ConjuRing is a trading card game specifically built for up to four players. From the project’s origins, we set out to create a casual and approachable take on the trading card game genre that retained the depth needed establish an enthusiastic fan base. In crafting that depth, we found inspiration in the mechanics of light euro-style board games. These highly interactive experiences influenced our core betting system, in which players compete for to place the most bets on the winning fighter.
Design Statement
I worked as a game designer and producer of this game. I created the core ruleset, card design, UI/UX design of this game.
Researching TCGs
With an initial creative goal of creating a trading card game, we started this project by playing through several TCGs. After documenting the positives and negatives, we also talked about the eurogame mechanisms that we would like to include in this game. We had some major takeaways about many aspects including, having a central characters, quick and fast turns, high interaction between players, cards as resources to spend.
Rapid Prototyping
Over the course of a year, we designed and developed seven iterations of the game. Initially started from being overly complicated to reducing complexity, we tried to design a complex enough game targeted at TCG audiences. We playtested each iteration with audiences both within TCG community as well as non-tcg players.
Deck Design
The final polished version of ConjuRing consist of four pre constructed decks and some cards in each color for deck building. We had different design philosophy in each decks.
Aggro Hot Dog – Red
The red deck we designed is the most straight forward aggro deck in our game. The cards in the red archetype are very straightforward to achieving the objective of the game – knocking out the opposing fighter with its power and fight spells. Since the game is about betting on which fighter is going to win, the red archetype fights and creates the opportunity itself.
However, if other players see an aggressive deck is on the table, they could strategically choose to bet on the aggro player’s side as well to take advantage.
Sacrifice Critter – Purple
Purple archetype consists these little critters who lives in the forest and the powerful sorcerers who sacrifices the critters to cast spells. We designed this archetype to have a more mid-range strategy. Playing critter spells to get early advantage and sacrifice them to get significantly stronger effect.
Since the game plays in three rounds, the purple deck will be at its strongest during the second round of the game, where it will get a lot of value from the first round build up. It also has the potential to combo off since the card Critter Benefactor is the only card in the entire game that could produce action point.
Shifting and Progress – Green
If the red and purple decks are direct translation of TCG concepts, the green deck represents the unique combat design of our game. The green archetype represents these retro-futuristic city where people are crazy about advancing and upgrading, making useless inventions everyday. The shift mechanic represents the flexibility of the spellbook system of our game. Each player has 8 slots in front of them and whenever they fight for a fighter, they will roll numbers of six sided dice and resolve the card on the rolled number’s slot.
This means the spell in the lower number slots have higher chance triggering than the higher number slot. The green archetype utilize that as a strategy as they can shift the cards in higher number slots to lower number, so they have a much higher chance casting a powerful spell than other archtypes.
Synergy and adjacency – Blue
For the last archetype, these sea creature band, the blue archetype features an aggro strategy that requires player to play carefully. Compare to the red deck, the blue cards often have conditions on what they can or cannot get benefit from. It also introduces a new concept of adjacency, where the player gets benefit when playing cards next to each other in slots.
Conclusion
We are very proud of what we have produced in the end as a polished board game. ConjuRing is currently being pitched to publishers as either a updating TCG or a self-contained board game!
Check out this very cool trailer:
Chros Wang 