In the design article for this week I thought it was time to give the Heroic cards in REDLINE their time in the spotlight. What are they? Why do they exist? How did we go about creating them, and what do they mean for the game? Though the Heroic cards were a late addition during design, they add a lot to how players approach the game.
When designing any type of board or card game, it’s always important to have some aspects of it feel more special or powerful than the rest. For one, these special playing pieces help players to quickly identify what has high value when playing. Knowing what the strongest pieces are can help push players to build strategies around them or serve as warnings of what to try and avoid when another player uses them against you. And finally, they are just fun to play! Uno has it’s Wild Cards. Everybody understands the power of Park Place and Boardwalk in Monopoly. Both Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone have their own types of legendary cards, And even Battleship has, well the five peg aircraft carrier.
Surprisingly enough, when designing REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat, the first versions of the game never had any special card type at all. We were so busy trying to get the core interactions of the game to work right that it never really crossed our minds to have a special card type. Sure we had unique cards from the start in the form of our General and pilot equipment cards, but they weren’t any more special than the rest of the cards in your deck in regards to appearance or rules.
That didn’t feel right, as those cards were special within REDLINE as they each represented specific individuals who were important to the game. And on top of that, there was the small pilot problem. Since most of the pilots in the game were named individuals, it didn’t make any game sense for a player to have multiple copies of a card like Hibiscus in play at once, though that could still happen within the rules. Technology has come a long in REDLINEs year of 2060, but cloning has yet to be cracked it seems! We could make a special rule about pilot cards being one of a kind, but that seemed messy and not very elegant.
What we needed was a way to make unique cards like Hibiscus stand out and feel special as unique. And so the idea to create a special card type for the unique parts of REDLINE came to be. We needed our own legendary cards.
You may be asking did we wait so long to create our own versions of a legendary card when they have been a staple in so many other card games. The reason is simple. We didn’t want to fill REDLINE with bloat. Adding a ton of rules or game mechanics for the sake of them existing doesn’t make the game play any better if they aren’t needed. Once we saw a need for a unique card type, we made one, but not before.
The next pressing question we faced was what to name our special cards. We could have easily called them legendary and be just like 90% of the other card games out there but it felt a little lazy, and legend always seemed to carry more of a fantasy feel to it which would have felt slightly out of place in the sci-fi world of REDLINE. We thought about calling the cards “experimental” as we thought having special one of a kind weapons players could equip would be fun to play with. But you cant really have experimental pilots or Generals so that was scrapped.
Mythic? No. Famous? Notta. Special? Boring.
Heroic? Hey…that could work…
In the end we finally settled on Heroic for a few reasons. The word felt important and hefty and grand. But it was also was just generic enough we could use it on all the card types in the game and it wouldn’t feel out of place. Specific efreets could be just as heroic as the pilots who drove them after all. Plus, as REDLINE was created as a tabletop wargame experience played with cards, having heroes to celebrate in times of war was a theme that seemed natural.
To make it easy to identify which cards were Heroic or not, we created a special gold frame placed around the regular card frame. It helped to make the cards look a little more special without going overboard.
Hero Factory
Now that we had our Heroic cards we had to figure out what exactly made them special. Taking a cue from the pilot cards, for a card to be Heroic in REDLINE meant it had to represent a unique individual, place, or piece of technology. Because of that, we created the Heroic rule which stated a player may only have one of each Heroic card in play at a time. (Again, no cloning in REDLINE.) If a player found themselves with a Heroic card in play and played a new copy, say Hibiscus again, they would be forced to choose which version of her to keep and which to scrap. We thought briefly about having this affect both players so that only one could have a Hibiscus in play, but quickly tossed that idea. Fighting over who gets to play a certain Heroic card first or who can’t is simply complication for the sake of complication.
Because the rules only allowed a single copy of a Heroic card in play we had to adjust how this affected card design. While on the surface having a card be Heroic may seem like upside, it actually comes with a huge downside in that multiple copies in your hand are often just dead cards, as they cant be deployed without loss. This meant we had to make sure Heroic cards were worth the hefty drawback of always being solo. They had to feel heroic.
As a designer, this can actually be a useful tool, for if an effect is too powerful making it Heroic effectively put a hard cap on how many times that effect could be used. It also adds a wrinkle to deck building, as having multiple copies of a Heroic card in your deck will increase your chances of drawing one in a game, but also adds more chances of dead draws when that card is already in play. I love it whenever some risk/reward dynamics pop up while playing as it forces players to make critical decisions. And Heroic cards have that built in by their very nature.
