is a simple suggestion to fix this: at higher level, start having items with only 2/3 the normal number of cards. Weapons contain 6 cards, and other items 3, so make available to the player 4-card weapons and 2-card other items. This allows the player to start building a thinner, more consistent deck, and also introduces some deck-building skill into the system. Most items contain a high number of duplicates anyway. As it stands, the only way for an item to have any noticeable impact on what you draw is by cramming multiple copies of card. It seems that high level items start to simply be composed of lots of copies of desirable cards. This is one approach to deck consistency. Of course, by cramming larger numbers of the same card in, you see even more "runs" of those particular cards, and your hands become more monotonous and boring. This also kills the ability for items to be versatile. A 3-card item with 3 different cards is going for versatility, but realistically you will see each of those cards once every 2 to 3 combats. Versatility is useless if you don't ever draw consistently enough. By allowing players to build thinner, more consistent decks, you improve the experience in two ways. First, the players hands are more consistent, meaning a better balance of cards drawn. Second, it allows players to actually build and use versatile items and have a greater expectation of being able to use them. I hope you at least consider it, and I welcome any discussion.
Yes i agree more cards more problems lets mail wizards and tell them they should have a minimum of 20 cards for their deck 60 is just way to inconsistent. I mean like come on how am i supposed to go off with my combo deck on turn 1 every game if i have to use bad cards that just cycle get it together wizards! That said do a search in your inventory for "Trait".
Sarcasm does not equal a convincing argument. That said, thanks for being so welcoming! You sure are making the Card Hunter community very friendly! This is exactly the way to grow the fanbase!
You do have good points but deck consistency isn't the only consideration. If they start reducing the number of cards on higher level items you'll run into a compliancy problem. Too many decks will resemble each other at the highest levels of play. This is already somewhat true in upper tier Multiplayer. They have a number of deck cycling effects such as traits which can be both negative and positive. I think in a early thread someone even made the comment that a negative trait can be beneficial through its ability to deck cycle. Also don't forget every round you draw one movement card based on your race in addition to the other two cards you draw. So the chance of over drawing movement is high because of that, but movement is more important in this game then mana is in Magic The Gathering as movement determines all ranges and potential counter moves. So its hard to balance attack vs move ratio in my mind. Also a particular problem I have is not thinking in magic terms. Your deck recycles so in many cases passing a turn with nothing happening is a victory because your closer to recycling your deck. Which is unlike magic in that decking yourself is game over. Finally single player and multiplayer are VERY different. Single player is more puzzle then strategy. Some of the later encounters are frustrating for this reason. The mission needs you to be equipped a certain way as opposed to multiplayer where positioning and timing are more important. I do agree about you point with gear but going from level 6 to 7 doesn't take that long. Edit grammar
Thanks for a thoughtful response. You make some good points. I'm actually thinking more from the perspective of games like Dominion and Nightfall. Your deck also recycles in those games, so decking yourself is not the concern. I think this game is probably better balanced in consistency than MtG, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. The amount of consistency due to deck size is a balance choice by the developers. I don't have a good idea of what an "optimal" deck size would be. I bring up my point because there is an anti-mechanic where at the early levels (1-5 or so), combat actually felt more consistent because you had a smaller deck size. If you acquire a good item, you notice the power right away. Now, at level 12, I find that after switching in a new 3-card item, I often don't even see it for a game or two. So, in terms of balance of absolute consistency, I don't know what the developers intended. But in terms of relative consistency, there is more consistency at the lower levels and less at the top, which is a bit weird. I found myself enjoying the tactical and card based combat a lot at lower levels, then being a bit frustrated as my deck grew and I started getting a lot more dead hands. Traits are indeed a good addition, but even loaded with a Skill item that has traits for all 3-cards, I only draw a trait on average maybe once a game, meaning I don't see any in some games. It's great when it comes up, but it doesn't seem enough. As for the puzzle aspect in SP, I do like that a lot. But sometimes the strategic cards don't come up. I played a frustrating encounter recently (I think the cockroach one), where I loaded up on long-range melee since the boss is unreachable behind a river, and armor destroying magic since the roaches have resistant hide. I think I geared pretty well, but had to replay about 4 times, until I got enough of the cards I needed before time ran out. Overall, it's not terrible as far as balance or anything, but I think the addition of a little bit more card searching or filtering, and/or slightly smaller decks through the availability of 2-card items and 4-card weapons, would help. As far as the tokens go, I should add that I've had a lot of fun figuring out the best gearing possible with limited tokens, from level 7 until now. It was mostly level 3-6, where I kept on getting token-requiring items without being able to use them. Trying to figure out gearing with a ton of unusable token gear was frustrating in part because I constantly thought I could use something, started planning other gear around it, then realized I couldn't. In particular seeing bronze token items start to show up at those low levels, without ever even equipping a clear token item, and looking it up and seeing that I wouldn't get a bronze token until level 15, was perplexing.
Yeah the bronze tokens have to do with multiplayer where we are all level 18. It was jarring to have items that I could not use so early show in my inventory. I think that has more to so with a current way to really define item sets. I believe they are working on though. I pretty aggressively sell things right now to keep my inventory manageable but I sometimes feel I errd on the side of keeping to little. The difficulty I've noticed in the later encounters is the fact that the opponents deck is so much more heavily tuned then our own. The roach are a good example because they have so few cards to choose from their decks are highly consistent. I believe that is to make up for the AIs poor play. Realistically in PvP I feel my deck is very consistent. Its only against the SP encounters I feel my deck is not properly tuned which is why I mentioned the difference between the two. Since the computer gets to play by different rules our decks can seem less under our own control. If you ever have played the single player version of Race for the Galaxy card game I think that better encompasses the difference Its two different rules sets between single and multiplayer.
Interesting, I have not played multiplayer at all, so that is good point. I can see how PvP vs PvE would be different then. I have not played single player Race, but I've played multiplayer. Thanks for the response.
Sounds like you cleared the roaches, but next time forget about the armor on roaches (only matters if you use wizards and it completely shrugs off your damage really). Bring attacks that do 7+ damage and even if they succeed on the armor they die. Mostly ignore the roaches. Bring step and extra move cards instead of bringing spears. You can get around the river on the west side of the screen, there is difficult terrain there, which slows you down, but lets you through. And bring a Whirlwind or Whirlwind Enemies if you do have a wizard. Wait for a turn when Morvin doesn't have Immobilize active (his Arrogant Armor will force him to be without it, or if you draw WW/WWE on turn 1 he doesn't have it active yet). If you whirlwind Morvin off his spot, he can never get back, as he has absolutely no move cards. You are then free to go sit on it yourself and only have roaches to worry about while you wait for victory.
