[Stacked] Choices, choices, choices

This post is part of a designer diary series about my latest game design, Stacked. Check out my first post if you want to start from the beginning.

Game design is often a very organic experience. Inspiration comes from a variety of sources and can take a mechanics-first, theme-first, or even component-first approach. I think of game design as creating a novel system in which fun can happen as well as setting the goals and philosophy of what the game is or isn’t.

Playtesting Stacked at OrcaCon 2024 with Cody Thompson and my son.

Once that fun is found and goals defined, the process transitions more to game development, which is about making sure the game flows smoothly and is balanced, and that players can extract the maximum amount of fun from the game design.

In contrast to game design, I’d argue that game development follows an almost formulaic approach:

1. Identify a problem — is there an aspect of the game that isn’t fun or disrupts the flow of the game?
2. Create and playtest a solution — update the game design to eliminate the problem.
3. Simplify — this is something maybe more specific to me, but I believe that every rule or component needs to justify its existence. If it doesn’t contribute to the fun or is necessary for the functioning of the game then it should be removed. Simpler is better.

Every rule or component needs to justify its existence. If it doesn’t contribute to the fun or is necessary for the functioning of the game then it should be removed. Simpler is better.

In my previous post I had built a prototype for my game, Stacked, and found the fun. But it was very rough and there were still a lot of things getting in the way of the fun.

As a recap, the primary mechanic of the game is the stacking and revealing of cards. Players sequence 3 cards in a face-down pile of cards and pass it to the next player. The next player then reveals 1 card at a time and decides to keep it or discard it. Once they keep a card the rest are discarded. If they discard the first 2 cards then they MUST keep the last card.

Players carefully stacking the cards they are passing to to the next player.

Now there were two problems with this design.

• It took a long time to collect any meaningful number of cards. For a game where the scoring is based on set collection, only keeping 1 card per round made the pace of the game fairly slow.
• Sometimes there are no interesting ways to stack the cards. With 3 cards there are only 6 different ways of sequencing the cards and if they’re all good cards, it didn’t feel like you were making any meaningful decisions.

I quickly experimented with a number of solutions for the second problem. What’s great about playtesting with game designers is they don’t mind you changing the rules mid-game or abandoning a game to reset with a new rule. We tried stacking with 4 cards (not meaningful and made rounds longer), we tried starting with a pool of 10 cards where you choose which card to add 1 card into each round (overwhelming to see so many cards), but in the end one adjustment stood out far beyond the rest.

Rather than stacking 3 cards and revealing/keeping 1 card at a time, the groundbreaking change was to stack 6 cards and reveal/keep 2 cards at a time. This dramatically increased the number of possibilities from 6 to 90 different arrangements of the cards! This provided players with so much more agency. They could pair up good cards with a bad cards to try to make the choices mediocre. Or they could go all in and put the best (or worst) cards all at the end. It also meant that as you took cards, you would incidentally take cards you may not have planned for, creating more possibility of interactions between cards.

These are the backs of the cards for the prototype, which visually represent the stack of 6 cards grouped as 3 pairs of cards.

Suddenly the decisions within the game were so much more interesting and the pace of the game moved much quicker. Additionally the overhead of stacking and revealing cards became much easier to justify when there was twice as much happening each round.