Deck building games are a genre which found numerous expressions in
modern gaming. While, as for most Euro style games, the objective is normally
point scoring, you will find variants which have a more competitive model
focusing on a "Last man Standing" objective. Deck building games all
share a number of basic traits which can be listed as follows:-
1.
They are normally LCG's or Living Card Games were you play with a
complete set of cards out of the box. This as opposed to CCG or Collectable
cards games (Like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon) were players need to build
their deck by purchasing several booster packs.
2.
Players will normally start with the same deck of (usually) 10 cards,
divided between attack-type cards and purchase-type cards. These may be called
by different names but their effect is always the same.
3.
There is always a "Market" from where you can buy better cards
to add to your deck.
4.
Any cards you purchase from the marketplace are always sent to your
discard pile.
5.
However once your active deck is all exhausted, the discard pile will
then be re-shuffled into an active deck in order to allow continuation of play.
6.
In most instance, players will be trying to either reduce their
opponent's health or life points to 0 or to gather as many points as possible before
a game ends.
7.
On your turn you are expected to play all the cards in your hand if you
can. While there may be some optional actions you may take, no cards are leftover
(for successive rounds) unless they happen to be permanents put into play and
which persist between turns unless otherwise removed through direct action.
8.
At the end of a turn, all played cards, with the exception of
permanents, are sent to the discard pile.
9.
There will always be an option to banish or remove cards permanently
from play. These actions are necessary to clean up a growing deck from all the
weaker or undesirable cards.
The first deck builder I ever owned was Star Realms. This quite clearly embraces the
"Last man standing" model I mentioned earlier. Players start off at
50 points each and 10 standard cards granting them either purchasing power (8
of these) or fighting power (2 of these). In Star Realms the theme revolves
around space conquest so you will find a slew of spacecrafts belonging to
diverse factions. In true deck building fashion you will not embrace one
specific faction over another, though it does benefit your strategy if you
build a deck around a principal theme (or faction) since there is a synergistic
effect to be reaped.
The marketplace is where the game happens. Players will normally have
access to a market composed of 5 faceup cards fed from a common stockpile of
cards. Furthermore there will also be two other types of cards available on the
market (but separate from it) which either offer improved buying power or
fighting power. These latter cards don't have synergistic or secondary effects
but can prove essential to build up a good deck. Again they are mostly
important at the beginning of a match, when players are still vying to acquire
the better cards from the marketplace.
Regardless of the factions, and very much in line with almost all deck
builders I have ever played, you will find specific architypes that will always
be there. Let me summarise them below.
1. The Hard Hitters - These cards will produce fighting
points. These cards are normally not about finesse, they are about getting
those opponent life/health points down and fast. Furthermore in all probability
they will also have a synergistic effect when playing them together with other
cards of similar type. So for instance if I just play one Hard Hitter I might
add 5 attack points to my final tally, but if I play a second one then that
same Hard Hitter will now be good for 8 points.
2. The Health enablers - These cards generate life
points and they exist precisely to counter the effects of the Hard Hitters. On
your turn, playing these cards will generate life points which can ramp up your
deck's resilience to the effects of Hard Hitters.
3. The ATM's - I call these card types the ATMs because
they are literally there to ramp up your buying power. You need these cards to
be able to buy cards from the marketplace where the better cards are found.
4. The Shields - You will always have some cards that
act as shields. Their main purpose is to stave off Heavy Hitters by absorbing
the damage themselves. When they take a hit equal to their shield strength,
these cards are not removed totally from play but rather move to the player's
discard pile which will be recycled once the player works through his face down
deck of cards.
5. Deck Thinners - Since you will grow your deck
substantially throughout a game, you will definitely need something that purges
the weaker cards from your deck. This is where the Deck Thinners come in. These
are important cards to have in a balanced deck, especially towards the middle
and end game.
As mentioned earlier my first Deck Builder was Star Realms and as
noted the five architypes are present in this game. The "Star Empire"
faction are hitters but then have a secondary feature which leads to your
opponent shedding cards before they start their turn. So essentially if you
normally start a turn with 5 cards in hand, your opponent could use this
faction to force you to start with 4 or fewer cards. The "Machine
Cult" are a mix of Heavy Hitters and Deck Thinners. The "Trade Federation"
cards are the ATM's of this game, they help you rake up purchasing power while
at the same time also acting as Health enablers. Finally the Blobs can really
turn up the combat heat with their synergies while at the same time aiding in
removing the weaker cards from your deck. However while the Machine Cult cards
come in handy at the beginning/middle phases of a game, the Blobs become a real
threat towards the middle/end of a game since most of the serious hitters in
their ranks can be quite expensive. It also pays off to work on synergy with
Blobs, so the more Blob cards you happen to have the better.
Present in all of the above factions in Star Realms are the space
colonies or bases which can primarily act as shields, or to boost synergies for
their specific factions. If you can purchase enough colonies you can safeguard
your health level (or "Authority" as it is called in this game) in
the early to middle stages of the game in order to give you enough time to
build your offence.
I know of two other games which are very much like Star Realms but with
different themes. The first is Hero Realms which is basically Star Realms
with a fantasy theme. There are also some changes such as the use of Champions
rather than colonies or bases which act as shields in the game. As in Star
Realms you will also benefit from working out synergies between the cards
acquired.
