Collectible card game design has come a long way since the days of Magic\u2019s blue denial decks.You can almost see the edicts that must have come down from the high halls of design theory: don\u2019t prevent players from doing something they have already legally done. Don\u2019t interrupt their play. Minimize the role of luck in draw order. Who wants to be told that the card they just played has to go back to their hand? Not to mention the sequencing nightmares that could happen with multiple chained effects. This happened, which caused that, which caused that, but that was then canceled. What actually happened, and what didn\u2019t?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Getting rid of interrupts also eliminated the need to have online games give an opponent time to counter a cardplay before it actually went into effect. Things that were annoying to some people in person became simply untenable online, and anathema to good pacing. And thus we got Hearthstone, the ultimate CCG reduced to its most sugary elements, the Coca-Cola syrup without the seltzer water. Hey, I like sugar, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The way to do this, obviously, was to concentrate on creatures, or \u201cminions\u201d as I guess the CCG taxonomists have now labeled them. Direct damage took a hit because there isn\u2019t much that\u2019s fun about \u201ctake two damage\u201d unless you can somehow block it. Hearthstone did some neat things with the idea of the player\u2019s \u201cpersonal weapons,\u201d but it was very clear what the implication of no interrupts was: a menagerie of monsters that got played to the board and then fought each other, like the game that Chewbacca and Luke Skywalker played against each other in the rec room of the USS Enterprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of this is new, and I sure wasn\u2019t the first one to notice. You\u2019d have to go back Card Science magazine, or maybe to the Journal of Collectible Card Gaming, to get the details. But the records are all there for the scholars to examine. Which is why we got Mythgard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Mythgard isn\u2019t out to change any precepts of accepted game design. If it seems \u201cHearthstone-like,\u201d then that\u2019s just because of the current legislative climate which makes it illegal to have people interrupt you while you\u2019re doing something important, or to de-emphasize the role of magical flora and fauna in the world of mesmers and alchemism. Everyone is doing this because everyone knows what is good for him. Or her. Everyone is a singular noun. So don\u2019t go blaming people for following the law. No one makes boardgames with player elimination anymore, either. Because they\u2019re chickenshits. But still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mythgard is definitely not chickenshit. It is the very opposite. Because what Mythgard has done is to double down on this minion fixation in CCGs and turn it into the CCG equivalent of a tactical combat game. With the complexity to match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which starts with terrain. I want to make it very clear here that I don\u2019t have a degree in CCG history, and don\u2019t really know who thought of the idea of having terrain as a thing you placed on the board that you could then put creatures (sorry! minions) on. I vaguely recall a game called Wyvern where you placed cards that needed to be scouted, which was pretty cool if you ask me. But the terrain in Mythgard is brilliant. I don\u2019t care if some guy in Darmstadt in the Early Reformation came up with the idea first: here, it is played to perfection. The board is divided into lanes, and those lanes can accept enchantments which alter the characteristics of minions occupying them. The fact that there are \u201clanes\u201d means that you must be able to move between them. And that there are ways to move faster. And that relative orientation of minions in lanes affects their ability to interact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mythgard takes this tactical space and develops it into the basis for the whole game. There are a dizzying number of abilities that modify a minion\u2019s basic attack\/defense numbers, and it\u2019s the interplay of these abilities that makes each game of Mythgard what it is: a tactical wargame in CCG form. There are all the usual abilities\/restrictions: Alpha Strike disrupts the simultaneous nature of combat, Fragile exacerbates damage, Defender prohibits attacks, Focus increases damage against your lane. It goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fact that all minions are restricted to lanes means that you can use adjacency to enhance (or lessen) effects. All the different units types are there, with the synergistic abilities you might expect. You could have a wolf, which gets benefits from being next to other wolves. But your little faerie grandchild, which is not a wolf or even very concerning, might be transformed into a fearsome canine by means of a card, which represents a spell that inflicts magic. At which point it gets wolf points for adjacency. It\u2019s all in there. For sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can imagine that with so many card interactions, you would have to spend a lot of time evaluating them. Which is exactly what happens: each board position is