Week 10 - Time to BATTLE BATTLE!

On Tuesday, we were introduced to “Battle Battle,” a dice and card game designed to help learn about balancing games. Everyone was given five initial cards: A rule card, a ‘vanilla’ card, and three random character cards. The Vanilla card acted as the control, or the element that remained unchanged, and the three characters I received were the assassin, the game designer, and the Dalek. All of the character cards had an advantageous power that was available to use throughout a game, activated usually through the use of tokens or an action taken. The goal of “Battle Battle” outside of practicing balancing? Winning. Every unit has a finite amount of health and tokens, reducing your opponent’s hit points, or HP, meant victory.

All of these attributes combined were used to show how changing different attributes can be used to balance games, not just editing powers. Our playtesting showed that the cards were quite equal opponents against each other, but the real change emerged when we had to make our own. Everyone was given two blank “Battle Battle” cards and were told to make our own- both with a theme. This was the beginning of the introduction to our assignment and the introduction to truly designing for fairness. 

Dice by nature are based on probability, each number having 1/6th of  a change of being landed on. Some, like myself, fall outside of this trend but largely it is true. Dice rolls were the indicators for if you won or lost a round, however, many cards changed the rolls. For example, a fellow class member made it so most rolls would end in a tie, which could initially seem unfair. But for cards akin to my custom ‘Ace’ card, it was a good fit. This ended up being a great example of a “case where one side has an advantage over the other and the game still seems fair” (Schell). Despite it being a fair card, it could also be considered unfair by keeping players in a stand-still. As “fairness is key to how players perceive randomness,” the card was slightly changed to give opponents a sense of security rather than enforcing the idea that the “randomness limits their chances at victory” (Hiwiller).

My card, the ‘Ace, ended up being nearly too balanced with a perfect win-loss ratio. While on one hand this is desired, on the other hand it can show a lack of faith to the theme. In addition to its token using ‘ace up my sleeve’ ability, there is also a last ditch effort ability that returns the singular token to the ace when it hits one HP. This gave the card an edge while keeping it largely fair and relying a bit more on strategy. It forces the player to take action, to force the player into strategically making choices. From this point, as a play-tester you ask yourself “how did the player make the choice?” and “what is the result of the choice?” (Hiwiller). The ‘ace up my sleeve’ ability makes any roll a 6, and with one token, you must choose to use it wisely. However, making it so the token can be returned adds thoughts of: should you save it still, should you risk being on low health for victory?, will the other player be low enough on hit points to make spending it now worth it? The randomness, while still important, now gives way to more strategy and makes the game more fair.

The goal for our next project is to make a more cooperative game based on “Battle Battle”, and after being able to choose our groups this time, I am quite excited to see how the creations will all turn out.