It's All In The Cards

A two articles related to Collectible Card Games, with some math and game design aspects.


Gotta Catch 'em All? Just how many of those collectible card pack do you have to buy in order to get a complete collection, or maybe just that one card you are looking for. Not About Apples has a good discussion of the problem:

 Getting a Complete Collection.

[Image kotaku.com]

Once you figure out how many cards you might have to buy, you could start to wonder if getting into such a game is a good idea in the first place. Ethan Ham article at GameStudies.org discusses problems and answers to creating balance in a CCG.

Rarity and Power: Balance in Collectible Object Games

For collectible card games (CCGs), game designers often limit the availability of cards that have a particularly powerful gameplay effect. The conventional wisdom is that the more powerful a card is, the more rare it should be. The long-term implications of such an approach can have negative consequences on a game’s suitability for casual play. Digital Addiction (a company that produced online, collectible card games in the 1990s) developed a different game design philosophy for balancing collectible card games. The approach called for the most obviously and generally useful cards to be the most common and to equate rarity to specialization rather than raw power.

If you need more math about math and cards, then John Cook has it for you at The Endeavour:

Chances a card doesn’t move in a shuffle

Finally, this doesn't have anything directly to do with cards, but it's still a good read on understanding probability:

Game Developer Column 9: Playing the Odds