Through the Lens: Board Games - Game Design Theory - page 146

riors uses dice, but I'll use cards and deck throughout this section to de-
scribe the mechanisms.) Each turn you draw a small number of cards
from the deck, and then you can usually buy cards that get added to your
own deck, and can later be randomly drawn. Some cards increase your
buying power, and others give you special abilities. There are also often
victory point cards of some kind that give you victory points at the end
of the game, but have no other use, thereby diluting your deck. Because
of this, deck-building games involve a perpetual balancing act that can
make them feel interesting.
Of course, the question of whether or not they actually are all that
interesting is another one entirely. The issue with deck-building games is
that they're extremely luck-based, and often have a pattern of assaulting
players with tons of extra expansion content. In fact, I think their mecha-
nisms are actually not terribly interesting on their own, so they require
this extra content in order to seem interesting.
Dominion , which was released in 2008, is the most popular and suc-
cessful deck-building game. At the time of this writing, there were six
expansion packs for the game. Because of the large amount of continu-
ally released expansion content, some have taken to calling Dominion an
LCG, or limited card game. The implied difference between a CCG and
an LCG is that there is a limited amount of content available for a limited
card game. Of course, this idea is asinine, because the amount of con-
tent for Magic: The Gathering or any other CCG is limited too. Further,
the expectation of continually releasing expansion after expansion seems
roughly the same with CCGs or LCGs; the only difference seems to be
how the games are marketed (which is notably better for LCGs, since at
least you know what you're getting).
Many have hit Dominion with the criticism that it's multiplayer sol-
itaire—several players sitting around playing the same solitaire game
and then comparing who has the highest amount of points at the end
of the game. Then again, Puzzle Strike is a much more interactive and
direct-attack type of game, and it has been hit many times with the
complaint that the game is simply too random for this kind of compe-
tition. While you can do some things to mitigate the chances of a bad
draw, many good players simply die suddenly because of a bad draw at
a bad time.
As I said about games that tend to be asymmetrical: it's not that
these mechanisms cannot make for great games, but the fact that they
seem to need tons and tons of content as well as a flow of new content
says something about these games on a fundamental level.