The Idea and the Journey

People keep asking me: "How did you come up with it?". I don't really know how to approach the question. I hope a story will suffice.

For a long time, I had been meaning to sit and think up a novel card game for the standard 52-card deck. One night, at a friend's place for dinner, we got to the topic of running an internal boardgame-jam (yeah, that's the kind of friends I have). I recall the spontaneous base idea was that there should be different piles with different properties, so that navigating the piles was a core component of the game (veterans know the original name was to be "Piles"... good switch). Living in different states kept the game jam from materializing, but the idea stuck with me deep into that night.

Pulling up a blank Google doc, I quickly realized that the 52 cards were too limiting to make the piles meaningfully distinct. So I started jotting cool effects for cards:

Thank docs for revision history; note the character name changes. Most of these initial ideas were too callow or gritty to make the final cut (be on the lookout for a "Cut Cards" blog soon!), but it was a beginning. The actual mechanics of the game took shape around that core piles concept.

I wanted player turns to be versatile and elegant. I figured that drawing a card and playing a card were equally singular events, so they became an "action". The two-action per turn system I adopted from Terraforming Mars, one of my favorite board games. I had always admired that simple mechanic, as it allows players to form these cool micro-strategies within one turn, like a one-two punch.

Now there had to be a way to win. What is the actual goal? As much as I hated the idea of having a few non-effect cards that only had abstract value, it was a pretty good way to add a win condition, and it did not detract from the intricacy of play. So "coins" became the currency which tracked victory:

It wasn't all bad: the idea of playing cards that "belong" to a player gave way to Keep cards, which allowed tons of new interactions, and substantially supplemented player interaction. In fact, about half the cards in the Keeps deck are Keep cards now. And the coin implementation in Keeps is much richer than just some bland, gameplay-deficient "resource".

For the pile mechanic to be significant, I realized I would need to force them to move somehow. Thus was born "HOT!" cards (as in, too hot to hold), which must be played immediately:

That fixed the pile problem, but it also opened the gates to some awesome new card ideas and play. It also allowed me to balance some cards that I felt were cool enough to include, but were either too weak or too often found sitting around in player's hands, without enough incentive to play.

Finally, the game needed to end somehow. My solution to this is one of my favorite parts of Keeps as a game. Having had the concurrent problem of what to do when a pile was empty, I smashed the two issues together to form the perfect answer: whenever a player would draw from an empty pile, the round just ends! I like the mechanic for a few reasons:

• It plays deeply into strategic positioning. If someone's pile is wearing thin, you need to be on the lookout for how they could end it. You will learn to add "who can end it?" to your list of things to think about on your turn.

• It sets the length of the game to be dynamic but controlled; a bit more deterministic.

• It strongly reinforces the pile mechanic when both pile content and count is important, weighing their motion.

  
  

So there it is. That's how I came up with the game. Or, at least, that's how I think it went; memory's images, once they are fixed into words, are erased. The truth is, that was only the very beginning. I have told you the tale of how the game became something playable. Following this, rounds and rounds of playtesting lead to a hundred iterations of cards, mechanics, and artwork. But that is a story for another time.

-David