On Difficulty and Decision Making

As people make the transition from beginner to seasoned Keeps veteran (though I am not sure even I have made it quite that far), they appear to undergo a kind of metamorphosis. And it is marked by distinct stages.

A brand new player can be daunted by the fact that every card is unique. Just like any game, it can be frustrating not knowing what the optimal play is due to a lack of game knowledge. The good news is that joy of discovering the cards and their accompanying strategies/interactions tends to make up for it. And it helps that the rules themselves are actually dead simple. One symptom common to these players is so-called "draw withdrawal", where the player becomes paralyzed in analyzing what they can do with the cards in their hand, and so just keeps drawing cards, too unsure to maneuver. This player tends to take quicker turns, as they are just testing what works and what is possible.

Once a player gets a general sense of each card under their belt, they begin to grow confident. They start playing their cards earlier and sometimes find novel strategies that give other players trouble or pause. In some sense, they become a bit more predictable as they learn more optimal uses for the cards, which can be an opening for attack. But their strengthening cadence starts to create a more imposing threat at the table. They play fast and loose.

Some people stop there-and that's OK! If they enjoy the game their own way, who could complain. But the most advanced Keeps sharks I know have played enough of the game that even complex chained strategies are automatic to them. Their turns are either very long, when they encounter an unfamiliar situation and need to fully calculate the most correct play, or very short, when they identify the scenario as a position or play they have been close to before. But in that quick playing, that mechanical assumption of "I know what will happen here", that is where you will find their weakness. It's dangerous to automate any thinking in Keeps, as there is always some trick or variable unaccounted for. So no matter how adept your opponent, if they assume a situation will play out one way, they may have assumed too much. Sometimes experience can be a burden!

What goes through these players' heads? I designed Keeps to have a search tree roughly halfway between the simple one-shot decisions of something like Love Letter or Exploding Kittens and the massively expansive fog-of-war complexity of something like Go or Civilization. The prior case is satisfying but feels wanting; the latter case is frustratingly impossible to make optimal decisions in. If you have played Slay the Spire, I was aiming at the feeling of finding the correct order to play a given hand in during a (difficult) fight. The decision tree in Keeps is elaborate enough to allow for some awesome interactions and synergies, but not so much so that it inhibits the ability to construct and anticipate the tree. And, importantly, each decision carries a genuine and meaningful impact. Not just tweaking a multiplier by 3%.

But how does this actually manifest in-game? You might know the feeling. Looking through the cards in your hand, playing out each of their effects and the effects of those effects in your head. Looking a player in the eyes, suspicious, asking "do you really have that card...?". The tension of setting up a plan, hoping no one recognizes it and makes a move to disrupt your concluding it next turn. It's just that in Keeps, it feels so especially gratifying and clear, like a a clean rain forming from dense fog.

It's funny, the card Resurrection allows a player to take any one card from the discard into their hand. We have learned to recognize when someone draws it because their gaze immediately wanders to scrutinize the discard pile, playing out the possible futures of resurrecting. So the experienced have equally learned NOT to do this when drawing Resurrection, to avoid revealing their acquiring a powerful card!

In Keeps, the players cultivate a wonderfully expressive search tree: branching on decisions, pruning sere losses and dead leaves…watching it develop it in your mind, unveiling game states until you find that one final hidden bloom, a delicate and precious flower of victory.

And OH is it BEAUTIFUL!

-David