During the past few years, card game designers have really pushed the envelop on creating “big” games out of only deck of cards. One key development breakthrough as been to use the same card for multiple purposes in a game.

The pioneer

One of the first game that I know that has pioneered the multi use of cards in game is San Juan. This is a reimplementation of the cult classic Puerto Rico but as a card game. Initially the game was developped by Tom Lehmann but the original creator of Puerto Rico Andreas Seyfarth liked the “pay with your card mecanism” so much that he licensed the mechanism from Tom and published San Juan himself.

In San Juan, each card is a building that you can construct and put on board. In order to pay for a building, you will discard some of the cards in your hand (i.e other buildings). Some buildings, like the indigo plant, can be used to produce goods. To indicate that a new Indigo good is produced, you take the first card of the common deck and tuck it under your building.

All of this means each card in San Juan can have 3 uses: building, money or good.

San Juan in Space

The spiritual sucessor to San Juan is Race for the galaxy. Tom Lehmann decided to use the core of his first San Juan design and mixed it with the Space theme of a CCG he was working on. Thus Race for the Galaxy was born. This is really one of my favorite game and one of the richest strategy game I have played. And it plays in such a short time!

The core gameplay of Race is similar to San Juan: you pay with cards out of your hand to pay to either build new Developments or to colonize Worlds. Your Worlds will produce goods that are tucked on the World card. You get the same 3 use of your cards as San Juan but the gameplay of Race is really richer and more varied (lots of expansions have been published for it).

The Legacy of Carl Chudyk

After the success of San Juan, author Cark Chudyk has really carried the torch of Multi Use cards. His 2005 hit Glory To Rome took some of the ideas from San Juan and dialed the whole thing to 11!

In Glory to rome a card can be used as a “Role” (engineer, soldier, architect, builder) which means it will select the action you will get to cary in a turn.

It can also be added to the “left” part of your player board to represent a “Client” that will bost your role selection. You can put it on the bottom of your board to represent a new material (stone, marble, concreate, brick). If you place a card on the right side of your board (your vault), it is considered a treasure will be score you points at the end of the game.

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Alternatively you can also place a card in front of you and pay material to make it a “building” that will give you powerful new actions and powers.

In short a card in Glory to Rome can be: a role, a building, a client, a material and a treasure!

But Carl, didn’t stop there. He reworked Glory to Rome and created both Uchronia and Mottainai which are reimplementation of the original game. But then he created a real under appreciated gem: Impulse. Jump on the Kickstarter because this game is really worth it.

Impulse is a 4X games of space exploration and conquest. Players will use their hand of cards to do all sort of crazy things. There are 10 different actions possible with the different cards. This is probably the biggest downside of the game: lots of rules and special cases to explain. But the game is so worth it.

Cards can be used as sectors that ships travel to and that create the galaxy:

Cards can also be used for their specific action if a card is part of the common “Impulse” row of cards: execute, draw, command, explore, research, build, sabotage, plan, trade, mine and refine!!!!

Depending on the action taken, some cards will be placed next to your player board and will help you faction conquer the universe:

Each cards as some minerals icons on them. If a card is mined, it gets place on the left of your player board and its minerals will help boost all actions of the same color as the minerals.

A card can also be developed as a “technology”. It will then be placed on the bottom of your board and you will get to use its action each turn in the Technology phase.

Cards can also be placed to the right of your board and become part of your “Plan”. Once each turn, you get the chance to fire up your plan and execute all cards part of it. That gives you a good opportunity to build an unstoppable winning move.

In recap cards can be: Sector, Action on the Impulse row, Mineral, Technology or part of your Plan.

The little dungeon crawler that could

A lot of Carl Chudyk’s games have been published by Asmadi Games. It seems some of Carl’s design ethic has rub on Chris Cieslik head honcho of Asmadi Games. Chris recently released a little gem of a game: One Deck Dungeon. I recently talked about that game in my Micro Games post. Basically in that game you are an adventurer delving in a Dungeon and exploring rooms to find monsters ands traps to defeat. At the end of the Dungeon you will find a boss that will almost surely kill you. But during you adventures, you will gain experience and level up, you will acquire items and new skills and you will learn to brew new potions. All of these mechanisms are expressed in a simple deck of cards.

In One deck Dungeon cards begin their life as either monsters or traps:

When you defeat that obstacles, you can use the card in one of three manners: either you tuck it as an item on your character cards. This will boost of of your core stats (Strenght, Agility or Magic). Or you put the card in your experience pile. By gaining enough exerience you will level up and gain new abilities. Finally a card can be use to either learn a new skill or a new potions recipe.

One last draw

The old CCG Doomtown resurrected recently as Doomwtown Reloaded (and now dead again…) was interesting in its deck building constraint:

Each card had a both type (character, location, item, action) and a normal card suit and number (4 of spade, 6 of heart). The suits and numbers were used to resolve the different tests of the game: either in combat where you would deal poker hand out of your deck or in spell casting where you would pull the first card of your deck and compare it against the spell difficulty. This made deckbuilding really challenging because you had to work on two axises: the card usefulness in the game as well as its value in poker and pull.