by Christian K

This is a designer diary for Combo Creatures: The Quick Ones and Combo Creatures: The Witty Ones

Prologue
We, Michael and Christian, met at an event at our local Board Games Café Papas Papbar, for a release party for Biotopia. We quickly got chatting about games and even had a few beers (or at least it felt that way). This kind of meeting between game designers is always an interesting and exciting moment. At the end of the night, we hugged goodbye, and one of us whispered the lovely phrase “we should totally make a game together”.

10 Years Later
Nah just kidding, it was like half a year later or something that we seriously started working together. We started meeting up regularly and experimenting with games. We tried various ideas, but it was hard finding a good common project that actually worked. After we added like five tracks to one of our other games (which surprisingly didn’t make it any better), we felt a bit stuck and like we hadn’t quite found the right game.

“Faunas” (as we called Combo Creatures at the time) emerged as a breath of fresh air. The initial prototype was fast playing and delivered a lot of crazy moments that occasionally had one of us pause and say… “Is this allowed?” The answer was always yes.

The Game
The game is super simple, and surprisingly, most rules are exactly the same as in the very first prototype.
You have a hand of cards. On your turn, you pick one to play. It has a cost, which you pay by discarding other cards. You put it into play, and it has a play-ability that you trigger. Those abilities tend to be quite wild and powerful, often allowing you to play more stuff (sometimes even for free). We wanted to give you the feeling of playing a crazy combo deck in a TCG, but with almost no rules, no complex timing, and very simple and powerful abilities.
[Michael: I remember coming home from those early playtest sessions with an overloaded brain just sitting there staring into space, trying to figure out whether I could have played my hand more efficiently, all while new ideas for cool card abilities kept popping into my head – And right there I knew we were on to something!]

(Ok ok, occasionally on your turn, you don’t have a cool card combo to play so you spend the turn picking up new cards to load you up for a powerful next turn. But most of the time, you are just playing cool combos, we promise!)

To prevent too much time from being spent reading the cards in your hand, we found it useful to limit the number of different cards in the deck. When you play, there are just 7 different ones. You quickly know the cards so you can use your energy to find the best possible ways to play them, rather than reading an endless stream of cards.

A Weird System
With only seven cards though, we were looking for creative ways to increase the variety of the deck and the number of situations that the players will face. We made the deck modular, so you wouldn’t use the same seven cards every game. But within each game, we also wanted more variety.

We came up with this weird system that felt like it shouldn’t work, but surprisingly it did.

Each card comes in three variations. The same ability, but with costs of 1, 2, and 3.
However, the cost is also how many points that card is worth. So, if you play the 2-cost variation of a card, you discard two cards for the exact same ability that sometimes costs one, but you also get an extra point.

So, the dilemma the player faces is, do they play a lot of cheap cards, not getting so many points but triggering a lot of abilities, or do they prefer playing a single expensive card for big points but only the one ability.

The next step was to figure out how strong the abilities should be to make this dilemma work. So that you sometimes go for the cheap option and sometimes the expensive. An especially tricky thing to factor in here is the implicit cost in spending your turn playing the card.

[Christian: I actually remember writing some equations to try to figure out if this concept even made sense, and if so, how strong an ability would need to be so that one option wasn’t always strategically superior. The math dictated that each ability needed to be SUPER DUPER STRONG. This was something we would have to accept as designers. No innocent little “Draw 1 card” abilities, sorry!]

We had a good excuse to put really powerful abilities on the cards. In fact, we had to do it or the game wouldn’t work. This fueled our combo machine to even greater heights. Coming up with simple yet exciting and powerful abilities is one of the most enjoyable things as game designers, and this game was a blast to work on.

Pitching and Publication

The excitement we felt for the game turned out to be contagious; several publishers became very interested, which is an amazing feeling as designers. DV Games was particularly excited about the game. It is not uncommon for publishers to take many months to play your game and give feedback. However, with DV Games, Luca wrote immediately after SPIEL Essen asking for the files, and a few days later they proposed an offer of publication.

DV Games has been great to work with. Marta, our editor, has been tirelessly testing, evaluating, swapping cards around between sets, proposing minor changes etc. It is great seeing someone else match the passion you have as a designer for your little baby game. Seeing the game come alive with the beautiful artwork from Jeff Hong was one of the absolute highlights during development.

Two different boxes (with completely different cards) are being released simultaneously, Combo Creatures: The Quick Ones and Combo Creatures: The Witty Ones. Each one is stand-alone, but they can of course be mixed. Either one is a good starting point. The Quick Ones is a bit more approachable, while The Witty Ones leans into more involved and tricky abilities.

After many years of hard work from a lot of people, the game is at the finish line. But in a weird way, the finish line for a game, where it finally comes out, is also the starting line. This is the first time the wide public gets to see and play it. Fingers crossed you like it as much as we do! Cheers and happy gaming.