Writing rules and revising them

I never was very good at remembering rules in my head, and the small notes I once tried to write for Wuxia Pian turned out to be a major pain to read later on.
I taught myself to write proper rules for a game, without going too much into detail on the cards itself. I made that mistake too many times. On more than one occasion, I came up with a card game, and went straight to card design, figuring the rules would be written in the end.
This resulted each time in a too big of a hurdle to cross in the end. The amount of cards already designed, the impact they had on the rules (without a single rule being written), made the rulebook a very difficult undertaking. Since my last fiasco with this, I promised myself NOT to design a single card until the cores of the rules were set in stone.
With Wuxia Pian, I finally managed to get a game going, where one of the hardest parts (writing the rules) were already largely set. This makes card design a lot easier, since the framework in which they should operate is already laid out, and I know exactly where their borders are.
During play testing, a lot of (see my last entry) possible problems may come up, and I find it easier to re-write the rules, than to re-design tens of cards.

I spend most of yesterday-afternoon rewriting the rules to implement the changes Vicente and I came up with, and here they are:

http://www.freewebs.com/sccards/Wuxia%20Pian%20game%20_v1-1.pdf

To give you an idea about how to write a good rulebook, just take a look at the dozens of available rulebooks for ccg/tcg´s out there. What I did was to take a rulebook that "kinda" represented my game, in my case: wow tcg, and just deleted all the entries and replacing them with mine. It becomes like a big exam you have to fill in, but luckily, you know the answers to the questions. Next to some deleting and minor editing of the bullet points, its quite easy to do..

I am still on the fence about letting the winning warrior stay in play. I found it pretty lame to force a player with his almost dead warrior to fight a freshly new one. The battle then is no longer about who defeats who, it was all about one player trying to defeat the other warrior as fast as possible, while the other player was just concerned with dealing some wounds and get ready for his new (fresh) warrior. I did not like it. I prefer a fresh start for both players, but with a small handicap for the player winning the last combat (e.g. forced to show and play their warrior + element card first).

The next time we’ll play test, I will make sure to pinpoint the pros and cons of this system and make revisions if necessary.

I feel great that the rules are coming along so fast and with each revision I make, the game feels more “mature” and more diverse.

Next up: creating a basic cost matrix for combat, elopement and warrior cards, and another play test, with a possible 2 or 3 revisions. Hopefully the revisions to the rules will be minor….

And after that.. card design.. hurray!

I think for most game designers, card design is where they get their kicks and thrills.. rule design is pretty dry and can take a lot of time. Card design is where the real creativity is to be found. Card design is also a very big part of making the game fun to play.

I can make a bunch of boring numbers fit together, any monkey can do that, but to make cards texts work together in a smooth way, without being too obvious or creating a “broken” combo, there is where they real challenge is.
Of course I already have like a zillion ideas in my head, but I prefer to not put too much cards on paper, because if the rules turn out to be in need of another change, I do not want to be forced to change tens of cards as well.

I think card design should start with some basic cost matrix, later on filled in with costs for card effects.
Maybe a list of possible card effects is a good idea, to see the possible framework I can work with.
Maybe just basic cards with just numbers will do for now.. I’ll design broken combo’s later on!