The What and Why of Orbs CCG

Posted July 24, 2024

What is Orbs CCG? Why am I making it?

Orbs CCG is a digital collectible card game that is designed to reduce variance and non-games, to be more skill-testing than typical CCGs, and to allow for asynchronous gameplay.

I first made Orbs CCG back in 2012. At the time, I was playing various digital card games, but not really loving any of them. Magic: the Gathering Online (MtGO) was the only Magic: the Gathering digital client, and it cost money to even get started (it wasn't free-to-play like games are today), and wasn't available on a Mac. There was another CCG I played from a Vietnamese dev team that was free-to-play, but had its own issues (including very few Americans even aware of it, so I had no community to play it with). Hearthstone wasn't even announced yet, although it was probably in development and I just didn't know about it. There was a game called Tyrant on Kongregate, which was designed to be simple enough that it could be "autoplayed" for you by a computer AI; in fact, this was the preferred way people played it, since it was faster to finish a game to get your rewards. One of the best performing mobile games of the time was Rage of Bahamut, which was more of a "card battler" than a strategic CCG, meaning you basically just brainlessly tapped your screen to "play" it, rather than thinking through strategies.

As you can see, there were basically no good strategic digital collectible card games available.

While every game has its strengths and weaknesses, I was extremely frustrated with some of the design decisions in the games I was playing. For example, in Magic: the Gathering, I was frustrated with the mana system, which was a huge source of variance in the game. Losing due to mana flood and mana screw is extremely frustrating. I estimate that a third of games in limited are largely impacted if not essentially decided by mana flood, mana screw, color screw (not drawing the right color lands), or relative mana flood. By relative mana flood, I mean that you were never completely mana flooded, but you drew two or three more lands than your opponent, who instead had two or three more threats. Since limited comes down to a lot of two-for-ones and having the last and best threats remaining on board, relative mana flood can determine the game even when you never felt like you were totally flooded.

It's telling that virtually all modern collectible card games have been designed with some alternative resource system that does not have the variance problem of Magic: the Gathering's land system. The energy system I designed back in 2012 was bold for the time, but widely accepted now. I think it's a great system because it eliminates mana flood and mana screw, while still allowing decks to be flexibly designed (you can include any card in your deck) instead of restricted to one or two factions like in Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra. It has some other properties that are strategically interesting, too, like reading your opponent based on what cards they choose to energize.

I also felt that the power of cards in most CCGs is too high. You can see it now in games like Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering, where most cards in constructed feel like must-remove threats. I think powerful cards are a good thing to include in a game, but the power and value generating potential of cards should be toned down a bit from where these games are currently. Even in limited, it's no fun losing to a bomb rare, especially if it's a mythic rare that's "made for constructed" and is practically unbeatable in limited. I think it's possible to have a gameplay experience that has lower power, giving you more time to play the game and make decisions, and not just losing to a bomb.

In most CCGs, all too often there's very few or no meaningful decisions to make during gameplay. The game is essentially determined by the cards you draw vs the cards your opponent draws, and you have few to no meaningful decisions. It's like "Curvestone" in Hearthstone: first you play your one drop, then your two drop, then your three drop, etc. I'm not claiming this happens all the time, but if you actually review your games, you'll see it happens a lot, much more than I'd like. I've been a chess player for most of my life, and in chess, every single game has many meaningful decisions. That means you're guaranteed to learn from replaying every single game you lost by analyzing the moves. I want to make a CCG game that had more meaningful decisions present in every single game, so you could review you games and learn from them. I don't feel that's possible with other CCGs I've played, since often there were no meaningful decisions during the game.

A key game design goal I had was to make a game that was more skill-testing than the games I was playing. Whereas Hearthstone has cards like Arcane Missile that deal damage to random targets, and Magic: the Gathering makes cards with dice rolling or cards like Cinderheart Giant ("deal 7 damage to a creature an opponent controls chosen at random"), I wanted to make a game that tries to reduce variance to some degree. It still has variance, but it's less than other games.

Finally, back in 2012, I had played a lot of Words with Friends and correspondence chess. These are turn-based games that let you take one turn at a time, then wait for your opponent to take their turn. This asynchronous gameplay is great for people who are busy and can't commit to playing a game in one sitting, or who want to play with their friends but find it difficult to coordinate a time to play together. I wanted (and did) make the first CCG with asynchronous gameplay.

These were the main design goals when I originally made Orbs CCG. In the years since, I've followed the CCG space as a player, and have yet to find a game that addresses these same design goals. In fact, many games seem to be moving in the opposite direction, such as Marvel Snap, which is a game that is designed to be played quickly and with a great deal of randomness. No CCG that I'm aware of has implemented asynchronous gameplay. And every major CCG has experienced significant power creep over the last decade.

For these reasons, I've decided to remake Orbs CCG. I think it's a game that has a lot of potential. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I've enjoyed making it!