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Ark Nova Design Teardown #4: The Action Cards, Part I
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Today on the Ark Nova Design Teardown, Isaac breaks down the Actions Cards, Upgrade System, and the numbers 1 & 2 in Ark Nova.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, email us at feedback@wegotplayed.games
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Focus
00:00:17
Speaker
Hi, this is Isaac Shalev, and welcome back to the Ark Nova Design Teardown. At the end of last show, my plan was to talk about action cards and the break, but I had some interesting ideas percolating about the numbers 1 and 2 and how important they are to design in general and to this game. And I'd really like to dive into that idea for what is going to appropriately be a two-part episode.
00:00:41
Speaker
So in this episode, we're going to talk about the action cards themselves, And we're going to leave break timing to part two. So I hope I'm both fulfilling my promise from last time and also satisfying the tease from last time.
Game Balance and Design Insights
00:00:56
Speaker
So this will be Action Cards part one. Reinier Knizia advises that when you're testing and balancing a game, you should double or have important values in testing rather than trying to fine tune them. And that's like a common um instinct that you might have to say, oh, you know, I ran a test and everyone was getting 10 income a turn, but it it wasn't quite enough. I think I'm going to loosen it up. I'll make it 12. Knizia will be like, make it 20.
00:01:25
Speaker
Because it's a lot easier to see the impacts of larger changes And then you can kind of reverse engineer how they affect player incentives. And when you have that clarity, you can work on precise balancing.
00:01:39
Speaker
I think this same idea drives the insight that one can be a terrible number to use in designing games. I think I first heard it from the designer, Peter C. Hayward, who does a terrific board game design podcast called Fun
Ark Nova's Upgrade System
00:01:55
Speaker
Problems. And if you like this stuff, Fun Problems is very much worth your time.
00:02:01
Speaker
So Peter's point is that one is twice as much as two, but three, well, that's not right. Peter didn't make that point. Actually, Peter's not great at math. He might've made that point. No, his point is that two is twice as much as one, but three is only half again as much as two.
00:02:25
Speaker
Koeppnern, other words, even though the difference between one and two units is the same as the difference between two and three units. David Koeppnern, The rate of increase from one to two is so much larger it's 100% than the rate of increase from two to three, which is only 50% and in many situations.
00:02:45
Speaker
It makes balancing, especially costs and resource production, very difficult when you're trying to work with one and two. And so he suggests that you start with two, three, and five as an initial series. And that is also an interesting one because you'll notice that two doubled is more than three, but less than five. And three doubled is more than five, but still only by one more. So there's some interesting patterns in two, three, and five that really make it a good series to work with.
00:03:16
Speaker
That said, there is still a place for ones and twos in design. And I think Ark Nova does this kind of brilliantly. We're going to look at the card upgrade system.
00:03:28
Speaker
So let's talk about the cards action. In its base version, at level 1, you can draw one card, but then you also have to discard one card. At level 2, you draw a card, and now you don't have to discard.
00:03:43
Speaker
And then that pattern repeats at power three, right? So level three, you get to draw two cards, but you got to discard one. And at level four, you get to keep both cards. And then at level five, you draw three and discard one.
00:03:57
Speaker
Or at level five, you can snap any card from the display. Now, the upgraded version of cards just shifts this pattern by one step so that upgraded level one is the same as base level two, and so on. Upgraded two is like base level three. And then we do some additional fine tuning with this pattern. So actually, if you would have held this pattern, the upgraded level five action should have been to draw three and discard none.
00:04:30
Speaker
But instead, we actually draw four and discard one. So that's two steps up in level from what we would have expected. So in other words, upgraded cards one through four, levels one through four is plus one level relative to the base.
00:04:49
Speaker
But cards five is plus two in level relative to the base. Upgraded cards also allows snapping starting at level three.
