by Ryan Migalla

I love trading card games. I don’t love what they ask of you. In designing Quickdraw I found I can design a game that gives that TCG experience – deck design, synergy discovery, iterating against an asymmetric opponent – but without the endless commitment.

An interesting space. But more interesting? Quickdraw accomplishes this with just 18 cards.

A bold claim, delivered by a unique double-edged team building and resource system that I’m excited to apply to more ambitious projects. More on those plans later, first, how did Quickdraw come to be?

[heading]The Inspiration[/heading]
Like any good chemical reaction, Quickdraw was formed via a few core building blocks and a catalyst. These building blocks were 1) a design segment, 2) a form factor, and 3) an interesting mechanic.

Design Segment
I wanted to design a game that I myself wanted to play, and one I could actually finish without getting burnt out in year five of design. I landed on a 2-player, dueling, small-box game. It’s a favorite genre of my wife and I. Grab a small box game with high replayability and head to the local brewery to sip delicious drinks while challenging each other. It’s a very familiar segment, so I know what the player would want/expect. And seemed a lot easier than starting with whatever my version of Cones of Dunshire would be.

Form Factor
I was at Pax Unplugged when I first stumbled across Button Shy via the keynote by Elizabeth Hargrave. She explained their concept: games that consisted of just 18 cards and a rulebook that fit in an awesome ultraportable wallet. I was immediately intrigued by this as a design constraint.

I’m a person who loves design constraints. Give me a blank canvas and I’ll flounder, but give me an interesting set of constraints and my creativity flourishes. The idea of building a deep game with just 18 cards excited me a lot. I went to the booth, bought two games, (Tussie Mussie by Elizabeth Hargrave and Revolver Noir by Xavier Davidson), and played them in line with my wife. They did not disappoint, and I knew I wanted to try and add my own unique flavor to this sub-genre.

Mechanic
In 2020 I had my most insane boardgame experience. My friend Kevin hosted a virtual Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth game where we all joined through Zoom and he managed everyone’s had of cards physically over webcam. I won’t go into that madness of “Kevin, I know it’s Zach’s turn but can you show me my hand? Thanks, wait what does that second card do?” But it’s worth noting that what I took away from that game wasn’t “never play games with Kevin again”, it was “wait, that was actually an insanely interesting mechanic…”

The mechanic I’m talking about (because there are a lot in that game) was the skill check where you flipped a set number of cards from your deck based on your ability and then had to reveal a number of pips determined by the difficulty rating of the task. Cards had zero, one, or two pips. You generally needed to reveal a total 1-3 for a success. So, two pip cards were really valuable. However, the cards also had abilities on them you could use if they were in your hand. Do you see the tension coming? It became a very interesting decision space of do I want this card in my hand or in my deck.

It’s a minor mechanic in Journeys in Middle Earth, and I honestly couldn’t tell you how to play the rest of the game, but that simple interesting mechanic stayed in my brain.

(If I mis-explained any part of the game please direct your comment hate to Kevin.)

Catalyst
The catalyst arrived as many of my gaming ideas do, when listening to a board podcast (probably the Board Game Design Lab or Crowdfunding Nerds). Someone mentioned a Wild West game. I don’t remember what the game was, other than it was a completely different game type, but that theme made my game fall into place. Time to build a Wild West shootout.

[heading]The Design[/heading]
The idea seemed to coalesce all at once. It would be eight Lawkeepers vs eight Bandits, where four are deployed with attacks and abilities and the other four form the ammo deck. The core tension stems from the best units to deploy are also the best ammo in your ammo deck.

Simple Game Mechanics
The key to any good card dueling game is that the rules are simple, and the intrigue comes from the card selection. Quickdraw accomplishes that with rules that can be summed up with four step.

The first part of each round is team building. Players look at their eight unique units and decide on a strategy and how to arrange cards between being deployed to fight, or in the ammo deck to support.

After deciding which four units to deploy, the remainder are shuffled as the ammo deck and randomly dealt face-down to each deployed unit. Players take turns activating units and win by being the last one standing at the end of the shootout.

On a player’s turn a unit is selected to activate. Their attached ammo card is revealed, and if the Ammo Value of the revealed ammo card is greater or equal to the Ammo Needed for their attack, the attack succeeds. The target unit is dealt damage equal to the damage value of the attack. One damage and they are turned sideways, two damage and they are defeated and removed from the board.

Players take turns activating units that shoot back and forth across main street. The last team standing wins!

Intriguing Game Strategy
Pretty simple gameplay, but once you start dissecting the central tension, you find a whole lot more. Remember, the central tension in Quickdraw is that the units with the strongest attacks and abilities also have the highest Ammo Values. The distribution of Ammo Values for each team is 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1. So if you deploy your four strongest units, your ammo deck would only have ammo values of 3, 2, 2, 1.

