It’s been a hot minute since my last post, wherein I explained why I wouldn’t be doing weekly posts anymore, breaking one of the goals I set out with this year. But I promised to not just stop posts entirely, so here’s one that I had intended to do a while ago. It came to mind again after a fun weekend of playing games at PAX West, where one tends to have conversations about different games. This post is going to be a short explanation on how I feel about different deck-building games.
I’m approaching this topic in a similar way to how I talked about puzzle games a while ago. When it comes to puzzle games, I am always interested in cool mechanics and feeling smart when I figure something out, but I tend to gravitate towards puzzle games that are more meditative rather than difficult. Now that I have played a number of “deck-building” games, I find that I also gravitate towards certain kinds versus others.
I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m not going to be using deck-building in the strictest sense of the term. In this context I’m using it to mean any game that involves playing with a deck of cards that are built using a subset of the full range of available cards, either during or before a game. So I am talking about games like Dominion, which is a pure deck-building game, and games like Magic: The Gathering, which falls under collectible card game. Why include both of these genres? Well, as you might have already guessed, I like one and not the other.
And when I say I don’t like one side of these games, it has very little to do with the game itself. If I sit down to play a game with a deck of cards that all do different things, I’m going to have a good time with it. From this you can probably also now guess that it’s the stuff outside of the game that I don’t like. Believe me, I really want to love games like Magic and Hearthstone because they really are fun to play. But I just can’t get into spending the time it takes to build decks outside the game. I find it tedious and stressful.
What I love so much about Dominion is that, even though there are hundreds of different cards you can have in a game, you don’t have to worry about all of them when you sit down to play. You get a subset and that’s all that matters for the game at hand. So forming a strategy around what cards to get happens during the early part of the game and it doesn’t take a large amount of effort because of the limited pool. At any given time Magic and Hearthstone also have hundreds of cards, but you have to look at the whole thing and figure out what to get before you even sit down to play. Sure you could get around this by just looking up successful decks, but that’s removing a big part of the game’s appeal. Some people love it, but it’s not for me.
This was not much of a surprise to me since I’ve known it for years. I haven’t tried to pick up Magic at all because I knew in high school that it wasn’t for me. Hearthstone I’ve dipped into a couple times, but each time I remember why I bounced off before. It’s really more FOMO than anything else that keeps me wanting to get into it, so I need to get better at simply ignoring that impulse. Especially when I have other deck-building games that I do actually like.
The real reason the topic came to mind a few months ago was because I had been starting to dabble in more games that have deck-building mechanics as part of a larger game. And the distinction between the ones I really got into and the ones I didn’t is basically the same.
The first one that piqued my interest was Slay the Spire, back when it had just gotten into early access. Not because I was excited for it, but because everyone I knew was raving about it. And I can see why. Though I haven’t put as much time into it as I would like, it definitely scratches that itch. Rogue-likes are another genre of games that tend to be hit or miss for me, so I was pleasantly surprised that it turns out to work very well with building a deck to fight sets of monsters. Like other good deck-building games, it starts out with standard stuff and you get choices as you go along about what to do so you don’t have to think too much about it. After enough plays you know the cards enough to know when to skip taking new stuff since you don’t want an overfilled deck. There is also some sense of persistence between plays, though I prefer more in my rogue-likes. But on the whole I really like it, and I would play it more if the runs were shorter.
A while after that another game that used a deck of cards to do combat in a single-player game came out, Steamworld Quest. It wasn’t as widely talked about as Slay the Spire, but what I heard from people who did play it was that it was like Slay the Spire with a real RPG wrapped around it. I figured, I like both of those things, so I gave it a shot. For the first five hours or so I was enjoying it, though I quickly realized it wasn’t quite the Slay the Spire I heard about. Then after another five hours, I realized it was actually Hearthstone with an RPG wrapped around it. Yes, the combat is fun enough to keep me interested, but the actual deck-building part is not fun for the same reason I don’t like making decks in Magic. Too many characters with too many cards, and the deck you build is way too small to have any real fun with the cards you get. Maybe that changes later in the game and you get to have more cards or abilities that let you do more, but I don’t know if I want to play enough to find out.
In a similar vein, another game I got right around the same time was the digital copy of Pathfinder: Adventures. Definitely not the kind of game I would buy the physical copy of, but as a digital game it works well enough. Since it’s a board game rather than a video game, it’s closer in my mind to a game like Gloomhaven than Steamworld Quest, but when you play it digitally where you control all the characters, it does get closer to the latter. What makes Adventures a little more compelling for me is that it does a better job of keeping the options limited, so I’m not building decks outside the game as much. Each character is limited to a small set of cards they can take into battle like Steamworld Quest, but you figure out what cards to put into it after each scenario, so you’re really upgrading your deck as you go along rather than picking a subset from a large pool. I really like that aspect, as well as the choices you have to make when you upgrade your characters. Where Adventures falls short for me is in the actual game part. After you play a few scenarios, you basically know how the game goes and it doesn’t seem to change much from there. That part is probably more fun as a physical game, though maybe not since the game isn’t that highly regarded. Gloomhaven so far scratches the same itch in a better way.
Speaking of Gloomhaven, I considered whether that counts as a deck-building game enough to include it as a comparison point, but I don’t think so. You don’t change your character’s deck of cards enough to consider it deck-building, plus a big component of that mechanic is adding more cards to it as you play. You will do that playing Pathfinder: Adventures, but not Gloomhaven. I do still like Gloomhaven a lot though, and will probably write a post about it sometime in the future.
In conclusion, Dominion style games are fun for me, Magic style games are not. I don’t know if I need more deck-building games like Dominion and Slay the Spire, as they both do their thing quite well and I don’t need a bunch of clones. But I do want more games that use card decks as a main mechanic to be closer to those than the Hearthstones of the world.
Honestly, if I had more time, that’d be a fun thing to design myself.