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As most people know, I’m a massive fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I honestly believe the Nickelodeon cartoon is one of the best animated series’ of all time.

When I discovered that Upper Deck was releasing a collectible card game (CCG) based on the Avatar IP, I had to check it out.

It took a bit of hunting to track down, but after some googlery, I tracked it down at Troll and Toad.

The first few games I played were basically played on autopilot. See, the Quickstrike system, which Avatar uses, doesn’t use cards in hand. Instead, all of the cards are on the board, and your next card is blindly flipped over from the top of the deck. What resulted was a game where we played every card we flipped and had the energy to use. It was boring to say the least.

Fatal Flaw #1 - it’s completely possible to play an entire game without making a single choice. Just flip a card, if you can afford to play it, play it. Any game worth playing involves choices. Sometimes they are simple choices (IE: Monopoly - buy or not to buy?) or complex choices (Magic the Gathering - which of the 7 cards in my hand do I play this turn?). When you remove the ability of choice being neccesary to complete a game, the game plays itself and you are merely watching it unfold.

At this point, I think both Kim and I were ready to give up on the game, we weren’t having fun and it wasn’t a challenge.

How did Upper Deck do this? The design team for the Quickstrike system is composed of legendary pro Magic players. There definitely needed to be more depth here. I set out to see what depth I could find.

So we gave it another try and looked at what choices we could make. With the Quickstrike system, you are given three choices during a game:

1) Do you play a card or not?
2) Do you use a signature attack or not?
3) After you get a point against you, you choose who defends the next attack.

We decided that we would start saying no to the immediate decision and see if we could improve our position with selective choices.

We were playing every card as we drew it, what would happen if we waited? We could build up energy by focusing cards, charge up for signature attacks and take more gambles by going into the red and yellow zones.

What?

Exactly - apparently every descriptive word in CCG’s has already been used, which left the design team digging for terms so that Wizards of the Coast wouldn’t sue them. This means that you need to ‘focus’ energy to add it, the shield icon represents the ‘intercept’ level and the lighting bolt represents the ’strike’ power. Intercept and Strike are always opposed in this game. Wouldn’t it be better to name them: Attack/Defend, Offense/Defense, Strike/Block.

This game is filled with non-descriptive jargon, resulting in many confusing situations.

Fatal Design Flaw #2: Most of the game’s language is overly complex and is out of context with the rest of the game’s language. The language in the Quickstrike system is simply awkward and underdeveloped. Changing a few terms would make this game infinitely more accessible and much easier to teach/learn.

After a another couple of games, Kim and I are rolling along pretty well. We’ve got our head wrapped around the rules, we are making choices instead of letting the game play itself and we are starting to have fun, but we are feeling like we are seriously missing out on a key part of the game.

In a couple of occasions, we have doubles of cards. This means that we only have a small amount of predictability in our decks. So even when we understand the rules for the game, we are still limited by our deck.

Designed by hardcore CCGers, the Quickstrike system is a deckbuilding system.

Your most important choices are made before the match. What cards are you putting in your deck? What strategy is your deck using? Which zone do you want to play in most of the game? These choices are key to enjoying this game to it’s fullest. We won’t be able to sufficiently make these choices until we spend $50 more dollars (at least) on booster packs and starters (the starters are twice as good of a deal, price wise, another little oddity).

As it stands, we are only enjoying the game to 20% of it’s full potential. In comparison, games like Magic the Gathering, Duel Masters and Pokemon all offor a fun and challenging game, full of choices, when played with two starter decks.

The emphasis on deckbuilding reflects the perspective of the game’s designers. These are people who have spent thousands of dollars on their card collections. This is the life they understand and it makes sense that they would design a system for this type of consumer behavior.

The hardcore CCGer thinks nothing of buying a box of boosters the day a new expansion set is released. The casual CCGer, especially the young ones, on the other hand might buy a few boosters a month, slowly building their collection. They rely on their skills as a player to allow them to challenge (and occasionally defeat) players with more cards. By moving the focus from playing skills to deckbuilding skills, the Quickstrike system excluses the casual CCG player and adds a huge barrier to entry.

Fatal Flaw #3: To fully enjoy the game, signifigant spending is required above and beyond the starter set. This effectively removes the casual CCGer from your consumer pool.

Then there’s the real kicker. I really like the Avatar cartoon, so does my nephew. I thought I could teach him the game and we could hang out and play every once in a while. But I can’t do it. The investment is too much for the budget of a 10 year old, the rules system is very complex - he’s a smart kid and he could pick it up, but he definitely won’t be able to teach it to his sisters.

The set-up for the game itself takes up a large amount of space. A dining room table is your best bet. It would be next to impossible to play on a student’s desk in a school room - which is where the target audience for this game is most likely to play the game.

Avatar is a kids cartoon, a very popular kids cartoon. Upper Deck has licensed Avatar and wrapped it up in a game system that is process and jargon heavy, requires a signifigant investment and takes a lot of space to play.

Fatal Flaw #4 - The game has to serve the license’s audience. Duel Masters, Pokemon and Neopets offer more strategic options, are more playable out of the box, are easier to understand, can be played on a desk at an elementary school and serve their young target audience very well.

The Quickstrike system is great - for committed gamers with disposable income: Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica, Firefly and Buffy would be much better license options for the Quickstrike system.

Now, with all of this said - there has to be something I like about the game, right?

There is a great deal that I like about this game.

Once you learn the game, the tempo moves at a solid pace, with each turn only taking a minute or two. A common problem in slow paced games (Axis and Allies, multi-player Heroes of Might and Magic) is that your turns take so long, that your opponent loses interest/focus and the same thing happens when you are waiting for your opponent to take their turn.

With the fast tempo of the Quickstrike system, you rarely find your mind wandering away from the game at hand. This keeps each player in the game all of the time and the importance of this cannot be overstated.

Design Lesson #1: In multiplayer turn based games, keep the tempo fast to keep everyone’s mind on the game at hand.

The largest factor in keeping the tempo of is removing the ‘hand’ from the card game. It’s a CCG, almost every CCG ever made is based around having cards in your hand. In contrast, there are a lot of great traditional card games that don’t involve having a hand: Solitare, War, Blackjack, etc. The designers knew that they needed to sacrifice the ‘hand’ to increase the tempo, they weren’t afraid to pioneer new territory and for inspiration they only had to look at some of the most popular games around.

Now that Quickstrike has proven that it’s possible, it’ll be interesting to see new CCG’s that improve on Quickstrike’s shortcomings.

Design Lesson #2: If you are trying to resolve a major problem in your medium, sacrifices will need to be made.

The team behind the Quickstrike system have designed a game that is fast to play and demands large purchase to fully enjoy. On the surface, it sounds like every game publisher’s dream come true - a fast game that will sell a ton. What they’ve ended up doing is ostracising their target audience and made a game whose full enjoyment isn’t obvious in the first few games.

It requires an investment of both time and money to fully appreciate.

Personally, I can’t wait to see how the Avatar online community starts working on house rules for the game.