Elegance in the Free Realms TCG

So last week I got my first comment on my blog in my Elegant Game Design article. In it, I was discussing elegant games and game systems, and I included the destiny/gem system from the Free Realms TCG in my list.

Now, this inclusion hardly compares to some of the other systems I listed, as my commentor duly noted. The gem system is certainly not as complex as most of the other games that I've included. Yet, I feel it is worth including simply because how the gem system plays into every aspect of the game, is a key consideration in deck construction, and presents interesting design space for future releases of the game, should Topps and SOE ever wish to release additional expansions.

The basic gist of the Free Realms TCG is as follows. Skip the next two paragraphs if you just want to read about the destiny/gem system. The Free Realms TCG is played on a normal game field like Magic: the Gathering but there are only spaces for each player to control three creatures at a time. Players play cards from their hand to their "inventory", which is basically land in Magic, except that it has no color. Any card can be played as a land, but most players play "resources", which are similar to quests in World of Warcraft. These can be played face up as land, and there is generally some benefit which can be harvested from turning them face down. In addition, resource cards generally have good "destiny", which I will get to in a bit.

The cards in your inventory, give you coins every turn that allow you to play more powerful creatures. When you play a creature, you put it in one of the three slots on your side of the board. Once you have spent all of your coins for the turn, or wish to spend no more, the remainder is lost. Then you can attack with your creatures. Creatures either battle the creature in front of them or attack the opponent directly if there is no creature in front of them (so in the above picture, if the red player was attacking, if he chose to attack with the Mauthe Dog it would battle the Chicken Bomber, and if he chose to attack with the Forest Troll Archer it would "hunt", which basically means hit the opponent). When a creature hunts or wins a battle, it scores a card. When a player has scored 12 cards, he or she wins the game.

Destiny draws come into play whenever two creatures are battling. In battles, the attacking creature's attack is compared to the defending creatures defense. Tricks, the game's equivalent of instants, can be used to augment a creature's abilities in battle temporarily, but the attack/defense values are also temporarily increased by destiny draws. In its simplest form, players simply reveal a card from the top of the deck and add the number of gems on the revealed card to the relevant combat stat of their creature. However, the color of the gems also commonly matters, as creatures frequently have text in the form of : Effect; where G is a gem color. In this case, if a required gem is green, and the player reveals a green gem, the effect will trigger. In many cases (such as on the above troll and chicken cards), a proper revealed gem will further increase the attack or defense of the creature. However, there are many creatures who cannot be destroyed if a combination of gems are revealed, who draw a card if the correct gem types are revealed, or untap if the appropriate gem types are revealed.

Therefore, destiny does a number of things for Free Realms:

• It makes battles more exciting and random.
• It enables the designers to put exciting abilities on creatures while simultaneously reinforcing the need to battle with those creatures.
• It allows the designers to add color restrictions to the game without making it difficult for decks that are "off-color" to actually play their cards, since gem color is (at least for now) strictly affiliated with a color in the game.
• It unlocks a great deal of design space without significantly adding to the game's complexity.
  

And, like any other elegant system, it is very easy to understand.

If you haven't tried the Free Realms TCG, and you enjoy examining well-designed game systems, you owe it to yourself to visit the Free Realms virtual world and participate in its Trading Card Game. I do not need to qualify the statement 'The Free Realms TCG is a very well-designed game.'

-Jon