Card Clash

How To Play:

You must play a card that is the same value or higher as the card in the center. Each turn, your card will be compared to your opponents. The player with the highest card value will take the two lower cards. 

If you don't have a playable card, your turn is skipped.

Repeat the process until the end. The player with the highest score wins!

Description:

This is a simple card game where players must utilize the luck of their initial hand combined with smart decision making to come out on top.

For this game, I wanted to create a card game where it felt like the players felt like they had a strong influence on the outcome of the match. In the original cloned card game, the card playing portion consisted of rock paper scissors which essentially left the game up to chance. By adjusting the fighting of the cards to be based on numbers, players can influence the "strength" of what card they play. While this is all good, it still left the factor of chance on the table. What if a player got a much better hand than their opponent at the beginning? To combat this, the idea was implemented that instead of drawing cards for their hand, players would win cards from the battle phase. By forcing players to discard the top card and take the bottom cards into their hand, players must balance the benefits and downsides to playing their high ranked cards each turn. Furthermore, players have a much larger control as to what cards enter their hand and when.

Some playtesting input that I received for this game involved the way the card taking system worked. Initially, the winning player received the bottom two cards on the field no matter what. However, when the losing player had no cards to play, this left the winning player with an unfair advantage. This was adjusted so that the winning player would only get one card.

Besides the card taking system, there was also input received on the win conditions. In the initial versions of the game, players could win before the turn limit if they reached a score threshold. This threshold was ultimately removed, since it relied too much on the luck of the current card and the players hand. 

Overall, I am glad to have made this game. I have always wanted to make a skill based card game, and it was a good learning experience to implement one in game maker.