On Theming

Do you prefer streets to be numbered or named? Would you rather live on 5th Street or Ocean Avenue? Which is more meaningful?

Imagine a deck of 10,000 cards, numbered on one side but blank otherwise. With the right assignments, virtually every card game could be played with this deck. Map clubs/hearts/spades/diamonds to cards 1-13/14-26/27-39/30-52 and you have the standard French-suited playing cards, and every game that comes with them. You can even reduce most board games to this; because the board as printed is fixed, players can just assume it exists as is. Resource counters can be cards. Play tokens can be cards. Spaces, properties, troops can be cards. It might be prohibitively frictional, but it's possible.

In terms of gameplay, this abstraction to 10,000 pieces of paper is complete. The game, then, is not in the components—which track game state—but in how they move and interact. The game is the rules. Different rule assignments are responsible for the mechanics you know and love: hand management, push-your-luck, take-that, you name it.

A game designer's job is to craft rules that evoke interest. That feel unique or intriguing, or are innately exciting. So that the game has value even if stripped down to this barest form.

An artist's job is to give them feeling.

An artist needs to somehow tie game pieces to the human condition. To represent it in a way that people can connect to their life experience, their sense of wonder or emotion. Are you playing a card because it then lets you draw two more, or are you recruiting the Flash, so fast that he can save two more imperiled heroes? This wrapping around the mechanics is what is known as a game's theme. And in many ways, it is much harder to get right.

There isn't a lot of room for a theme that is adaptive enough to make sense when fit around Keeps. Luckily, the elegance of the game lends itself nicely to mysterious, subtle theming. Design language and cues that allow the player to build their own sense of place, but guide them towards a more visceral feeling for the Count, Fool and Friar, and the favors they offer. One that sticks in the mind, attached to past and current experience. The strongest mental images are the ones people construct for themselves.

Thematically, the character whose pile is in front of you is visiting your Keep for the moment. They are physically there, and you can ask them for a favor by drawing. When you do this, they provide one of their cards, and it is your task to make the best use of it. Call these favors in at the right time and in the right way, and you will be able to establish that very keep, safe from future blight.

It helps that each card has a strong personality even from a rote, abstract gameplay perspective. When you play Providence, it really does feel like the hand of God is reaching down and adjusting the field to your liking. Hocus Pocus really does feel like you are making an important move appear out of thin air, playing a (magical) trick on an opponent.

In some games, the name or art for a card may seem untied to its purpose: "The Engineer (4 attack power, 12 defense): For each X card, do Y. Dies when The Architect is played." In Keeps, the names actually came first. When you draw Resurrection, you hardly have to read the effect to know that it lets you take a card from the discard pile, bringing it back to life. It is common in a round of Keeps to hear something like "I Joker-Hocus-Resurrect-Invoke-Tithes, then Dagger-Interest you into Blunder, then Sanction to end it". And it feels like a natural sentence, because the card effects are semantically tied to their name, and so tied to every other time you have used that word.

On the surface, Keeps has a soft theme. But when you start to think about it, or gaze at the card art in your hand for a while as you wait for your opponent to blunder, or find yourself using the verb form of a card name instinctively, you will see how well it fits your mind and itself.

It is, in a word, elegant.

-David