Card Mechanics and Efficiency
00:04:59
Speaker
And this can be powerful from a tempo perspective, though it can encourage over snapping, and I'm sure we'll talk about that at another time.
00:05:05
Speaker
The cards upgrade, you can kind of oversimplify it and say it provides one additional net card relative to the base in most cases. And in that way, it's quite similar to the animals card, which at base,
00:05:19
Speaker
At level 1 is 0 animals. At levels 2 through 4 is 1 animals. And finally, at level 5 is 2 animals. The upgraded version just gives you kind of a plus 2 to your level across the board. So you can play one animal at levels 1 and 2, two animals at levels 3 plus.
00:05:36
Speaker
And then at level five, you get this additional bonus of plus one reputation. So the effect for the most part is going from one to two, playing two animals instead of one.
00:05:48
Speaker
Association, sponsors, and build have a different upgrade pattern, but it still rests on this notion of moving from one to two. So upgraded associations doesn't provide any level boost like we saw with the other cards.
00:06:03
Speaker
but it does allow players to take more than one association action. It is theoretically possible to play three association actions ah with one ah play if you have enough X tokens and possibly other boosts.
00:06:19
Speaker
But practically speaking, you get to take two actions. Upgraded association will let you take two, whereas the standard one lets you take one.
00:06:30
Speaker
um Sponsors gets both a plus one level boost and the ability to play more than one sponsored card. So it's doing both. And then it also has the alternate action of breaking for money, and that one is doubled. So instead of break five for $5, it's break five for $10, and that's quite powerful. Build is similar because it allows players to build several buildings in one action of different kinds.
00:06:59
Speaker
And build is actually the one where you end up taking the most actions because typically if you do a full build, you might build a pavilion and a kiosk and a one size and a two size. You're actually getting four buildings down.
00:07:12
Speaker
But of course, you're not getting any extra map coverage. You're still limited to covering five spaces. So it doesn't upgrade that part, but it does give you a different kicker. So builds kicker is that you can build at five again, the aviary and the reptile house. Those buildings are a little bit out of favor in the current meta, but nevertheless, we see that same pattern.
00:07:36
Speaker
What we can kind of glean from all of this is that the action card upgrades are built on action efficiency. And that's the central dynamic in the game.
00:07:49
Speaker
So to see what I mean, consider some possible alternative upgrades. Imagine Matthias Viega sitting at his design desk and thinking about what kinds of upgrades the cards might do.
00:08:04
Speaker
So one easy one to to consider is discounts, very, very common. Animals and build both cost money. What if we upgraded them and allowed them to provide discounts, make the animals and the buildings cheaper?
00:08:21
Speaker
Well, that would allow players to play more animals and buildings in a round between breaks, between getting income. but they would still need to take the same overall number of turns. It wouldn't make them much faster, maybe at the margins, because you've saved enough money that you'd be able to squeeze in an extra cycle of build, but probably not because the way that brakes work. We'll get to that next time. But you see that saving money doesn't really equal action efficiency.
00:08:50
Speaker
Think about maybe the ASSOC action. and Upgraded ASSOC could have made association actions available at lower levels. So, you know, what if ah you could get a zoo at two and you could get a university at three? And that certainly would have been a little more efficient.
00:09:07
Speaker
but not nearly as efficient as being able to take two association actions in one turn. Another efficiency characteristic of the upgraded cards is that aside from build, they all enable interaction with the display.
00:09:23
Speaker
Animals upgrade allows playing animals directly from the display within reputation range. And it also gives you a method to increase that reputation. So that's especially nice. Cards allows snapping earlier. So that's a little more interaction with the display. But it also allows drawing cards from the display directly within reputation range.
00:09:42
Speaker
And sponsors and associations both allow playing the respective cards directly from range. This probably matters a lot more with sponsors, or we see it happening a lot more with sponsors.
00:09:53
Speaker
in part because there are just more sponsor cards than there are project cards in the deck, conservation project cards. But we see that that same pattern exists. All four cards, all four action cards, ah aside from build, allow you to play from the display, interact with the display.
