I am creating a parody trading card game where the monsters are the 50 states and DC; the point is for the stats to be based on census data, creating a game out of the most boring information possible, based on my outdated assumption that TCGs are just glorified spreadsheets; it’s nothing but code, each card is a different line that has a different effect, and when you run it all together you can see where the rules clash, and what sort of loops occur, where things get stuck, etc. Strip away the art and the theme, make it just data; this card has attack X and defense Y for cost Z, it has effect ABC which causes LMNOP; and see what happens.
My game wouldn’t just be a boring ass spread sheet, or nobody would play it; my intention was just to show that bring data could be used to create a game. It’s all in the theming; the rules are esoteric and complex, but it’s the theme that makes it fun. I wanted this game to be a sort of war simulator, where each state is going up against any of the others; you have X amount of people in Y amount of square miles, how would any given state go hold up against any of the others?
Defense = Population Density
I put each of these values on a 10 point scale so that pairs of states like Alaska & Rhode Island, and California & Wyoming wouldn’t be orders of magnitude apart in cost and attack respectively.
Turns out that population and area aren’t the best stats to take into account, as they tend to be all over the place. Population doesn’t correlate with size; big states can have big populations like Texas and California, or small populations like Alaska and Montana. Small states can be mostly empty like Vermont, or super dense like New Jersey. This, coupled with the method I used to turn census data into cost/attack/defense stats led to a very lopsided library of states that would lead to an unplayable game. There were too many low cost cards that were over powered, and higher cost cards weren’t worth it.
I took all the data from my previous update and mapped it all out:
There’s a lot of noise here.
Ideally attack and defense should both go up with cost, and to keep things slightly balanced attack and defense should be indirectly proportional (not one to one, attack shouldn’t go down as defense goes up, but there should be some tapering so that no one card is objectively best because it has the highest attack AND defense). In practice though, we get a different story altogether.
Cost and defense correlate as they should, as do attack and defense, but cost and attack are almost completely negligible. The states are so randomly distributed that that the cards had almost the same attack regardless of the cost.
There are too many outliers above and below the power curve to be balanced. I need to study the stats of cards from Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, and Hearthstone to see how they prevent their ratios from going out of whack.
There is definitely a game to be played with this data, I just need to keep chipping away until it reveals itself to me. Maybe I should come up with a different scale for the three stats, maybe I should make it a strategy board game instead of a TCG so that each state can form alliances with the others in your hand; maybe it should be less like Magic, and more like Risk or Catan, with a common deck for all the players and limited resources, but I also kinda like the idea of states battling themselves if the two players both happen to have the same cards.
