I’m Feeling Genre-ous… Talking about Genres, Part 2
By Marc Q
A few weeks ago I started a long and complicated conversation about genres. In that earlier post, which you can still find right here, I wrote about the big divide in board game genres (“Euro-Style” vs “American-Style”), then briefly touched on a few specific examples of sub-genres.
Today I’ll do a deeper dive into one of the most popular sub-genres of board games, and one of the easier ones to explain: Deck-building.
Please note that when I say “easier,” I don’t mean to say it’s easy. Like any genre, there is nuance and particularities. There are no universal truths when it comes to genre. For example, many people include Magic the Gathering as a Deck-building game, but we’ll come back to that.
Deck-builders were originally created by Donald X. Vaccarino for his classic game Dominion. In Dominion, players all start the game with their own deck of 10 cards: 7 “Copper” cards and 3 “Estate” cards. You shuffle those together and deal yourself five cards. On your turn you’ll use those cards, spending the copper to buy other cards to put into your deck: this lets you buy from the market of action cards, all of which let you do neat things (“Draw 2 more cards” or “Force everyone you are playing with to discard 1 card”), or perhaps buying better money (adding Silver and Gold in addition to your Copper). You do this so that you can buy more victory point cards, like Estates, Duchys, and Provinces… but the victory point cards are totally useless. Every time you draw one, they’re choking up your hand, slowing you from getting the high value cards you need to get more victory point cards! But you need the victory point cards, because whoever has the most of those wins the game!
The end result is this neat throttling mechanic where you want to put cards in your deck to get better cards, but the more cards you get the harder it is to get the cards you need to actually win the game. There is a real sense of control and momentum behind figuring out which cards to add, and critically which cards to remove, from your deck to make the most efficient way to score points. Clean, easy to learn, and a tonne of variability makes Dominion a bonafide classic.
But Dominion is now an old game, having originally released in 2008 (and receiving a revised second edition in 2016). It’s almost old enough to drink! And the genre has come a long way since then. New Deck-building games are released at a torrential rate, partially because the rules tend to be quick and elegant, but usually add more depth than ye olde Dominion. Games like The Star Wars Deck-Building Game are more aggressive, Clank! Legacy adds a campaign system, and The Quest for El Dorado adds a variable map and one of the most clever market systems for any Deck-Building game ever.
I want to touch briefly on Magic the Gathering, which many people include as a Deck-building game. Magic, and games that play like it (for example the sublime Summoner Wars or the incredible Marvel Champions) are games where you construct a deck in order to play the game, rather than starting off with the same deck as other players and slowly modifying your deck as you play. The core mechanics are radically different: determining what cards to add to your Standard 60 card deck, or 100 unique cards to a Commander deck, and then mitigating luck as you draw through your deck, rather than the slow building of an engine that will allow you to win by giving you tools that you can use from a common market. That’s not to say one is better than the other, but somebody who likes Dominion-style Deck-builders might not care for Magic-style Deck-builders, and vice versa.
And, of course, in addition to the variations on the original genre, there are now interesting sub-genres of Deck-building! Things like Dune Imperium and Lost Ruins of Arnak add worker placement mechanics (a genre I will cover next time!), games like Century Golem Edition attach Deck-building to resource collection, and Quacks of Quedlingburg is a Deck-building game that doesn’t even use cards! Lots of interesting variations, and every month new games are showing up pushing the boundaries of what the genre can do!
Hopefully that gives you some useful advice for how to approach Deck-building games, and maybe some suggestions for games you’d like to try! Next time… Worker Placement!
Happy gaming, everyone!