00:10:12
Speaker
Now, playing from range is extremely efficient. It's essentially like a bonus card draw action. It's almost like getting to do a snap for free.
00:10:23
Speaker
It's not exactly snap because it's within reputation range. So it's probably equivalent to doing something like a cards to action for free because you get to draw a card from the display.
00:10:37
Speaker
And you know you want it, right? You wouldn't bother if you didn't want it. So that's what gives it that snap flavor of you're not drawing from the deck at random. You're getting something you know you want.
00:10:48
Speaker
You do have to pay a little bit in order to make that happen, but it's essentially a bonus card action. So thinking about what we said last episode, you know playing from range is an example of how players can achieve more in one turn, can get extra actions within a turn. So you can't just count up how many turns a game has. There's all these opportunities for doing more actions within a single turn.
00:11:16
Speaker
Upgrades do even more than what we've discussed so far. They also gate access to certain cards and upgrade paths. You need to upgrade a SOS if you want to get a third and a fourth partner zoo.
00:11:28
Speaker
You will need to upgrade cards if you want to increase reputation past nine. And sponsors and animals both needed to be upgraded in order to access certain more powerful animals and sponsors.
00:11:44
Speaker
We're going to talk more about that in another episode when we consider limitations on upgrades, how you can only upgrade three or four of your cards, not all five. So that's a whole other topic we'll get to. But there's just a lot baked into these action cards and efficiency.
Complexity and Cognitive Load
00:12:01
Speaker
And you see how powerful that is when you're moving from one to two. can really get a lot more efficient. That said... There's a downside to this, right? From a design perspective, Ark Nova's action cards can be fairly criticized.
00:12:18
Speaker
Even though the cards have common patterns among them, they are also dense and difficult to learn. And they do a lot. And they got all kinds of tentacles hanging off of them. For my tastes, they're also kind of wordy.
00:12:33
Speaker
build, assos, and sponsors, for example, all have the phrase written, typed out on them, with a maximum value of x, where in this case x is the level that the card is played at. So as in, build one building with a maximum size of x, or play one sponsor with a maximum size of x, or perform one association task with a maximum size of x.
00:12:57
Speaker
I would have preferred that this concept, that the level of the card is a maximum, and that you can do less if you want to, i would have preferred that that was a general rule that you don't need to put on the card.
00:13:10
Speaker
The build card could just say build one building, and the upgraded version could say build one plus buildings, one or more buildings. Similarly, the general rule of playing from reputation could have simply been an icon on those upgraded cards instead of a whole sentence.
00:13:29
Speaker
Think about how bad it really is. You might not have noticed it if you've played Ark Nova and you have internalized what these cards do. You don't even think about it anymore. But here's the upgraded Assos card. This is maybe the one that's most guilty of wordiness. It reads, perform one or more different association tasks with a total maximum value of X.
00:13:52
Speaker
In addition, you may make one donation. You may play conservation project cards from within reputation range, open parentheses with additional costs, close parentheses.
00:14:04
Speaker
There is so much to parse. Just look at that first sentence. Perform one or more different association tasks with a total maximum value of x. There's a lot to unpack in there. Each word is doing something important.
00:14:23
Speaker
And then when you get through that sentence, the card interrupts the action you're taking, right? The card says, hang on, I know you were going to take one of these, maybe more than one of these association tasks, but by the way, you should also know that you could do a donation.
00:14:38
Speaker
And oh, let me come back, by the way, after you do the donation donation. If you happen to have chosen to support a conservation project, you should know just by the way that you could do that from from reputation range with additional costs.
00:14:54
Speaker
It's confusing. It's a lot. It's not super well organized. For starting out, this is way too much to digest. And I even remember when I was starting out and learning the game and looking at these cards, and there were just you know one or two of them where I was like, I don't know what you're doing. I don't understand you. I'm going to play some animals and figure this out. right We're just going to stick to build some enclosures, play some animals, and I don't know what the rest of this is.