subject to manipulations by scores of combinations of cards, which can take your carefully planned attack and chop it all to pieces. Until a different card combo manages to make your overlooked throwaway creature suddenly formidable, and then unbeatable. It\u2019s this micro-manipulation of the individual units that makes Mythgard unique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Mythgard is, then, is the Squad Leader of CCGs. Since no one knows what that is, you can call it the X-COM of CCGs. But in X-COM, you nurture your units in a way you don\u2019t in Mythgard. So the Squad Leader comparison really is the better one, because the importance of your units is emergent and dynamic: you\u2019re fighting over terrain, you have a bunch of units with different capabilities, and much as you might be attached to your 9-2 leader, it\u2019s actually your lowly 4-4-7 squad that battle-hardened, and then generated a hero, and now they and your fanatic 8-1 are taking advantage of a break in the enemy line and have flanked his main force. They find a great position behind a stone wall and are now in position to mow down any counterattack with their MMG. After the game, you put that counter away just a little more gently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is, of course, a lot more to put away than that. There are all the \u201cConcealed\u201d markers. \u201cDesperation Morale\u201d all over the place. How about \u201cFirelane\u201d markers? You\u2019re gonna have a ton of those. Maybe some \u201cRubble?\u201d Definitely a lot of \u201cSmoke.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Huh excuse me? Oh, I was talking about Squad Leader. You know, all those markers that keep track of what is happening on the board? There are a lot of them. Mythgard has them in abundance. There are so many unit abilities and conditions, and all of them are integral to the game. Just like Squad Leader. You can\u2019t just say, \u201cIt\u2019s too confusing to play with Desperation Morale, so let\u2019s just leave those out and when units break, they are just Broken.\u201d That would change the whole concept of keeping Broken units under fire to reduce their chance of Rally. Likewise, saying, \u201cMan, Smoke is such a pain, let\u2019s just play without it\u201d would immediately shift the balance of any scenario where an attacker had to cross a street under fire. Same with Firelanes, without which the entire military concept of machine gun placement would have to be re-written. This stuff exists for a reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so it does in Mythgard. If you have lanes, you need to have something that breaks the lanes. That\u2019s the \u201cAgile\u201d ability. A \u201cDefender\u201d forces opposing units to attack it, even if adjacent lanes are occupied. \u201cSwift\u201d units can move two lanes, or move one lane and then attack. There are so many abilities and conditions that you have to carefully mouse over every minion (and other things at the side of the screen) to really understand what is happening, or could<\/em> happen, which is the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mythgard uses some symbols and icons to try and make this more manageable at a glance, but very quickly gives up. \u201cI can\u2019t fit all that stuff in here, so I\u2019m not gonna,\u201d it says with a resigned shrug and sort of aggrieved mien, as though it knew you were going to ask it to do stuff it really didn\u2019t want to do, and doesn\u2019t see why it should. This is a game that expects you to assimilate all the cards and abilities through repeated experience, not through some sort of revolution in interface graphic design. Neither does Squad Leader. If you want to see what\u2019s under the \u201cWound\u201d counter, pick it up if you have to. I mean, don\u2019t you remember wounding that 8-0 leader three turns ago? That\u2019s him. See that kind of barely visible greenish twinkle around that Forlorn Spirit? That\u2019s the Yana Virus you played last turn. Don\u2019t you remember? C\u2019mon, if you mouse over the card it even says \u201cBlight 1.\u201d Can\u2019t you try and pay closer attention?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pay attention. If your third-grade teacher could only have told you: unless you learn better study habits, you aren\u2019t going to have the discipline to mouse over every unit in a digital collectible card game forty-five years from now that you couldn\u2019t conceive of in your wildest science fiction dreams about what entertainment will be like when you\u2019re an adult. It sure would have been a better argument than, \u201cit\u2019s good for you,\u201d or \u201cbecause I said so.\u201d But five minutes into a game against the bot that Rhino Games has put in front of me because the servers are, well, barren, I can\u2019t be bothered. The bot is playing a bunch of cards I have never seen. Despite the fact that the game has been extremely generous to me with free packs and whatnot for the past ten hours of play. \u201cCome on,\u201d it pleads. \u201cTake some more cards.\u201d \u201cMake a new deck, with different colors. It will be great!