Card Game: Kong Cards (Tentative Name)
OVERVIEW
Roles: Game Designer, Artist
Tools: Pencil, Flash Cards, Microsoft Word
Timeline: 1 week (on hold)
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Kong Cards is a tentative name for a custom card game inspired by other trading card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, Hearthstone, and Chaotic. It features unique and flexible mechanics, fun artwork, and a unique method of achieving victory. I worked a prototype for this game in late 2019 after it was rejected as a course project and is currently in a prototype stage with the game consisting of flash cards with drawings on them.
The game is played with two players, each possessing their own deck of minimum 30 custom card. They each take turns playing down Creature Cards onto their field and battling with them with the support of Item Cards. Creature Cards have health points that, when are reduced to 0, send the Creature Card to the discard pile where it cannot be used anymore. Creature Cards also have attack points that they deal damage to other creature cards when they attack, and also have various effects they can use. Players can play up to a maximum of 4 Creature Cards with the top most Creature Card being the one they battle with after having a chance to play down cards from their hand. Item cards are supportive cards that apply an effect to cards on the field before being sent to the discard pile.
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Examples of a low level creature, a mid level creature, and an item card
Both Creature and Item Cards have levels that the player must deduct from their Battle Points, a central resource system, to use with Battle Points being refilled at the start of a player’s turn. While both players start with only 1 battle point per turn, every subsequent turn they gain one more battle point up until they reach 7 points, where every turn thereafter they will only receive 7.
Field Layout graphic
Unique to Kong Cards is its Deckmaster mechanic. Before the game starts, players are allowed to choose a special card with the Deckmaster label that they put in the last slot on their field called the Deckmaster zone. Players achieve victory by reducing the opponent’s Deckmaster’s health points to 0. While in the Deckmaster zone, they possess shield points that must be eliminated before the opposing player can damage the Deckmaster’s health points. While the shield points are still up, most Deckmasters have a unique effect that passively affects the game. Deckmasters can also be summoned to the field at a battle point cost of their level, but are generally difficult to bring out immediately due to their high costs early on, but also at the risk of the player losing their passive shield effect and direct vulnerability to attack by the opponent.
Example of a Deckmaster card
Skills and Tools
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Prototype was made using flash cards and pencil with over 120+ unique cards
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Ideated game design alone, using past experienced with other card games as a basis
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Tested the game with friends for balancing issues, taking advantage of the physical traits of the game to apply adjustments in real time.
The prototype was created using flash cards and pencil. By turning the flash cards over to their blank side, I was able to draw whatever designs I wanted and created a template to draw out the cards. The use of physical cards proved to be very advantageous for me as I was able to make adjustments very easily while designing or even during testing.
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The cards are primarily inspired by various other characters I made in the past, some coming from the newspaper comics I made between 2015-2018, while others come from my other game design projects or are even based off previous designs made ten years ago (scroll down to history for more details).
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The game is a representation of my passion for game design as with limited physical tools, most of the work was done mentally in designing the game and ensuring its balance.
Please contact me in regards to seeing and discussing the full rulebook for the game
The Challenge
Early History:
The original version of this game was made when I was a child still in daycare. This was a simple card game that was based primarily off of the Pokemon trading card game where players had a chance to perform actions during a turn before attacking the opposing player’s cards using moves listed on the card. With no proper end game state, the game was a rare form of play that was both structured yet unstructured at the same time.
A couple years later in high school, me and another friend whom I explained the game to decided to give the game another shot. This time there were more rules in place with structured card effects, different classifications, and a unique battle system where during battle, players would roll dice to determine what action cards would do during battle. Despite the improvement, the game still lacked a definitive end state and the two of us just agreed it would end once a player ran out of monster type cards to battle with in their deck. After a couple months, we lost interest in the game and it was put down for a time.
Examples of some cards in the first version of the game made when I was a child
Examples of some cards in the second version of the game made as an early teenager
Revival and project work:
Examples of cards from previous versions of the game remastered in the current prototype
In early 2019, as I was taking the course IAT 312: Foundations of Game Design at SFU, I saw a chance to revive the game due to the course’s unique focus on raw game design in a tabletop setting. Quickly thinking about a couple of unique mechanics I had not seen in other card games, I began to draft a project idea for my team. Sadly, I was not able to pursue the idea after the course’s final project’s criteria was too strict in that the learning outcome dictated a serious themed game. Using the draft that I came up with however, my team and I reworked the idea to develop the board game “For Freedom”, another project in my portfolio.
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Despite being rejected, I had done enough brainstorming to which I could not simply ignore the idea anymore and over the next couple of months thought about the game in my spare time before finally having time during winter break to start building the prototype.
The first challenge came in developing a unique method to end the game. Previous iterations of it had no direct victory method unlike the card games it was inspired by. One aspect that I felt was lacking in the games Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon was how the player did not have a direct unit to take control of, much unlike Hearthstone where players choose a class that affects their gameplay. Still, the mechanic was limited and only provided a simple ability that affected the game whereas I wanted something more engaging.
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Although the rules were loose and mainly done for dramatic effect, I was inspired by the similarly named deckmaster mechanic that was present in the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime’s third season. I asked and then decided to answer the question of what would happen if a card game was based around this unique mechanic and went from there. It was not easy as the more I kept thinking, the more it was difficult to have the Deckmaster both be a passive effect on gameplay, but also be a last resort power card. That was when I developed the shield point system that I tied the passive ability to, therefore allowing the Deckmaster to do both jobs as the shield points could be reduced by the opponent to nullify the effect, allowing the Deckmaster to still be targetable but also have suitable protection in the Deckmaster zone.
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The next challenge came in actually creating the rest of the cards. As I wanted to have a decent amount of card variety, I had to draft and develop over 120+ unique cards that tested various areas of the game’s mechanics. This took a lot of time and effort to make so many cards and at one point, I was forced to take a break as drawing all the cards and writing all their effects took a toll on my hands.
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Lastly, testing proved to be extremely enlightening and showed that while I spent a lot of time thinking about the game beforehand, there were many areas in which the game was not perfect. In particular, I noted that a couple of effects needed to be monitored closely. Cards that provided damage reduction effects, as well as cards with high health proved to be extremely powerful. My tests were also limited by the fact that I had my testers only play with pre-made decks, and I was only ever able to test the game twice.
Final Reflection and Future Notes
Multiple artwork variants of the card "Pizza Delivery Guy" taken at a playtest
Unfortunately, the story behind this passion project ends here for the time being. I became too busy to continue working on the game in early 2020 which was then followed by the COVID-19 pandemic that made it unwise to continue testing in person. As the world heals from the pandemic, I hope to be able to test the game again and continue my work on the project.
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Going forward, I want to fix the balance issues that I did discover and find more to analyze and correct. One aspect I look forward to when resuming work on the project is how custom deckbuilding affects the game balance as well as how can I add more unique effects that take advantage of the game’s mechanics. I also look forward to creating and drawing an assortment of zany characters to give these card effects to.
Gallery featuring more example cards:
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