A Boring Post About my Balatro Inspired Wargame I'm Writing on my Phone

I don't even know if I can get an image in here.

It might be working.

For the last week I've been tooling with a card combat system. It started when I made an impromptu RPG while we were chilling at the park that only used a D6. I was toying with a campfire RPG that could be played anywhere and put together quickly before realizing I'm not the first to get to that idea, and then I got into the idea of replacing dice with a deck of cards and…well, curiosity killed the cat I guess.

I've always been interested in Poker. I'm bad at Poker mostly because I only play strategically until I start winning and then I get cocky and lose all of my money. But the game is great, especially Hold ‘Em, and it got me into a bunch of solitaire variants that I wasted an entire week on. I also wasted a week reading about Poker theory and probability and since I've been very interested in the use of cards in other games.

In theory there is no inherent benefit to using cards over dice if all you are going to do is make cards a simulacrum of dice, which is what I did in the beginning before realizing it was boring and unsatisfying. Cards have a use but this mostly comes through hand management, and so I shifted over to Poker invariably since there is something so satisfying about using elements of that game in other games.

That's a theme you might see here. My project before this was turning Monopoly into some sort of Calvinball nightmare with roleplaying and combat elements and I don't think my kids have ever had more fun with a game. I just find the idea of taking something that exists and tweaking it to give it new life.

Have I mentioned Balatro yet? Balatro is a little more…pure in its design, in that it is still Poker and is squarely focused on Poker, but that with a couple of extra systems plopped on top turned Poker into some embarassing wealth of riches to which I became immediately addicted too. I limit my time with Balatro and despite playing it more recently as I am shamelessly studying it in order to figure out the general “feel”, particularly how often you can get to at LEAST a pair in your hand with minimal discards, I hadn't touched it since it first came out on PC because the demon is just too strong. I hate “just one more round” games because for me there is no such thing. There are just rounds all the way down…s.

But the challenge to taking a more traditional wargaming or otherwise adjacent tabletop combat system and smushing it into Poker like some bizarre Cronenberg Fly hybrid is really understanding just how probable it is you are going to get different hands. Because hands are the lifeblood of Poker and if Poker is effectively your game engine, balancing it incorrectly can mean lots of turns going by where no one is doing anything. And when no one is doing anything no one wants to play your game.

The way Cardhammer…er…whatever we are calling it works is that you have units on a board that can move a certain distance during a move action and then can do a few other things. Attacking of course is primary because the game is about plastic men murdering one another. But players can also discard cards from their hand and replace them with new ones, can temporarily increase their max hand size which for new defaults to 7 over the traditional 5 since 5 just wasn't very consistent, can burn cards meaning they are removed from their standard 52 card deck for the entirety of the match, allowing players to refine their deck to be able to get more specific results, and all of these things are tied to action points meaning that better units can often do several of these things in a given turn.

This is damning evidence of me using AI to shamelessly do math I am not capable of doing. This is demonstrative of the current very Balatro styled 7 card hand system…or is it six? I can't say it's a direct replication because I didn't refer to Balatro much specifically when doing this but do know that you get more cards in your hand than a standard Poker game.

Every unit can do a basic melee attack with only a pair in their hand so this ensure that most of the time you will be able to do something in a turn even if that thing is not super impressive. Two pairs would allow for a ranged attack, a three of a kind of allow for you to do X and Y and the other hand, and so on, all the way to the Royal Flush, which triggers an ultimate ability specific to that army. The Royal Flush doth not come easily so when it happens it's really meant to be a game changer.

In turn, the defending player is allowed to react, playing equal or better hands in retaliation in order to absorb damage or counter-attack, leading to some entertaining back and forth.

I won't talk much about lore because it's fairly restrained at this point. I did write a ton of gobbledygook about a god call the Tetragram who is four natures in one, where each nature is represented by a suit. While most units are going to be going for the same general hands in order to use abilities, each unit has an Affinity which essentially just means your abilities are modified to be better if the cards you are playing in those hands are the same suit as your Affinity. In addition to that are unique hands that are tied to what a Unit has in its inventory, the proverbial Warhammer 40k “wargear” of our game. These might be modified straits or flushes, or even a specific hand of cards.

If there is a way to not have this being tied into lore feeling hokey, I haven't found it and frankly, whatever. I was going to steal from ancient scripture at some point or another when justifying the universe we are developing, better to get it out of the way early.

I think the most satisfying part of the process have been the possibilities inherent in a system like this. It's basically a number crunching game that you paint with theme.

Oh God…is this…is this a Eurogame? Have I invented a Eurogame? Say it isn't so.

Our initial idea was really, how would you run something like Dragonball in an RPG/wargame context? Something that feels like a real back and forth of exchanged blows?

You can do it with dice. I know someone did. But I never played it, and our Dragonball Z inspired world is distinctly more Roman in its approach. The Space Marines of our world are called Spartans because that influence is clearly there and also because we aren't very creative. But the idea is that fight like the proverbial Saiyans of Dragonball because we were always interested in a culture of burly guys who angrily fight entire planets. It's kind of like fan fiction with slightly less cringe. But maybe more depending on how you look at it.

Mechanically I've been playing a lot of 40k and I just really love Character units. It's really satisfying to take some giant Marine with a power sword and watch them chop through an entire group of cultists. Anyone who has followed me for awhile will know I am at least vaguely interested in mass combat, but I also like Dynasty Warriors and the idea of chopping through dozens of regular dudes at once and minions from D&D 4th edition were the closest I've seen D&D try to approximate that with…dubious results. Our game definitely supports that, with bigger blobs of guys typically having their HP represented by individual guys, where when you do five damage to that unit, your friend gets to watch in horror as your single man slaughter unit removes five dudes from the table.

But even this idea was derivative to a degree because when I was thinking about cards and Dragonball, I was reminded of this strange card based Dragonball RPG for the Super Famicom that I played with a bad translation when I was twelve. I'm also pretty sure it's nothing like what we are doing, but it gave me the questionable idea that somehow, Dragonball as a tabletop RPG would be best served with cards.

So apart from refining my initially haphazard and poorly equipped Chaos Space Marine army to be able to survive a 1000 point game, this is what I've been up too. I'm not sure what else I can share about the general setting as I'm not solely responsible for creating it, but for now the focus is really mechanically oriented.

What this is actually going to end up materializing as, if anything, I'm not ready to say. It is decidedly turn based, and that's why it's so easy to prototype it in an analog fashion - we just use the same tools we use to player Warhammer online. But it may not end up being a tabletop game, it may end up being digital.

Right now I'm not worried about it. I've worked on a bunch of ideas this last year and most of them have either been reworked into this or dropped altogether. We do a lot of designing together, my mysterious best friend and I who run a company for tax purposes called Mycelium Games, and more often then not, smaller ideas tend to get rolled into bigger ones down the road. Where this one will go is anyone's business but I do know this - Balatro is a great game and you should play it.