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The Origins of REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat Part II

REDLINE Danger Close

Last week I looked at the long and winding development road behind REDLINE that took it from a desperate idea to mobile game to failed project to finally, the card game it is today. Today I wanted to focus on the design history of REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat and the ideas behind the creation of the gameplay within the game.

If you read last week’s article you’ll already know a number of development inspirations came from some of my favorite games growing up. Namely BattleTech, Magic the Gathering and the X-Wing Miniatures Game. But how did they influence REDLINE’s actual rules and mechanics? Read on to find out.

The Gathering

It’s well known by all that Magic; The Gathering is the grand daddy of all modern day trading card games. First released back in 1995, today the game is bigger than ever and features over 20,000 unique cards, multiple formats, online versions and a thriving secondary market. I first played MTG when it came out back in the 90’s but never got seriously hooked. It wasn’t until many years later when I played again by chance I fell deep into the rabbit hole and I am still there looking for my way out.

Make no mistake, Magic the Gathering is awesome.

But REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat is not Magic: the Gathering.

It’s nearly impossible to create any new card game today and not stand in the shadow of Magic. The game has been around so long and does so much right that any game designer trying to be different will quickly find themselves feeling like Butters in an episode of South Park shouting “Magic did it! Magic did it!”

As a card game, REDLINE features many of the same basic elements seen in all card games. Dropping resources over time allows you to play more powerful cards as the game progresses. Turning cards sideways, or expending them, allows them to be used in a turn. Drawing extra cards is always powerful and there are special cards we call tactics that can be played in battle to give your side an advantage.

With that in mind, we did try to be careful when working on REDLINE’s design to distinguish it from Magic. Not for the sake of being different but to create something that felt unique. After all, we felt there would be little point in developing REDLINE if we couldn’t bring something new to the table.

Covering Fire by Nezyr

As such, players in REDLINE don’t have life totals and victory is attained through controlling the battlefield or eliminating the opponents deck through card elimination we call razing. Damage is persistent from one turn to another. Critical hits can be scored in battle. And the maximum amount of units on board is capped at five as REDLINE is about leading an effective squad into battle instead of building armies.

But there are bigger differences as well.

I like to describe most cards games as cardboard versions of trench warfare. If you’ve played many, you know the rules often push players to always be attacking in one direction and one direction only. Forward. The only decisions a player can really make when forced into that position is to either attack or not to. But what would a card game look like where combat gave you the ability to attack in different directions? Where instead of pushing into the red zone you simply go around it? And what if players made attacks at the same time? That’s what we set out to create from the start with REDLINE, a combat system that broke all the rules. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll come back to combat in just a second.

One of the other biggest design decisions we made early on was with a simplification of REDLINE’s resource system. In MTG, the color pie is critical as the different colors of lands a player puts in their deck has a huge impact on how it plays. Each color in Magic plays differently than the others and each has their own strengths and weaknesses in the game. By mixing multiple colors together players can make powerful decks, at the risk of complicating resource management as each color needs its own special cards, or mana, on the table to see play. This can be tricky and occasionally can lead to “mana screw” where the wrong colored cards on board stop you from playing the game. Not fun. And at times the quite frustrating actually.

Supply Drop

We wanted the focus of REDLINE to always be in the combat and so chose to simplify the resource management in the game by having one basic resource card, the supply drop, that can be used for playing every card. Because of this, every resource card you play can be used to help build your squad on every turn. By eliminating resource barriers for playing cards the bulk of a players decisions revolve around preparing for battle. But without barriers to stop players from playing the most powerful cards in every deck we had to come up with another way to force choices. So along with the simplified resources we created the factions rule that limited the cards you may build decks with to only neutral cards or cards of the chosen deck faction.

Do you want to play as the UNE and have greater control over the battlefield or as the Crimson Pact of Mars (CPM) and blow everything up? What faction your deck is built around is determined by the General you pick to lead your deck. And in this case we leaned heavily into a popular Magic: The Gathering format called Commander where deck construction is also limited by the colors of the card you pick to lead it. In REDLINE as in Commander, your General has special abilities to build around and so is a fun way to promote different play styles. In a way the resource system REDLINE uses actually has more in common with another popular card game called Hearthstone where generic resources are used to cast class specific cards based on a chosen Hero. Regardless, the end result is players in REDLINE will spend more brain power planning out mission strategy than calculating card costs just the way we envisioned.

And yes before you ask, there are plans for additional factions in REDLINE’s future, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses along with ways to mix factions together. Patience. They are coming.

