Over the last several weeks, I have been helping run the Kickstarter campaign for our new game Earthborne Rangers, a co-op adventure card game with an open-world design unique to card games of its type. This article is an excerpt from one of the updates I posted about the design of the game. In this update I got to dive a pretty deep into talking about the complexity of the game and I thought it would be a good fit for this blog. Enjoy!
I’d like to start of today’s update with a screenshot from one of the recent streams of the game where Team Covenant got a lot of cards on the board:
Woah! That’s a lot of words on the board!
Earthborne Rangers can look a bit intimidating when you first sit down to play it. There are a lot of words on each individual card. Taken as a whole, a collection of cards like the picture above can seem like a lot. Based on that, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people asking how complex the game is, and a lot of raised eyebrows when I answer “pretty simple actually.”
Let me explain.
To best talk about complexity in Earthborne Rangers, I am going to borrow a few terms that were coined by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic the Gathering, and used by him over the years in discussing the game. (Both this article and this article touch on the subject if you’re curious). These terms are comprehension complexity, board complexity, and strategic complexity
Comprehension complexity refers to the measure of how complex an individual card is in isolation from the rest of the game. When a player reads through a card’s text, how easy is it for them to understand what the card does at face value? How easy would it be for them to remember that? How intuitive are the effects?
Board complexity is the measure of how complex the state of the entire game board is with lots of cards in play. This metric looks at how many different potential interactions and overlapping effects there are. It is the measure of the cognitive load that players need to keep in their head to correctly process the game state on the table.
Strategic complexity is how difficult it is to understand the optimal strategic use of your cards and choices in the game. It is a measure of how much calculation and different considerations there are to know what cards to put in your deck, when to play them vs when to wait, and how to approach the game for the best chance of winning.
Let’s take a look at Earthborne Rangers through the lens of Mark’s three types of complexity and talk about why we made the decisions we did about where our complexity sits.
Comprehension Complexity in EBR
As you probably guessed from the opening to this update, the path cards in Earthborne Rangers have higher-than-average comprehension complexity. There is a lot of text to read when you put out a new card, and a lot of the path cards have 3 different abilities on them between actions you can perform and challenge effects that can trigger. The ranger cards that players are looking at their hands are designed with a considerably lower comprehension complexity on average, but we designed path cards to be a bit more complicated. This is a deliberate choice to achieve a couple goals, and we made sure to approach it carefully to avoid letting it get too overwhelming.
Earthborne Ranger is a card game, but it’s also a roleplaying game. We want to create a world for players to explore that feels real, and reality is messy and complicated. A simple card may create an elegant mechanical experience, but it doesn’t really model the complexity of a human being. In path card design, we’ve really prioritized theme-first card design (what Mark calls “top-down” design). We are trying to create cards that actually feel like the thing they are modeling, and a bit of complexity for the sake of theme helps make them feel more alive and multi-dimensional.
In addition to trying to make each card feel realistic, one of our main goals for the project was to evoke the feeling of a living, breathing ecosystem on the board. We wanted predators to hunt other beings, herbivores to graze on plants, and rockslides and other natural events to interact with it all. We could have put these interactions in the core rules or on the landscapes, but then they would be dependable, and take away from the feeling of discovery. By putting them onto the cards themselves, we allow for emergent interactions to emerge as you see different cars paired against each other each time you play.
Finally, we’ve done a lot of work to help make this comprehension complexity easily digestible by the player. In Mark’s Lenticular Design article that I linked at the beginning, one of his rules on tackling complexity is that “Players Will Try to Use the Cards to Match Their Perceived Function.” This means that players will try to interact with a card based on how they understand that object to work in real life. We lean into this hard with our theme-first cards. Our goal is for people to get done reading any given card in the game and say “oh yeah, it makes sense that a [insert card name here] would work like that.” That kind of intuitive theme-first function can help with comprehension.
Board Complexity in EBR
When I tell people that Earthborne Rangers is a relatively simple game, the board complexity is really where I think that simplicity shines. That is not to say that our board doesn’t have a lot of potential (as mentioned above when talking about the living ecology), but we employ a couple key techniques to keep the cognitive load on the players as low as possible so that they can focus on what their ranger wants to do and having a relaxing time in the Valley.
First and foremost, almost every section of rules text on path cards are used at contextually triggered moments. What this means is that we try to avoid having a lot of state-based, passive rules affecting everything on the board that players have to keep in their mind. Instead, almost every ability is either an action that players can perform on their turn, or a challenge effect that fires when a player takes a test. Each ability is also marked with distinct graphic design to make them easily identifiable from “table height” without reading every card.
The result of this is that players only need to worry about a percentage of the total rules text based on what they are doing, and it’s easy to see which text they need to care about. Performing an action? Pursue your options around the board. Executing challenge effects? Look for everything labeled with a mountain and a blue background. This way, players can put those abilities to the back of their mind until they come up, greatly reducing their cognitive load during play.
Secondly, we use consistent theming and styling to make these abilities intuitively learnable over time. Red crest challenge effects on predators will always do the same “flavor” of ability, and actions that use certain aspects will often do similar types of effects. This, paired with the theme-first card designs mentioned above, means that after only a session or two, players can build an intuitive expectation of what the board is going to be doing, which greatly streamlines the experience for them.
Strategic Complexity in EBR
Finally, we come to strategic complexity. This type of complexity is not as intimidating as the others, and most games strive for it. This is an area that I think our game has in spades. Learning how to use your ranger deck to best manipulate this changing environment, and trying to learn all the different path deck combinations and their emergent behaviors is something that will take an entire campaign, if not more.
While our approach to board complexity allows for players to put certain effects out of their minds as their learning, as they become more experienced, they can start taking on more and more of the cognitive load of remembering all the different effects on the board. Once an Earthborne Rangers player is experienced, they will start planning ahead based on their knowledge of the type of terrain their hiking and playing elements of the environment off of each other to make their travels run more smoothly. One really fun thing about working with emergent systems like these is that even we as the designers are sometimes surprised and delighted by an interaction we didn’t anticipate showing up during testing.
Thank you for joining me for this deeper dive into some of the design ethos behind the game. I hope it has given you a bit of appreciation for why we feel that more text-heavy path cards serve the experience we are trying to create, and how we are designing the board state to reduce the cognitive load on players.