Most attacks and abilities need a 3 or 4 to succeed, so the very strong units you deployed are going to be very useless without high enough ammo available. Conversely, deploying your weakest units will give you a very consistent ammo deck, but they might not have enough fire power to best your opponent.

This creates the central tension of the game. You’re trying to find that balance between power and consistency and also looking at different card abilities to find synergies that allow cards to effectively play stronger than their ammo value.

A great example of how this plays out is with our favorite bandit pair- Brother and Sister.

Brother has the rare 2 damage attack. Incredibly powerful since with one shot, he can take an enemy unit off the board. However, it needs 5 ammo to succeed. As a reminder the ammo distribution is 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1.

If I deploy Brother and the three other strongest units, the ammo deck would comprise of 4, 2, 2, 1 – meaning a 0% chance for Brother to hit.

However, if instead of playing Captain Blythe (6 AV) and Bruiser (5 AV), I put them in the ammo deck, now Brother has a 50% chance to hit since the ammo deck would be: 6, 5, 2, 1.

That’s the basic math, but the card abilities let you stack the odds even further. If I also play Sister, she can give Brother her ammo after he shoots. So, his first shot has a 50% chance to hit, but if he misses, on the next turn he can take Sister’s ammo, which would then be a 66% to hit – bringing his chance to hit at least once up to 86%.

86% chance to one-shot a unit seems pretty good! But what about the opportunity cost? That strategy required two shots to do 2 damage. Two more consistent units might’ve been able to pull that off with similar accuracy and without painting a target on themselves like Brother. Plus is that strategy too Brother dependent, and when he’s defeated do the Bandits collapse?

Sure, there’s only eight cards in each team’s pool, but the interconnectivity of their synergies and the balance of deployed strength vs. ammo deck consistency means there’s plenty to think about in the team building phase, and in the shoot-out phase.

Locations
There is one last element to the game that provides another layer of strategic decision making – location abilities. The Battle for Silver City takes place across Main Street and units are deployed on either side to three different locations: the Street, the building, or the roof.

The locations provide simple but impactful abilities. A unit in the Building has cover, which means enemies targeting units in the building get a -1 ammo modifier. So, while Sheriff McGraw usually only needs a 2 to hit, if she’s shooting into the building, she’d need a 3 or higher. Units on the Roof get to cancel the effect of cover, but only one unit can be deployed to the Roof.

The Building is safer, the Roof is more accurate.

So now the deployment decision. Maybe you want to protect Brother to let him get more shots off, so you put him in the Building. But you realize that a -1 penalty dramatically affects his ability to hit opposing units in the Building, so maybe he’s better on the Roof? Again, it’s the small decisions that stack up that influence your game plan and how your team will respond to your opponent.

The success in the design is that the limited card pool, the simple abilities, and the basic locations add together in a very dynamic but comprehendible way. You can visualize the probabilities and how the synergies will play out to craft a strong direction for your team. But chance and your opponent’s set up will mean there’s never one right answer.

[heading]Challenges During Design[/heading]
Balance
Balancing small numbers is HARD. Just as small adjustments in your deployed team can have large impacts on your strategy, seemingly small design changes can have catastrophic impacts on balance.

As we saw above, Brother maxes out at 50% accuracy with an attack that needs 5 ammo to succeed when you stack the ammo deck with 6, 5, 4, 4. However, if you make the smallest possible positive adjustment to Brother’s attack so that he needs 4 ammo to succeed, now he’s 100% accurate and incredibly over powered. Go one point in the other direction with an attack that needs 6 ammo to succeed and now unless he’s on the roof, he can never hit a unit in the building.

It becomes easier to see why games like Pokémon and Yu-gi-oh use numbers in the hundreds and thousands. A balancing change from 120 HP to 130 HP is a much more fine-tuned lever to pull than an ammo value going from 4 to 5. But the small numbers are what gives Quickdraw its easily understood and punchy abilities. So, while it took a lot of iteration (on the order of hundreds of solo playtest games), the challenge was worth it for the gameplay it delivers.

Design Requirements to guide development
To make sure the game was as dynamic as possible, without losing track of the central tension, I implemented several high-level design requirements.

1. Every card should be playable as a deployed unit or as ammo. With only eight cards in the card pool, if a card that is unbalanced and never gets deployed, or is always deployed, this significantly limits team building decisions. This means each card must be balanced exactly to its Ammo Value. A card that performs worse than its Ammo Value ends up always being ammo since it’s more effective than being deployed, and vice versa. The issue is exacerbated at either ends of the spectrum where the highest and lowest Ammo Values have the most impact in the ammo deck.

2. No specific team configuration should be unbeatable by all opposing team configurations. Similar to the first requirement, but possibly more important, if one configuration of cards is unbeatable, the game is broken. Once that configuration is found, then there’s no point in playing.

3. Different core archetypes on each team should have a rock, paper, scissors relationship. Meaning for example, the archetypal Sherrif build should be able to beat the archetypal Captain build 70% of the time, but lose to the Bruiser build 70% of the time, and be evenly matched with the Brother/Sister build.

