How this for a logo; the top is Black Ops One bold, and the bottom is just Times New Roman.  I like the juxtaposition between gritty army stenciling and old chiseled tablets.  I might look for a different stencil font though because I don’t like serifs on the E and the Ls.

What do you guys think?

I think I figured out the defense stats for each card in the game so far.

My first idea was to rank them based on area, with larger states having lower defense and smaller states having higher defense.  I ranked the 50 states and DC from biggest to smallest, and called it a day

But this didn’t feel right, so I changed it to a bell curve with so so that states on either end of the spectrum, big or small, have low defense, and middling states have high defense.

First I ranked all the states and DC by area, with Alaska and Texas on top, and Rhode Island and DC on bottom.  Then I broke them down into 10 levels, and color coded them with the weakest at the ends and strongest in the middle.

Then I reranked them 1 to 51 based on their position in this bell curve, with Iowa and Illinois on top, and Alaska and DC on bottom.

This was better, but there was still something off about it.  I thought it was weird that California and Texas would have such low defense stats, so for my third try I ranked them based on population density instead; I figured that a state’s ability to defend itself relies just as much on manpower as it does physical size; more people means a stronger defense, so I ranked them from densest to least dense.

But this put Rhode Island back on top, which still felt wrong; it’s s small state, smaller than some cities, it doesn’t matter how many people it has per square mile, it would be plowed straight through like it wasn’t even there.  I needed a way to account for both size and density, so I came up with my fourth and I think final idea.

I took their rankings 1-51 in both area and population density, and averaged he two values to create a new ranking which accounted for everything.  Washington, DC is super small but also super dense, so those factors would cancel out and make it middle-of-the-road at best.  Meanwhile Alaska is big and empty, so it belongs where it is.  Iowa may be the centermost state in terms of area, but given its low population it needs to be knocked down a peg or two.  The new ranking adjusts the values accordingly

The states with the best defense are New York, Illinois, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, because they’re not too big, not too small, and and have high enough populations to defend themselves in battle.  Nevada, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, and Alaska are all big and empty, so they are easily defeated.

I think this is finally the perfect ranking, now I just need to assign them defense points on a scale from 1 to 10.  My original plan was to divide them up into 10 levels with 5 states each (6 for DC’s level), but I didn’t like how evenly spaced that was.  There should be more weaker cards than stronger cards; the strongest cards should be rare, so I still need to figure that out.

If I use a log scale, it works out perfectly

The Final Defense Stats

Defense 1: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Maine, Utah, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, Colorado,Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, Alaska

Defense 2: DC, Michigan, Delaware, Hawaii, Minnesota, California, New Hampshire, North Dakota, West Virginia

Defense 3: South Carolina, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Texas, Rhode Island

Defense 4: Indiana, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Kentucky, New Jersey

Defense 5: Missouri, Tennessee, Maryland, Washington

Defense 6: Iowa, Louisiana, Alabama

Defense 7: Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia

Defense 8: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania

Defense 9: Illinois, Florida

There are, so far, 357 cards in this game, and that only includes the combatants, the creatures/monsters/pokemon, whatever you call them.  I haven’t even begun designing stuff like instants/sorceries/spells/traps, etc.

For the 357 cards, each representing a different one of the 50 state and DC from a different decade, 1960 to the present, I have calculated all of their attack and defense stats based on their populations, areas, and densities.  I have multiple spreadsheets on my computer that look like the ravings of a mad man, just full of random numbers, white noise, but there’s method to the madness.  I had to make sure that attack and defense were roughly correlated so there weren’t any unbalanced cards.

Now comes the hard part; I need to figure out the mana mechanic.  How much does each card cost, and when can you play them all?  Using a small pool of Magic: The Gathering cards for inspiration, I figured out a few different ways of pricing each state.

There are several ways to assign pricing based on the MTG numbers

I could account for it’s combined attack/defense; Wyoming 2020 would have a strength of 2 (1 attack, 1 defense), while New York 1960 would have a strength of 20 (10 attack, 10 defense).  If I calculated the mana cost this way, I would the purple numbers.

If I only accounted for attack (Alaska 1990 = 1, California 2010 = 10), you get the pink numbers.

If I accounted for defense (Texas 1970 = 1, New York 1980 = 10), you get the blue numbers.

Or, I could find the price in points per mana; how much mana does one point of attack/defense cost you in MTG?  In that case, you get these numbers instead

If you chart out the attack, defense, and price, you get this

Looking at it this way, there’s a lot more variance; 1-1 cards can cost between 1 and 3 mana, a 4-5 card costs more than a 4-7, a 3-3 and a 6-6 both cost 6, it’s seemingly random.