As the pilots and General cards were already Heroic from the start we looked at making other cards Heroic with these ideas in mind. But because Heroic came along so late in REDLINE design, we were only able to make two last minute additions to the Core Set to try and fit extra in.
The first extra Heroic card we designed was a special resource card for the UNE. The idea came from the idea to create General Brand’s war room as a unique card. One of the UNEs biggest strengths was battlefield control and this could be a good place to expand on those abilities. General Camilla Brand already did a good job at forcing the enemy to fight on her terms with her Prepared Ground ability, but we wanted to create an extra card to compliment those options.
Brand’s Bunker does just that with an ability that allows UNE decks to gather intelligence by looking at one of their opponents mission dials, deduce their movements, then adjust their own strategy accordingly. It’s a powerful ability to peek into your enemy’s plans, but something we didn’t want players to do without cost. Putting this ability on a Heroic resource carries extra risks as multiple copies of the card are at the mercy of the Heroic rule. And resources are not as easily destroyed as pilots so there will be little need to replace it if destroyed. Risk and reward.
I also like how General Brand’s Prepared Ground ability costs recon to use but her Bunker activates with resources only. This allows players with both in play to combo them together to really put opponents in a bad spot. General Brand does not mess around when she can funnel opponents into bad attacks while also exposing their mission orders.
Next we knew we had to make a Heroic efreet. We already had ace pilots in the game, but what about the special efreets they piloted? Shouldn’t they have their own unique cards too? With special abilities or loadouts not seen on the standard models?
And since Camilla Brand got her own special Heroic resource that pairs with her abilities, it only made sense to create a Heroic efreet that had synergy with CPM General Valya Serova. Especially since her Efreet Ace ability lets her pilot any efreet in your arsenal. And since most pilots in the game gain extra bonuses when piloting their preferred efreet type, this is also what players would expect of her.
Which is why I’d now like to introduce you to her personal ride, the Katyusha! The EF-34 Claymore is already one of the more fearsome efreets in the Core Set, so the question was, how could we make it even scarier and worthy of being Heroic? One way to do so is by giving it the ability to damage any efreet as soon as it hits the battlefield. By dealing two damage upon deployment, the Katyusha can soften up any efreet or put the coup de grace on a wounded one and scrap it for good. Ouch!
But we also wanted it to have synergy with Gen. Serova, who when she becomes a pilot gains both the Ambush and Sharpshooter abilities. The best way to capitalize on her skills would be to double the effect of them with her behind the controls. When in her Katyusha, Valya ambushes for 2 damage at the start of every combat round and is deadly accurate while adding or subtracting 2 from her attack rolls! The Katyusha is a real monster with Serova behind the controls! Engage at your peril.
Probably more than any other card type, we’re super excited to see how Heroic affects efreets. Being able to create special efreet variants of existing designs, experimental prototypes, or more aces and their special machines opens up a lot of space for the game to grow. And it’s just fun to play with special versions of your favorite designs!
Unfortunately because of limited space and time, there wasn’t an opportunity to create Heroic weapons in the Core Set. We really wanted to, but adding more cards so late in design meant others would have to be taken away.
Luckily, we created some extra space for them with the creation of the Upgrade Pack. To those unfamiliar with it, the Upgrade Pack is our free gift of 12 special alternate art REDLINE cards that comes with very initial production copy of the REDLINE Core Set. These are cards that just missed the Core Set cut but we plan on printing in the future, with different art, We really wanted to give REDLINE players a chance to have some deck building options right away while the game is in its infancy and with the Upgrade Pack, we had the chance to do that with heroic weapons for both the UNE and CPM.
Both the David and Plasma Splitter are incredibly powerful experimental weapons that can upgrade any efreet into elite status. But they come with hefty equip costs and carry the Heroic status which limits each to a single copy in play. Players will have to use them carefully if they choose to upgrade their efreets with them. .
A Hero Can Save Us
While all the Heroic cards were fun to design and play with, they also represent an extra way to sneak in more worldbuilding to the game. Which, if you haven’t noticed is something we like to do with REDLINE.
Creating special cards around unique identities in the game gives us extra chances to peek into the world of REDLINE. Otherwise, without that opportunity, how would we know General Brand is an avid tea (or is it coffee) drinker? Or that Valya has an efreet whos nickname reflects on her Russian origins? (The Katyusha was the name given to Soviet rockets during WW2 which in turn were named after a girl in a popular folk song. The more you know!)
As REDLINE grows it will be exciting to develop more characters in the game with Heroic cards and give players the chance to build around them and bring them into the fight.
It’s time for heroes.