It's Simple

by Lucas Thompson, Designer

25th July 2024

One thing that was very important to the Phage team was to suppress the urge to get too fancy. We're making cards for a CCG that has thousands of different cards already, so it's often tempting to try to do something new by doing something complicated. I know, I made the grotesquely over-complicated Harbinger cards from All Our Yesterdays. They seemed clever and interesting, but players (including myself) have found them to be an exercise in bookkeeping frustration.

Early in Phage development, even after Organ counters went away, we still had lots of different triggers to cause Vidiian players to lose power over time. The goal was to make it harder to game around the Vidiian weakness, but it was too much. Now you're just looking at your completed missions, your opponent's completed missions, and your total number of personnel in play (and even then, only up to seven). It's a much lighter mental burden, and still not easy to game around - though the possibility of playing around Vidiian weaknesses, we've found, is honestly a compelling reason to play them.

In addition to limiting the number of things you're tracking, it was also very important to just limit the total amount of text on the cards. That's why you've seen several ability-free personnel already, and the non-unique ships have very straightforward, one-line abilities. A new affiliation, any new affiliation, regardless as to the mechanics that it is built on, needs some simple cards. And here are some simple Vidiian cards!

Tomorrow is the last day of spoiler season! Get ready for the last 20 cards (five of which are Timeless reprints)!

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