One of the many things I like about Oath is how it associates abilities with areas. The areas in area control games often feel dull, and gaining new powers for control – or simply for the presence of your pawn, as in Oath – makes them feel much more alive. This system does mean that there are a lot of text effects in the game, and text effects cost a lot of player attention to support.
Suppose you have a bunch of objects – probably cards, but they could be tokens as well – and each object has an effect and a collection of subtypes associated with it. By subtypes, I mean tags that identify something when determining which abilities apply to it. For example, in Imperial Settlers, each card has one to three colors that function as subtypes, and certain cards reward you when you play a card of a particular color.
The nice thing about the effect-subtype pairing, and the reason we see it in so many games, is that it makes it very easy to incorporate interesting side effects into your cards. Side effects – beneficial outcomes of a player choice that were not the reason the player took that action – are good because they challenge the player to find a use for the unintended bonus. Subtypes are a fantastic side effect because they are practically free in attention costs – players can see at a glance which subtypes they have, assuming the graphic design is decent.
For example, consider the card “Longbows” in Oath. It lets you add or subtract an attack die from any battle, which is a fantastic bonus that justifies playing it. However, it also has the subtype “Order”. If you rely heavily on Longbows, you will likely invest in cards that benefit from control of Order cards, such as Order advisors.
The one problem with this is that while subtypes are cheap, effects are expensive. Passive abilities that trigger automatically when some event occurs are the worst, but even new actions the player must choose to use are a burden. When you have ten different abilities to keep track of, you are bound to start forgetting to use some of them. But there is one type of effect that costs almost nothing in ongoing attention: the “on-play” effect.
When I talk about cards with on-play effects, I do not mean action/event cards that you resolve and discard. I refer specifically to cards that do something when you play them and then remain out, effectively blank aside from their subtypes. For example, when you play “A Small Favor”, you gain four warbands – and that’s it. You don’t need to look out for something to be triggered later, or remember a modifier to another ability, or consider an extra action available to you. For the rest of the game, the card is a blank card with the “Discord” subtype.
As a game designer, this pattern of pairing on-play effects with subtypes is a fantastic tool for cutting attention costs for players. Going one step further, I can imagine structuring a card pool so that the more complex effects are on-play, while new actions, passive modifiers, and triggered abilities are simpler.
Of course, you don’t want all the cards in your game to have on-play effects; that defeats the purpose of persistent cards. So the natural question is: what percentage of cards should be on-play? I have no idea, so I decided to look at some of the games in my collection.
First, Oath. The on-play cards in Oath are easy to identify because of the graphical design. Oath has a total of 198 denizen cards; of those, 27 are on-play, for a total of 14% on-play cards.
Next, I looked at 7 Wonders. The on-play cards in that game are the blue and yellow cards; I decided not to classify red or green cards as on-play because they require some monitoring of other players to see what strategy they are pursuing. I found that 31% of the cards were on-play, at least according to my classification.
Wingspan was next, and it is another game where on-play effects have specific graphics identifying them, which made things easy. I decided to include cards without any effect at all in my count. Out of 170 cards, I found that 25% were on-play.
I also looked at 7-Wonders Duel, which contrasts with 7-Wonders in how red cards work – when you draft one, you move the Conflict Pawn toward your opponent’s city, and then the card does nothing. I wound up with a count of 56%, which is the highest that I saw.
Finally, I decided to look at technology tokens in Eclipse because I wanted to find an example that doesn’t rely on cards. Tech tokens in Eclipse come with three subtypes and reduce the cost of subsequent research in their subtype. Out of 24 technologies, only 3 (13%) did not have ongoing effects – Quantum Grid, Artifact Key, and Advanced Robotics.
The above is not a rigorous study; the sample size is tiny, and there is some subjectivity in what I classify as on-play effects, so take my conclusions with a grain of salt. I think it would be interesting to survey more examples. Looking at what I have, I noticed that the games with the lowest proportion of on-play effects are also the heaviest ones. Many factors go into the weight of a game, and I’m not saying that attention costs are even the most important, but they do matter.
One game in my collection that caught my eye is Innovation, because of the conspicuous absence of on-play effects. It fits the other criteria perfectly; you have cards with symbols (subtypes) that let you take advantage of other cards. Yet every single card effect is available at all times. It is hard enough to track what you can do, let alone other players, leading to massive analysis paralysis. Now that I see the pattern, I can’t help but think that the game would be better if 20%-30% of the cards had effects that triggered only when played. Such a change would require adding some rules, but the attention savings would more than compensate.