00:15:19
Speaker
So, you know, the wordiness contributes, sure, but the main cause for the cognitive overload is just the complexity of the cards and the options that they provide.
00:15:31
Speaker
Now, the action cards are interesting, and they are well-balanced, and together with the card cycling system, they make for a great puzzle and a really powerful tool in the hands of a capable player.
00:15:43
Speaker
But one thing, they're not as elegant. If anything, they have the hallmarks of a pattern we often try to avoid in design, a pattern I call ornamentation. You see it a lot in balancing.
00:15:56
Speaker
Oh, you know, this card isn't powerful enough. Let's give it a plus one VP or a plus $3 or whatever kicker makes sense in your game. Taken to the extreme, you get these Ark Nova cards, which they're like a Christmas tree with all the ornaments they've got hanging off of them.
00:16:12
Speaker
Maybe this is only an aesthetic critique. I mean, yes, Ark Nova cards look something like a Mad Max vehicle with all sorts of bits soldered onto each other, but they do also work. They create a lot of depth and interest. and So maybe the better question is, how do you manage to pull off something like this?
00:16:29
Speaker
Why does Ark Nova work when so many other prototypes lie in the smoking ruins of their own excess? And I think the answer is that Ark Nova has strong internal patterning.
00:16:43
Speaker
There are lots of bolt-ons, and they may appear at first to not really add up to anything or to not rhyme. But they do. The pattern we observe today, that upgraded cards provide a plus one or plus two level advantage compared to their base versions, is one.
Cohesion in Game Design
00:16:59
Speaker
We see also that, oh, that actually is kind of similar to how X tokens work. right They also allow me to boost the level plus one or plus two or however many X tokens I have.
00:17:12
Speaker
And once you see that, you begin to understand that X-ing back a card is kind of like giving yourself a plus two because you're gonna get an X token and you're gonna cycle all the other cards up one.
00:17:26
Speaker
So that's kind of like a plus two. There are a few patterns like this in Arc Nova and that consistency of patterning i think is what makes the game hold together.
00:17:38
Speaker
And even though yes, it's complicated and it is a lot to learn, but yet the rules do fade into the background and the understanding of how these things kind of interrelate does end up holding together.
00:18:04
Speaker
Okay, let's wrap up with some design lessons. So number one, usually one is a bad number for game design because of that rate of increase from one to two is so big compared to the rate of increase from two to three.
00:18:17
Speaker
So keep in mind, if you're looking for a series to try, try two, three, and five. Lesson two, explore your game's central dynamic in every mechanism.
00:18:29
Speaker
For Ark Nova, that central dynamic is action efficiency. What is it in your game? Lesson three, elegance is not the only valid aesthetic.
00:18:42
Speaker
If you prefer a more is more approach, cohesion is crucial. Find and stick to some underlying patterns to hold your game together.
00:18:55
Speaker
That's going to do it for today. If you liked this episode, please share it in your game and design groups and help us connect to more listeners.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:19:01
Speaker
You can find We Got Played on Apple, Spotify, and all the other podcasting apps.
00:19:07
Speaker
Join me again next time when we talk about action cards and the break in the part two to this series. Thanks for listening. I'm Isaac Schalev, and you can play Ark Nova with me at Board Game Arena by inviting Kind Fortress to your table.
00:19:21
Speaker
Until next time, remember, every zoo is a petting zoo if you're brave.
00:19:34
Speaker
Do you have any questions or comments about this episode? Do you know something that we didn't say or know that something we said is false? Do you have a fun fact that you desperately want to share but can't find a way to bring it up in conversation naturally?
00:19:51
Speaker
Send it to us at feedback at wegotplayed.games. That's feedback at wegotplayed.games. Thank you for listening.