Week 09 - Elemental Wars

The four fantasy elements are not an unusual theme, in fact they are a core component in many fantasy worlds like Avatar- even in my own creative worlds. Earth, air, fire, and water became the core components to our version of ‘Bartok’, which became known as ‘Elemental Wars’. Like many of our fellow groups, our first source of inspiration for moves was Uno, a very similar card game. However, ‘Elemental Wars’ in this aspect was no different from even the most popular Trading Card Game (TCG) in that “the game’s most influential ancestor is a game for which I have no end of respect: Cosmic Encounter” was ‘Magic’s version of our inspirational ‘Uno’ (Garfield 539).

However, a roadblock emerged. We created rules for the face card, as most traditional games do, but none of them really encapsulated our theme of the four fantasy elements. Those rules were as follows:

• King: The next player draws 3 cards, stackable.
• Queen: Switch hands with someone
• Jack: Switch Suits
• Ace: Either 1 or 11. Or, you can play an ace on an ace and change the suit.
• Joker: New rule overridden when another joker is played. (Think the rule card in King’s Cup)

Many games use Ace as either one or 11, such as Blackjack and it feels that just as many games use Jokers as a kind of wild card. Regardless, our rules were quite standard. Except for a special card that was based on one in the deck that appeared. A double-sided card that allows a player to use any of the eight wild card values. These eight ‘wild cards’ became the elemental suit’s abilities, each one sitting on a number seven or two card. Number two of any of the four suit’s was the more powerful and greatly impacted the way the game was played and added a fair amount of strategy. However, much like ‘Magic: The Gathering’, “the rules are much the same now as they were in the early stages of play testing”  we just added more for more variety and replayability on top of retrofitting the game to our theme (Garfield 542).

This was also a curse as  “it was not just determining the right card mix that players and designers found challenging” (Garfield 546). It was the spread of the cards and players not knowing how they worked unless referencing the rules. Unlike ‘Magic: The Gathering’, where it was initially thought to be “too simple” due to the card rules printed on them, ours was too challenging because we did not have the rules printed onto the cards. Of course, ours was a paper prototype unlike Magic, but it was an oversight that caused confusion and unnecessary clutter of the mind and will be taken into consideration for future projects.

Lastly, ours had a story-like aspect to it that came to be due to the theme. The four elements are warring against each other, and you want to be victorious. It gave incentive and “in its structured flexibility, this game environment is much like a roleplay world” (Garfield 549). A world that could be expanded if we had time, perhaps even developing into a fully lore-based card game like ‘Control’ or ‘Magic...’ itself. This project has shown that even very different games can be very similar, whether through development or isolated cases like story, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.