This is for sure the most aspirational of the requirements. To achieve this, after each iteration I would develop three favorite builds per team and then do a round robin each to see how they fared against each other. The balance percentages aren’t perfect, but they are good enough where this requirement succeeded in its purpose of enabling meta decision making. Anticipate your opponent, build to counter, but be wary of the double bluff!

[heading]”It Feels Like a TCG”[/heading]
So back to my crazy statement about my 18-card game providing a substitute TCG experience. Does all of this design actually deliver on that claim? I very much think that it does, and that’s not just my personal delusions talking.

As I brought my game around to conventions and events, my demos naturally attracted a lot of TCG fans. Beautiful cards laid out on a playmat creates that familiar and engaging feel.

The demos went very well, and what I didn’t expect was how often conversation would turn towards TCG nostalgia. Talking about the old days of buying every set, favorite decks, keeping up with the local scene, and so on. The common thread here wasn’t that players had fallen out of love with TCGs, but that TCGs ask a lot and eventually life had gotten in the way.

What these players appreciated about Quickdraw was that it provided what they loved about TCGs but in a manageable format – deck construction, a unique mana system, strategic/reactive decision making, and meta gameplay. We’ve already covered the bones of Quickdraw, but now let’s put it in the context of a TCG.

Deck Construction and Discovery
With Quickdraw, instead of a 60-card deck you’re focused on eight cards. That means you can really feel the impact of each card and easily conceptualize it up front. I love that I can quickly build a team and then look and say, “hmm but now Crazy Carl is only 25% accurate, oh but if I move him to the roof he jumps to 50%!”

And even with these few cards there are exciting moments of discovery as board state changes and you find different end states. Don’t believe me? See what happens the first time you leave Sheriff as the last unit standing…

My favorite part of running playtests was watching two new players learn the game, play a round, and then immediately re-review the units they didn’t deploy to find better synergies.

A Unique Mana System
Nothing affects a TCG more than its mana system. It’s why a Magic clone will always feel like a Magic clone even with completely different cards. And what is the ammo deck in Quickdraw if not an incredibly interesting and unique mana system?

Rather than adding mana until you have enough to cast your card or use your attack, the ammo deck serves as an RNG system to control the action. However, it’s a rigged RNG system that you built yourself. You can’t blame your draws if your units never get a shot off, you can only blame yourself for putting too many strong cards on the field instead of in your ammo deck.

Strategic, Reactive Decision Making
Building your team is only half the battle. Now you have to use them wisely to defeat your opponent’s key units before they do the same to you. And with only four units with 2 HP each, each shot that gets through hurts. The back-and-forth action, tough decisions and dramatic moments make the whole game feel like the final climactic rounds of a classic TCG game.

Meta Gameplay
What do you do when you lose an epic match in a TCG tournament? Go home and hope it goes better next time? No. You spread out your cards and think where you can make changes to do better next week.

Well, with Quickdraw you don’t need a week. Rounds take 10 minutes, so start the next one right away to tweak your strategy and claim victory.

[heading]Up Next[/heading]
I definitely didn’t start down this path planning on designing TCG adjacent games. But given that I’ve been playing dueling card games since my brother and I were in elementary school actually playing Pokémon, I might actually be the best person for the job.

I’m incredibly excited about the core Quickdraw system and its ability to provide powerfully unique experiences in this space.
The next item on the roadmap is a second set for Quickdraw that introduces new teams and new abilities, but with the same core system. Battle for Silver City has tight abilities, grounded play, and a beautiful western feel. So naturally set 2 will be Quickdraw: Aliens vs. Marshmallows!

Ok, maybe not super obvious, but that’s the point. I want to show the other end of the spectrum, wacky concept with elevated abilities, to show what is possible with the Quickdraw system.

My vision is a whole host of standalone sets that constantly let players discover new synergies and strategies. And maybe a future where sets can be mixed and matched for exponentially more options! If you want to follow along and weigh in on future sets, sign up for my mailing list and/or come join the RAM Games Discord community.

Apart from coming out with more sets, I’m also thinking of other ways to implement this system to provide for unique gameplay experiences. To that end I’ve began working on a roguelike version of Quickdraw. The quick gameplay loop, high impact of upgrades, and the pyrrhic nature of victories in Westerns sets up Quickdraw as a perfect base to develop a tabletop roguelike on.

I don’t have a ton to share with this yet, but again, for sneak peeks, including alpha tests when its ready, come join our Discord community!

[heading]Thanks for Reading![/heading]
I hope you find this interesting, and even better yet, took something away from it. I’m really excited to grow Quickdraw and come up with more ambitious projects that bring joy to my player segment.

Give me a shout out in the comments of what you think. Do you think I can really frame a game as TCG adjacent with only 18 cards? What other ways would you want to see this system implemented? What’s your favorite game that feels like a TCG but isn’t?