Week 8 - Cards

In class, I played Control on Tuesday. It was very interesting and incorporated several elements that utilized the unique characteristics of playing cards. The game was centered around secrecy and strategy, so naturally, the planar element of cards was a massive part of the game’s design. As Nathan Altice points out, “Playing cards’ planar surfaces simultaneously excel at both displaying and concealing information” (6). In a game about strategy and deduction, this was highly important. The cards in Control were used to conceal information from your opponent, but the information on the cards was also simple and concise. A player could use the information on the cards to play the game even without knowing all the rules. 

The ordinal nature of playing cards helped to keep card information succinct (Altice, 9). In Control, there are 2 different card types with values ranging from 1-10. This is very similar to a standard deck but with greatly reduced variation. This helps to balance the complexity of the game as most strategy is based around the unique abilities of each card. The simple ordinal system helps to make comparing and evaluating cards in Control a quick and easy process, which gives the player ample information to form a strategy. 

The game “The Key: Theft at Cliffrock Villa” takes a very different approach to the use and concealment of information. The Keys is a game about solving three separate crimes that all happened at the same time and place. The player takes on the role of a detective and must solve the case using as few cards as possible. Every card in The Key is a piece of evidence that gives the player a clue as to what happened. Play begins with all the cards arranged in a circular pattern around the key token. Any player can pick up one card at a time. Players all act at once in The Key which creates a hectic environment. 

The Key uses the spatial nature of cards in a unique way. The game uses the physicality of cards to directly affect the game space. As Altice notes “card arrangements can describe metaphorical, narrative, representational, geographic, and other hybrid spaces” (14). The circular configuration of the cards compliments the real-time nature of the game to create a chaotic and hectic experience. In a game about solving a crime, the chaotic arrangement of the cards is representative of a detective sifting through mountains of evidence while under pressure to solve the case quickly.

The arrangement of the cards also benefits from the card's non-uniformity. In The Key, each card has information on both sides. One side has general hints as to the information on the other side. Cards are arranged with the “hint” side up to give the players an idea of what they are choosing. (The fewer cards a player has at the end of the game the better.) The cards in The Key are not uniform in any way but they still conceal information from the player. This is a very unique approach to concealment, but it fits the theme of the game and allows players to better utilize strategy when choosing their cards.