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And sure, it will be, for a little while. Mythgard really<\/em> wants you to explore and enjoy the different game possibilities, so it offers you coins (which can buy card packs) for doing just about anything. Play three games, get some coins. Kill twenty minions, get some coins. If you play enough cards of a certain color, you get coins. But then the easiest thing to level up is to play a certain number of cards of a different color. So off you go to make a purple deck, because if you do, and you play with it for like fifteen minutes, you\u2019ll get some coins. It\u2019s like Rhino Games is the Federal Reserve of CCGs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It works, to a point. I was playing with some blue cards, full of ice and Viking theme, and then decided to move over to a weird Japanese ninja-slash-yakuza-slash-idunno purple color, and found these common units that gave you abilities when they dealt damage to the opposing player. So I took them and added them to the Vikings. Mythgard makes it very easy to make multi-color decks, because the cards themselves can be spent for permanent color-specific mana. Furthermore, spending a card in this way just puts it back in your draw deck. Like I said, I don\u2019t have a degree in CCG and never passed the certifying exam. So I don\u2019t know if someone else did it first, or better, or what. But I sure can appreciate this latest iteration, if that\u2019s what it turns out to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The interaction of a bunch of different units with wildly varying abilities and ways to combine them, played on a simple map with terrain that can arrive as by the hand of God, is its own cross-genre genre. An uber-genre. The genre of making things fight other things with really fiddly levels of interactive detail. Sometimes the terrain is fixed. Sometimes the movement space is more expansive. Sometimes the units are taken from history, and sometimes from the history of our fantasies. It\u2019s an elf, it\u2019s a bugbear, it\u2019s a fallschirmj\u00e4ger. All in the service of emergent story, and things that happen in unexpected and memorable ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This, to me, is what is \u201cspecial\u201d about Mythgard. I was amused to read the assertion in Tom\u2019s review that Mythgard is \u201cadult.\u201d When I accidentally left the game running on my computer and my wife came and sat in my chair, she answered my statement that I was \u201ctrying out this adult online CCG\u201d with, \u201cYeah, you mean \u2018adult\u2019 like \u2018porn,\u2019 right?\u201d I understand the pivot away from a juvenile audience pressuring its parents for game money, towards one in more control of its own finances, but the opposite of \u201ccartoony\u201d is not \u201cadult.\u201d The opposite of \u201ccartoony\u201d is \u201cnot cartoony.\u201d Mythgard is no more adult than your average R-rated movie. The artwork has no special insights into human experience, other than the usual ones about why wyverns are constantly attacking commercial airliners. It\u2019s sufficiently transgressive to make 25-year-olds feel like they\u2019re giving the finger to \u201cthe system\u201d while still paying $9.99 for digital cards on their Chase Sapphire Rewards Visa. I get it. I was counter-cultural, once, myself: I dyed my hair, wore black, listened to The Smiths, and voted for Pat Buchanan. Nothing says \u201cnot for kids\u201d like a pair of big buttcheeks and a copy of The Susan Sontag Reader. Or a picture of Susan Sontag in tight pants. You could have made her the model for the Grease Monkey, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t mistake me, here: Mythgard would be a much worse game if it tried to express a philosophy, or make any real sense of its chaotic universe. Setting is great when it lets you fill in the details. I think the best game is one where a coherent system of mechanics doesn\u2019t undermine whatever lore there is, and lets you justify the things you do via game mechanics through your own set of overarching logic. I have to admit I haven\u2019t cared to do this. Maybe that\u2019s my own personal failing. But I\u2019m used to having the crutch of a historical situation to provide me with context. The mechanics themselves are interesting enough in themselves to keep my attention, at least until I get tired of the map limitation in which my units can only be on my side, in one of the lanes. At which point, I start thinking: what if I could move my units around even more? And take advantage of terrain that was already there? But this would simply be a reverse-engineering of the boardgames I had already enjoyed, only with wyverns and enchanted deserts. Which is ultimately what will likely make me put Mythgard down in the near future. Because I know there is a way to get giant snakes to fight minotaurs and wizened magicians without locking them into single spaces that they can move out of only with difficulty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Time to pull out Titan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Collectible card game design has come a long way since the days of Magic\u2019s blue denial decks.You can almost see the edicts that must have come down from the high halls of design theory: don\u2019t prevent players from doing something they have already legally done. Don\u2019t interrupt their play. Minimize the role of luck in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1656,"featured_media":51764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"yoast_head":"\n