Spoil Market

Overview

Spoil Market is an analogue card game based off an ironic premise of the competitive stresses of undergraduate schooling. The core gameplay revolves around matching and dealing sets of assignment cards for scoring, while simultaneously managing a meta element of stress card modifiers, creating an intense experience centered around risk-reward management. Players can end the game proactively by playing out their hand at any time, and correspondingly, their desired gameplan can be prolonged with card draws, or win conditions stymied by and sabotage from other players. 

Throughout the game, unique ability cards are also drawn and bartered for stress, offering strong modifiers for greedy players willing to take on the additional risk. Abilities shake up the core gameplay, serving as potential linchpins for various high-level strategies and playstyles, creating dynamic gameplay loop where players have the flexibility to craft their desired gameplan, yet constantly adapt to face evolving threats from other players.

Design Process

Spoil Market was born out of meticulous ideation, prototyping and playtesting. From the start, I wanted to play with the concept of hand management further as I felt it was a relatively unexplored field in outside of the digital roguelike deck-builder genre. This eventually evolved into a concept of deterministic play where we want players to feel that they can affect control of the game at all times. The randomness from card draws and actions from other players can and will throw wrenches in their plans, but they can mitigate this through thoughtful card combination and strategy.

I also wanted to embrace the theme of the game and apply constant pressure on players. Stress always builds up over the course of the game, threatening to overwhelm you if mismanaged. At the same time, you need to risk a healthy dose of it to remain competitive. Secondary loops such as sabotaging and bartering for abilities promote interaction between players and thus disruption, ensuring that classing card game pitfalls such as turtling and kingmaking are kept to a minimum.

Rulebook

Seeing as the idea was my brainchild, I primarily fronted the design role for this project, and by extension its rulebook design. I learnt a lot during the many iterations of the rulebook. Information for complicated game systems had to be conveyed in a digestible manner for quick, casual play. It was a constant struggle to maintain a formatted layout with relevant content and visual diagrams for ease of reading. There were also many minor aspects we take for granted. Minute details such as wording choice matter as I had to analyse the game from multiple perspectives. What is obvious to me is not necessarily as intuitive to others, and I have to design around that.

Balancing

Another major responsibility of mine was the ability design and their subsequent balance. I enjoyed the process of conceptualising unique abilities. While focusing on offering unique, meaningful additions to open up new strategies for players to experiment with, I constantly kept simplicity at the back of my mind and refrained from going overboard and overloading players with information. The ability cards also had to be diverse, feeding into different psychographic player profiles for a variety of aggressive, midrange or control playstyles.

Card balance was another ball game. I had to balance for both fairness and for fun. General balance for gameplay flow and pacing has to be well defined and was relatively straightforward. I sought to lean on levers such as initial card count and mulligan probability to set a fair and even playing field. Ability balance was even more tricky as it was more akin to comparing apples to oranges. I relied on calculated assumptions based off my prior experience with other card games, and pushed for a sandbox where each card felt impactful and desirable enough to be fought over between players for their relative power levels.