all right well welcome back uh we're now going to start getting into again some more of the meat of working through and thinking about some of these different mechanics that you might want to incorporate into your your games and kind of how do they work what do they look like and maybe you can figure out what is going to work well for you so today we're going to start with deck building and so let me at least start by talking about what is deck building it's it's not about buying wood and lumber and putting something together we in this case we're talking about a card deck and so the general way of thinking about this is that we start with some sort of standard step set we reinvest the proceeds from that out of our deck of hands it doesn't necessarily have to be our deck of hands deck of cards doesn't necessarily have to be cards it could be other things so we reinvest these cards we use these cards to acquire more cards which then add to an upgrade our ability to get more powerful or additional cards or something like that and so the idea is to create a deck of cards that is going to have high synergy which improves your future potential so synergy just means that they're work together well they complement each other and so i'm going to focus on deck building but you'll notice here in this diagram deck building falls under kind of a larger scheme of pool builders where you use things to build larger sets so in deck builders list two examples here dominion and ascension dominion being by far probably the most classic example of deck building because that's all it is the game is just pretty much exclusively a deck building game but you can also build dice and i don't mean just collect dice so the dice forge is is similar to a dice building kind of a pool building because you're you're crafting you're using dice to get more powerful dice but you can add numbers of dice or bag builders so in this case you could um have a bag of tokens with like little chips or something and you you draw from that bag to acquire more chips that then go into that bag or something so there's this idea of building a pool of resources essentially in order to accomplish this and that pool grows and gets more powerful as you you move along so again the focus of this particular lecture is on deck building um you'll see with with reference to dominion because dominion is is just tends to be so clear so most of the time you start with a starting hand that is very standardized so in dominion it's always three estates and seven coppers of your pool of cards from which you draw a starting hand of five so that starting hand of five could be any combination of those things you could start with three estates and two copper or two estates and four copper or uh sorry two estates and i did that backwards doesn't matter different combinations of five cards and so then you're going to use those cards those coppers which are very low value to buy from a pool um other cards which are more powerful than your copper card and there's more powerful cards and then going to hopefully help you get better cards eventually working towards a goal in the case of dominion which is achieving uh victory points through most of the time acquiring provinces which have a high number of victory points so that's the general idea of a deck building game um so these tend to be very attractive because uh people can pick their own strategy they don't feel forced into one to do a particular thing on any given turn there's a lot of options so lots of player freedom lots of autonomy and independence it also tends to scale well with player count that is the more people you add within within reason that gameplay doesn't change uh dramatically and there's not generally speaking a lot of direct player interactions so i can't do things to hurt you as you work on building your deck so we're all kind of working on our own thing separately which is really nice because i feel a sense of accomplishment as my deck grows regardless of how well it's doing compared to yours necessarily uh you're going to end up with a more powerful hand at the end of the game than what you started with even if you end up losing the game in terms of victory points so there's still a sense of [Music] accomplishment and it can also be formulaic which is i have here down as a good thing because you know what's going to happen next you know you take these same three actions you know you do this this this and then you wait till your turn again you do this this this you just do that over and over and over again so uh there's not a ton of surprise and so there's not a ton to memorize beyond like there's all this freedom in terms of what you do but uh the basics in terms of the types of actions you can take are somewhat limited so you don't feel as overwhelmed as you can and some other kinds of things so there's a lot of freedom to to kind of move around and do what you want however there tends to be um with these kinds of things again not always but tends to be a lot of setup and cleanup so what you have what you're seeing here is a standard setup for dominion so that's a lot of i mean those aren't individual cards those are piles of cards so that's that just that takes time they've all got a they've all got to come out of the box they've all got to be arranged they've all got to be shuffled they've all got to be set up then you go through the whole game and then you've got to put it all back um and as much as the the standardized things that you do are the same so you you pay for cards you take actions and then you buy or you then you do that every turn or something like that um you there's there's still so much variation that it can take time to figure out what are the good strategies so when you first start with a hand of if you start with the hand of like three coppers well what do i do right there are in the case of dominion there are 10 cards here how do you have any idea which is the right card to try and go for some of them at least initially are going to be too expensive for you anyway but if you don't understand the game or you don't you've never played it before it can feel kind of like i have just no idea where to start um and it can i have it's you'll notice you're a formulaic as well it's not an error i didn't include it twice by accident to a certain extent that repetitiveness of the actions once you've played a game enough can can become tiresome like okay i know what's going to happen next as opposed to some games where there's a lot more variability and you don't know what's going to happen next and so it depends on what you like and what you're looking for with respect to that so a lot of what you're looking for with deck building games is you're looking for a grind um it's going to take time you're going to build this deck of cards and you are working towards being super efficient about your resources towards the end of the game and it takes time to get there so whereas other games things can change drastically or violently um in sometimes middle late and middle early middle and late stages and all of a sudden one turn you know tons of crazy things happen that doesn't usually happen in deck build building games there is a bit of uncertainty with this so yes you can see the cards in front of you yes you're choosing what you're going to um what you're going to draw but there's some chance because as you draw those cards and you put them into your hand or put them in your deck you're going to shuffle the deck so you don't necessarily know when you draw from that deck which are the five cards you're going to get so even though everybody starts with seven copper and three estates you don't know