Tactical Card Combat

Now that REDLINE had a working framework to build around the next, and by far the most challenging part of design was solving how to build the combat system as we wanted to avoid the pitfalls of trench warfare as I mentioned earlier.

Growing up, the game I played the most was BattleTech. My friends and brothers would stay up late into the night making our own mechs and then have a blast blowing them to hell during countless battles. In the game, grabbing the high ground of a mountain plateau or jumping into a thick forest for cover were just as important to winning as running behind your opponent and shooting them in the back. Because, BattleTech, really is a game of maneuver at its core.

I really wanted to incorporate that same system of tactical movement in REDLINE while still keeping it fast paced for a card game. Or in other words, how could we make a card game feel like a tabletop wargame?

Since we were making REDLINE into a card game, it only made sense to use cards to try and create some kind of map for players to fight over. This was an easy call to make as one of my favorite things to do when playing BattleTech was throwing its large paper map sheets together into random layouts to fight on. And we could recreate this easily with a deck of cards which is how REDLINE’s mission deck was born. At the beginning of every game players deal the top five cards from the mission deck over to create a random map to fight on. Every battle is therefore unique and the layout of the land changes strategies constantly. One game may favor a fast rush down while others with heavily fortified and difficult to capture missions cards may force players to fight a game of attrition. And just like real warfare, there are advantages to holding strategic ground as every mission grants a special bonus to players that is worth fighting for. In the end the missions ended up playing really well and add a totally new dimension to REDLINE not seen in many other card games.

Fallen Satellite

Now that we had a battlefield made up of different objectives and places of interest, we needed to create a combat system that allowed players to move around it, just like they would move units in a tabletop wargame.

But there was a catch.

We wanted REDLINE’s movement and combat to be simultaneous.

This again goes back to the trench warfare analogy seen with most card games. Besides going on the offensive in one direction, players usually take turns alternating between attacking and defending, back and forth, back and forth, until somebody is dead. Instead we wanted to open our combat system up to give players not only free movement but also some unpredictability and danger by incorporating the unknown fog of war into battle.

As far as traditional card games go, this was very much breaking the mold. And the idea was an intriguing one if we could pull it off.

Luckily I knew how to pull it off thanks to another game I loved playing. As I mentioned in last week’s article, the simultaneous dogfighting in the X-Wing Miniatures Game really drew me in for its elegance. In it, players simultaneously plan out movements for their space fighters using secret dials to anticipate where their opponents may move and how to counter with their own maneuvers. Once all moves are set, the dials are revealed and the movements take place. For what it is, the system does a great job at recreating fighter combat as being able to react to enemy turns and banks with your own really makes you feel like an ace.

A Tigercat assigned to attack mission position four.

Hidden dials in REDLINE wouldn’t have any use for executing barrel rolls but they could be used to secretly lock in mission attacks. To use them we assigned each mission card in play a numbered position and assigning that number to your efreet with the hidden dials orders them to make an attack there during combat. This played quickly and is a system that ended up ripe with player decisions. With the hidden dials for movements, players now have to read the map of mission cards and anticipate where their opponent will be sending their own units before committing theirs. Just like in real warfare you may end up having to chase your enemy across the battlefield to force a decisive battle. Or you may accidently bump into each other while gaining reconnaissance and engage in a massive fight nobody was ready for. Being able to pull off grand military maneuvers like these feels incredibly satisfying and every game ends with a story.

The hidden mission dials are really the glue that holds the traditional card game aspects of REDLINE with the wargaming experience we wanted to emulate. With them, playing a game of REDLINE feels like a hybrid of the best of both and you’ll be surprised how it changes the way you approach each turn in unexpected ways.

Once we had the idea of our mission cards in place and how to move around them settled, it took a lot of testing and fine tuning to get combat to play well. We probably tried testing over twenty different variations of combat to get it where we wanted. Some setups had too many mission cards in play and made combat feel more like hide and seek as bumping into the enemy was rare. Early configurations had the missions constantly changing and lacked consistency. A lot of setups gave players the ability to actually attack their opponents deck directly as long as they had a mission under their control to create a gap in the front line to push through. I loved the flavor of this as it but it actually decreased player interaction and so the idea was ultimately scrapped.

What we ended up with was a streamlined combat system that keeps the focus on the mission cards. Fighting to control all five and win the game is difficult and earned as a result of careful strategy. But when all is said and done, I’m really happy with how the combat in REDLINE ended up and the framework established in the Core Set has plenty of room for expansion with the addition of new mission cards and mechanics to add even more layers of depth and strategy.

Now that we’ve gone over the design and development of REDLINE come back next week where I’ll share the story of how our games efreets came to be.

Always be testing.