All of these numbers came from a pool of 26 creatures from 2 decks of old Magic cards, which is probably not enough to get good averages, but I have a bulk box of 4000 cards coming in a few days, so I’ll have more data points (I might even adjust the attack and defense values, depending on frequency)

Major tweak to the defense stat: so far, I’d been calculating each state’s defense by taking the inverse of its area.  That is to say, big states had lower defense than small states, under the assumption that a big state’s defenders would be spread too thin, allowing an enemy to carve out large swathes of it no problem.  This makes some sense, but it meant that small states had the strongest defense stats, which is not true at all; in a real war, Rhode Island wouldn’t stand a chance against any other state, it would be like Belgium in the World Wars, armies would march straight through it in no time

I think it might make more sense if the defense stat were distributed like this

With middle-of-the-pack states faring the best in defense.  Big states have more to lose, and little states are easily overwhelmed, so the strongest states would be balanced in the center.

Illinois and Iowa would have the highest defense stats

Alternately, we could assign defense value based on population density; whether a state is large or small is irrelevant if they have enough troops to hold the line.  A big state with a ton of people could defend themselves better than an equally large state with few people, so size is relative.  That method gives us an order like this:

Population density already takes into account a state’s area, but if I could find a way to adjust it so that it fit the bell curve too, that would be perfect.  I need to buff the bigger states with fewer people and nerf the smaller states with more people.  Alaska is right where it needs to be in this second list, but New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Connecticut are way too high up.  Even with high populations, their sizes would make them indefensible.

These are the power curves I’ve come up with so far; I’ve ranked each card from most powerful to least powerful, and now I need to fit them onto a 10 point scale.

There are 51 cards per set, so I need a way to assign attack/defense levels to keep it all balanced.

I am assigning power levels to every card in the game, and I’m not sure how I should divide them up.  The weakest cards have attack 1, the strongest cards have attack 10, but I’m not sure how many of each level I should include.

I have 51 cards per set, so I considered dividing it into so that there were 5 cards per level (6 in one instance)

but I felt this was too evenly distributed.  There should be more weaker cards than stronger cards, so my next idea was to divide them up into a log scale; each level would have fewer cards than the last, tapering out towards the end

This was better, but it meant that a majority of the cards were low tier, so in the hypothetical universe where I actually make and sell these cards, the booster packs would be full of useless crap.  I don’t like that, so I needed to shift things over a bit so that most common cards were middle-tier cards, so keep people interested.

I had two idea to make this happen; the first was to have the middle two levels be the biggest, and make them smaller as you move to either end

But this looked too similar to the first one, still evenly distributed.

The second was to keep the log scale sized levels, but rearrange them so that the most common cards were attack 3 and 4 instead of attack 1 and 2:

How does this feel?   I think 3 and 4 are too big; maybe 5 and 6 should be bigger to compensate.  I want the distribution curve to look something like this

In designing my card game, I decided to base each state’s attack stat on its population, while its defense stat takes into account both its area and its population density.  As a proof of concept, I plugged in the data for all 50 states and DC from the 2010 census to see how everything worked out on the power curve, and it was almost perfect.  Because I know it works, I’ve decided to move forward with the next phase of development.

A major mechanic I wanted to implement was having the same state from different time periods; if I ran the numbers for the 1960 census,it would come to different results than for the 2020 census.  I’m going to create a full set of 51 cards for every census since 1960 (you can think of them as different sets; the 1960 set, the 1970 set, the 1980 set, etc.)   This alone brings up the total number of cards from 51 to 357, and that doesn’t even include spells or item cards.

If you play the same state from different years, they can work together for a powerful combo, or they can help summon stronger cards from you hand before they would otherwise become available.

New York was the state with the highest population in 1960, but now it’s the fourth, so I might introduce a mechanic where a card is weaker or stronger depending on which year it is attacking.  A 1960 New York would be more powerful than a 1970 New York, despite having a lower population, so 1960 New York has a plus 1 bonus against all 1970 cards (or vice versa; 1970 New York has a minus one buff against 1960 cards)

Some states have seen major advancements; Texas has shot up like a rocket since 1960, while states like Iowa and West Virginia have gone down.  I’m still exploring the implications that has on gameplay; why would you ever play a weaker version of the same state?  What effect can the weaker card have that make them worthwhile?

It’s a civil war simulator where each card represents one of the 50 states, so I might want my logo to look like an old weathered map, the kind you’d see pinned to a table in the general’s tent with little wooden figures pushed around with sticks.