In Hero Realms, the "Wild" faction is all about brute force
and can come in handy towards the end of a match, synergies here are very
important. The "Guild" will help you rake up the gold to buy stuff
but quite literally needs the support of other factions in order to be able to
bring out their better cards later in the game. The "Necros" are the
hardest to use in my opinion but they are vital since they are effectively the
Deck Thinner faction. The "Imperial" faction is the easiest to use
and deploy early on, since they offer good defence and attack during the early
game. However using them to finish a match can be tricky which is when most
players will use combinations of other cards from other factions to seal the
deal.
Cthulhu Realms is the third in the Realms
series and this one brings Lovecraftian horror, albeit in a cartoonish manner
to deck building. Here your goal is to rob your opponents of their Sanity by
unleashing minions of the elder Gods at them. Very H.P. Lovecraft! You start
off with a 10 card deck made up of Goons (attack) and Initiates (conjuring
albeit purchasing power). There are four factions in this instance which will
comprise a mix of entities (monsters etc.), artefacts (mostly boosting
your entities) and locations (which act as shields or resource generators).
Synergies here are also very important which means you have to be careful what
you purchase from the ever present marketplace. One thing that Cthulhu Realms
brings to the mix is the ability to choose in between options on the various
cards in order to achieve a specific effect. This can be confusing to the first
time players but it actually offers more flexibility and more diverse outcomes.
Obviously the above are one type of deck builder. The Ascension series of deck builders for
example adopts a less confrontational approach to deck building. In a way,
Ascension feels more Euro than the other games. While you still have the
architypes and the marketplace and deck cycling, the focus is more squarely
placed on point scoring. In fact in Ascension, players can gather victory (also
called honour) points in three distinct ways. They can ramp up their attack to
defeat monsters, they can procure champions that generate victory points on
their turn, or they can ramp up their purchasing power to purchase high value
cards with high victory point scores.
While it may feel easy to just say stick to one strategy for point
scoring in Ascension, in actual fact you cannot. Your strategy during a match
will have to follow with whatever is on the market. If the market is flush with
monsters generating coin wont help, you need fighting points. On the other hand
if your marketplace is loaded with great value cards, having fighting points
won't be as effective, though you still can get some victory points by using
the untapped fighting points on the "Fanatic" card. This latter
action will give you one victory point for every two untapped fighting points.
For some the mechanism used in Ascension may feel less rewarding or too
impersonal. Regardless Ascension is a very popular series of games that has
been around for over 10 years, so they must be getting something right.
Ask anyone who is in the hobby and they will tell you that Deck Building
has gone through some interesting developments in recent years, thanks mostly
to the creativity of some ingenious game designers. Shards of Infinity is precisely one such
game. I personally think of it as the spiritual successor of Star Realms and
Hero Realms.
In Shards of Infinity, players are still driven by the main objective of
bringing their opponent’s health points down from 50 to 0, but it then also
provides another means towards victory via the Mastery track. By reaching a
Mastery level of 30, a player can still snatch a victory even if his opponent/s
might have successfully kept their Health level up through various stratagems.
Another interesting inclusion in Shards of Infinity are the Mercenary Cards.
Some cards on the market, marked as mercenaries, can be activated without being
acquired outright. While this may sound wasteful since you still get to pay
their face value, it adds an element of immediacy or speed to the game by
allowing the player to activate actions on a card right away. Doing so,
however, will automatically banish that card (read remove it from play) the moment
its effect is resolved. Shards of Infinity, in this sense, has brought some
interesting concepts to Deck Building games.
To be fair new pure deck builders have become less frequent as at today.
None have attained the following and fandom attained by the others netioned
earlier. However this does not mean that the deck building mechanism is doomed
or past its "best by" date. In fact many game designers have found
ways to incorporate deck building into their new board games. This year for
instance there are two games which have gained a lot of traction among board
game enthusiasts and which have deck building stitched into their overall
design. The First game is Dune Imperium and the second the Lost Ruins of Arnak. Both use deck building
though the mechanism is intertwined with other actions that constitute the
turns of a game. In fact these two games have so far scored very well on Board
Game Geek, 8.3 and 8.1 respectively, and share some common traits though they have
very distinct themes and artwork. Personally I ended up purchasing the former
since I also happen to be a fan of Frank Herbert's Dune series.
Personally, I love deck building games even though I have a mixed
history when it comes to win rates in any of the games listed above. I like the
card interactions, the way you can go about building your deck based on what
comes out on the market. I particularly like Ascension because it focuses more
on point scoring than on knocking players out of play.
As for player counts, most deck builders work best with 2 players. This
goes for the various Star/Hero/Cthulhu Realms as well as Shards of Infinity.
Ascension functions well at three and four players mainly because the focus is
more on getting the points. Another aspect of Ascension I like is that all
players remain in play till the end, so no one ends up out of the game
twiddling their fingers.
That's just about all I had to say about the subject. Should you wish to
have a closer look at the games I mentioned above you can click on the links I
included within the text and they will take you to Board Game Geek which is a
very reputable website on all things related to Board games.
Have a good one!
