Gamasutra has published a great article on the computer game Reigns. This is a game design article written by Francois Alliot a game developer for Reigns.

Reigns is a cross between a Chose Your Own Adventures Book, a Card game and Tinder. You are the King of a Realm and each years of your Reign a new event (represented by a card) happens and menace to throw the balance of your kingdom out of the window. As an example, the Nuns of a nearby covent might have started to meow like cats. You must then take a decision: swipe left and bring the army to torch the covent or swipe right and let the Nuns behave like they want? Each decisions will have effect(s) on the four pillars of your kingdom: Church, Your Personal Life, Army and the Finance of your realm. If too many bad things happen, either you die, or the Chruch excommunicate you, or the people throw you out or the army kills you… and you lose. Your goal is to have the longest possible reign. Then you start a new kingdom an try to do better. Events will happen in a different order but you will still be wiser and benefit from your previous experiences.

Each events that can happen is a card. And depending on the outcome of some of these events you might add more cards to the deck. And make the game more varied and richer. Just that design by itself would be great. This sorts of gameplay really builds a story. Your story. And this could easily be replicated with a “real card game”. What I found fascinating is all the tweaks the designers have applied to control the randomness of the event deck to make your adventure more plausible and of better quality. Depending on certain conditions, some events might not be available, some might be more probable and so on.

These tweaks are really what sets appart a computer game from an “analog card game”. These calculation would be tedious and fiddly to apply on a real deck. When a computer is doing all the boring stuff behind the cover you are just left with a more amazing dynamic story.