What was the process like for creating your game? How did the limitations influence your design?
I've been kicking around the idea of reversing the deckbuilder somehow. I keep returning to a few ways of doing it, but I've never actually made a prototype to test any of the concepts. This was the perfect opportunity. (I went with "deck destruction" but probably a better genre term would be "deckthinner").
Once I settled on the core mechanic of stealing from the main deck as the way of removing cards, a lot of the pieces came together including the theme of espionage.
The limitation of 18 cards really challenged the balancing phase. I used only the "pictures" at first, and it essentially turned into a coin flip with minimal strategy. So, I put numbers on the cards which didn't quite work thematically to make the choices harder.
That made it so that both player lose a lot of the time. I wanted "go wide" strategy (you get caught a lot but end up winning do to how many pieces are on the board) vs a "go tall" strategy (you remove all cards that can catch you).
Putting two symbols on the cards made these strategies less viable.
I think all this could be fixed with a bigger deck size to fine-tune the balance a bit more.
How do you think it turned out?
I think it works great as a proof of concept. As a fun game on its own, it works a few times. Even in this form, there's a lot of interesting decisions. Do you try to remove cards to make your own board safest or do you try to work off the opponent's board to complete their sets? It grants both of you safety when you do that. But if you sabotage one their cards in the end, it ruins your own safety.
This was a somewhat unexpected emergent concept I hadn't planned on.
I'm also not convinced the win/lose condition is quite right for this style game. I went back and forth on it a lot. Conceptually, I think it has to be tied strongly to the "deck playing out" on its own in order to make the deckthinning concept feel meaningful.
Do you have future plans for this game?
Now that I know this type of thing can work, I'd like to try again with a more modern approach. Right now, this is just a simple "card matching" game. I'd be curious to explore card interaction with text on the cards and different types just like in the popular deckbuilders. There's a lot of places it can go.