Deck Building Games

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!