Retalia Game Rules _ Pre-Alpha

The word Retalia come from the word retaliate which explain half of the objective of this game. For this game it will avoid the traditional card game’s ruling and some play style. 

The game design Retalia is simple; it is a game of making counter move against your opponent, making aggressive move to makes your opponent lose the wining objective is not only one of the objective of this game, what makes this game special is that there will be more than two wining condition instead of one unlike all the other traditional card game. The winning condition is easy, whenever a player clean up their entire hand that is when the game terminates. At the same time whoever have the most card in their hand become the second winner. Or whenever a player draws in to a winning condition card that applies to its wining condition a winner will be announced.

The reason and the purpose of this secondary winning condition are so that no one will intentionally team up and target on the isolated player. There will be card that either increase or decrease opponent’s draw power or force opponent to draw or discard card from their hand. There will some card which cannot be used and will be treated as a “dead draw” {‘Dead draw’ refers to a card that is unusable or not helpful the time that it is drawn from the deck or otherwise added to a player’s hand. Depending on the game stat and situation, many otherwise powerful cards could become dead draws.} (YGO definition) When they are remaining in your hand player either want to stack up more or discard them by using card effect or game mechanic. Counter play will be introduced into this game. For example; when player A use a card that force player B to discard two cards, player B can chain a counter card if possible to reflect the effect back to player A.

At this current stage the game is still updating and trying to find the best draw ratio to makes the game fair, but intense at the same time. To really test out the game I’ll be creating a pre-alpha to play test with my friend and add on feature in the future

Balancing a Game

To make a game fun, there is a lot of things element that i need to be aware of. How to make a game sustainable and makes the audience continue playing afterward? How to balance a game while having some surprise wining condition? Well, let's move on and see some problem I am current facing.

What will be the most important challenge is “IMBA” (Imbalanced, http://www.gamasutra.com/), “The slang term for "imbalanced" is heard frequently in online games, particularly in competitive games. Often, claims about "imbalance" come from a person who just lost such a game and is attempting to save face by placing the failure on the game and away from [a player]. Usually, it is actually a combination of [player’s mechanic and game balance]. But sometimes, it really is just the game's fault. Balancing a game is a challenge that man has struggled with for thousands of years.” (Understanding Balance in Video Games by Keith Burgun) in card games there is always a “Game changer card”, a newly introduced element or factor that changes an existing situation or activity in a significant way, hidden in the deck that makes the dynamic change in the game play, which potentially can become part of interesting element or forming a “IMBA” situation.

History and Materials

There is a lot of of different card game out there today, trading card games, family card games and more.

I am an experienced card gamer
For this project, I want to create a family card game with my own ruling

"UNO" is the game that inspire me the most, it is a game that doesn't require communication, the card communicated by them self. UNO is designed in 1971 by Marle Robbins, originally the invention of UNO is inspire by the game "crazy eight", Robbins decided on the rules he was happy with and later on he saved up 8000$ to manufactured the first 5000 UNO game to sell from his shop. "In 1981 the game's popularity caught the interest of a company called International Games, which bought the right to the game for $50,00 plus royalties." (http://entertainmentguide.local.com/)

For my own card game, I want to want to have the idea that card communicate by them self. to be able to achieve that, I need to simplified the game as much as I can to makes player play with out asking the ruling consistently.