when you draw that first hand of five cards are you gonna have two cop are you going to have three copper or four or five you know so you don't necessarily know how it's going to start and so there's enough uncertainty there that it gives people who haven't played it as much a bit of a chance you can also run into problems with deck encumbrance so we think about oh getting this huge powerful deck is great but you forget that as you acquire more and more powerful cards you also still have those really weak cards in your hand that you started with and so a lot of times you'll end up with these huge decks where you've got some powerful cards but they're so spread out within the deck that they don't really do you any good um so and a lot of the time with these deck building games you can basically look at with especially with dominion you can look at the you can look at the 10 cards there and at the very start of the game you can you can pick your strategy and then never air from it there's nothing that's going to force you because you are working more or less independently from all the other characters nothing's going to force you to change your mind and so you can kind of determine you can plan your strategy and then the game can basically be about finding out well does my strategy work uh from the get-go and so once you've planned your strategy then it's just a matter of all right i have to sit through this for the next 20 or 30 minutes to find out if my strategy worked kind of thing so i've got here an example of uh this is a situation where someone has really carefully gone to the effort to get some really powerful cards these throne room cards choose an action card in your hand and play it twice but because of the uncertainty of the deck draw they've ended up in a situation where they have no other action cards in their hand got three throne rooms no other action cards and so it's it's a useless hand they can't really do anything with this hand so you can run into situations like that where there's the uncertainty of the hand that you're going to drop can lead to even though your individual cards look very powerful you don't really know how it's going to how it's going to work out so dominion is probably is frequently referred to as one of the purest versions of deck building because the mechanic is the game there's not i mean the game is loosely thematically tied to um kind of medieval type things and there's some flavor text on some of the cards and the pictures but the game is mostly about the mechanic so there are other deck building games that have added extra elements to kind of make things interesting to make things more variable and those kinds of things so marvel's legendary for example is a cooperative deck building game where you play against villains uh and so you're building your own deck and so you have control over that but there's a there's a villain or a mastermind who has some sort of scheme or minions who is routinely kind of coming after you and you're trying to combat that and you don't necessarily know what's going to be happening to you or what's coming out and so you're trying to draw cards and build the deck to combat this so it adds it it adds a bit more complexity and uncertainty even than the dominion does because there's a there's a bit more of an effect on your hand and on your actions from from the the villain who's doing that uh and then you can get other you know you can branch out from this so clank is a good example of a deck building game but it's not a pure deck building game you're actually building your deck um and then using your deck to move around a board and then what you do as you move around the board is going to dictate you know kind of whether you can gather the things you need to win and so it's not just a pure deck building game it's also linked to this other mechanic of board movement and so you start you start up here and then you kind of move through this board from space to space using your deck so you have control over the kinds of cars and the kinds of movements and what you're going to prioritize here but it's your your deck ultimately that's going to get you where you need to go and so it's not just about the deck itself but about kind of how you're moving around the board how you're interacting with the board and other people on the board and so things that happen on the board can change maybe some of your decisions about what you're going to do with your deck or change your strategy mid mid game or something like that so there's variability there that uh you you're not necessarily going to get with a pure deck builder like dominion so those are some interesting ideas of the kinds of things that you can add you may notice that i have i'm not talking about things like magic the gathering or pokemon so trading card games are collectible card names the depending on how you define deck building you might define these as deck builders because you you literally build you you customize and build a deck that you bring to the game basically and so the reason that i have not included those is these tend to be pay to play kinds of games where uh the more money you spend on them the better the kinds of cards that you're going to get and therefore the better decks that you can build and so i'm i'm not really talking about these um as much there's just there's just way too much variety with these um and i would recommend at least for if you're trying to build a board game for this class that you steer away from this kind of idea uh just because there's there's just too much there's too much to it uh but magic and pokemon have both done really well i prefer to think about maybe it's just my personal preference but as deck building is something that happens in game as opposed to something that happens pre-game essentially so one of the other advantages in terms of monetary things is that because you're building a deck it becomes relatively easy to come out with tons and tons of expansions so dominion has multiple multiple expansions and so what they do is they just add more choice it's just more cards that you can draw from so that that seam or that initial tableau of 10 cards that sits there on the table you're always going to have 10 cards but the selection of cards from which you can draw that pool of 10 cards is is expanded to hundreds if not thousands of different possible possibilities which adds a lot of replayability in the sense that every game is going to be different depending on the 10 cards that you have to pick from because your strategies are going to be different because the cards are going to interact and do different things so deck building games have this advantage legendary similarly this is just a few of what are called the big box expansions for legendary there's a variety of smaller expansion packs as well that add you know new superheroes and new abilities and those kind of things that are again adding variability uh to kind of the kinds of strategies that you can bring to the table the kinds of villains that you're facing and therefore yeah so lots lots to be had there with with uh with deck building so that's the idea i'm gonna have you play um dominion for your lab uh assignment so it's not on board game arena it's on its own website it's a free to play the base set of dominion so you just have to create a free account you should be able to play that but that will really introduce you pretty well to what is deck building what does it look like and give you a sense of how do things balance how do you pick a strategy um where's the player interaction is there any what do you like or not like about it so all right so that's deck building