Galacticard Captors

Unleash your puzzle prowess in a game where every puzzle is a bespoke card battle against an enemy creature – defeat these enemies in their battles to capture their card, make your deck stronger, and eventually challenge the final boss to discover the truth behind the cards.

Points of contact

Who (ideally 3+) would be happy to work on designing the card game part of the hunt?

Amon: design/implementation/art

Leo: design

Anderson: design/implementation

Nathan: design/implementation

Chris: design/implementation

Narrative

What story beats, arcs does the event go through?

Long ago, there was a legendary card game rumored to possess great power. Little is known about the game, but the cards in this game were supposedly imbued with unknown magic and could control the very nature of reality.

A group of vagabonds,  Stalactic Cavesettlers , uncover an artifact from the ancient game, with the magic to seal people into cards. Worried this power would fall into the wrong hands, they bestow the artifact to you: wanderers from the nearby village.

As you journey across the land, battling creatures drawn to you by the power of your artifact, you travel from agrarian pastures, through mystic mountains, and to sprawling cyberpunk cities. You capture the enemies into cards and grow stronger with each addition to your collection.

Your quest for the source of this power leads you to the stars, where you discover the last survivor of an ancient alien civilization. It has lured you here, along with countless other groups from your land, each with a card-sealing artifact of their own. The alien’s ancestors were the creators of this game – their true goal was to gather all their technology and destroy any evidence of it – including all of you.

In a final confrontation, you release the greatest creatures from the cards you captured in your journey against the boss. After emerging victorious, you convince the alien that the true power of the game was not in the artifact nor the cards, but in the power of friendship... and the alien promises to never write a puflantu puzzle ever again for 999 years.

“Puzzle” nature

What individual components can writers contribute? How does it integrate with the card game?

puzzle = enemy battle = card

Every puzzle is an enemy, which teams fight in a unique card battle. Teams bring a deck they’ve built from the cards they have, and all battles use the base card game mechanics. We’re already making a card game – why not have all of us build on the card game instead of just “meta writers”? This way we all write “metas” – puzzles that are embedded in the theme – and can deeply explore the space of interactions in a cohesive game with a novel experience for players old and new.

 Each puzzle writer designs their battle, which includes:

• The cards the enemy plays during the battle
• Additional battle rules, which can be explicit or enigmatic
• Their own puzzle card: when defeating a puzzle for the first time, the enemy is captured into a new card, which can be added to the team’s deck and used in future battles.

Example puzzle battles:

Monkey Guardian

• Plays a bunch of animal cards (cat, dog, elk, fish, chipmunk, etc...)
• Only way to defeat the animals is to attack with a card with more of each vowel:

• Rock Lobster beats Dog
• Banana beats Cat

Rock Lobster

• Autoplays Rock Lobster
• Plays jellyfish, dogfish, catfish, and baking potatoes
• Gets stronger on each turn, but rewards you with an additional Rock Lobster card depending on what turn you beat it
• Can be replayed to try to beat your team’s record and earn more Rock Lobsters

• Beat on turn 1 (easy, get 1 Rock Lobster)
• Beat on turn 5 (hard, get 5 Rock Lobsters)

Black Hole

• Unlike other battles, the Black Hole consumes cards used against it, so teams have to be careful about which cards they sacrifice
• Can be replayed to optimize card loss

Highlander 

• There can only be one!

• Battle is a replay of the previous team that beat it, playing their exact cards
• Highlander is a strong card, but there’s only one copy across all teams: you lose the Highlander card when another team beats your replay
• It’ll be a contest that gets harder and harder to beat over time, as teams optimize their deck and strategy

Ms. Yu

• Ms. Yu has a 2D play grid and plays white and black circles
• On each turn, the Masyu laser corresponding to her played circles kills all your played cards on the loop
• Ms. Yu moves a few circles around each turn, modifying the laser’s path
• It’s a placement puzzle! Place your cards in safe spots to survive lasers and deal enough damage

Kripparian Tick

• Kripp plays cards with cryptic clues on them
• Each clue solves to a card in your deck, and can only be defeated by that card
• (or maybe they clue groups of cards, only connect style)

Base card game mechanics

Be specific and detailed.

Examples:

• what features cards have
• how to play cards
• how to build deck, trade/upgrade/sell cards
• how cards interact with puzzles
• card examples

Cards have:

• cost, strength, health, name, picture, flavortext, (optional unique text/abilities), (optional rarity)
• suits: every card belongs to a suit. puzzle writers assign a suit to their own puzzle card

• ◍ kingdom of logica
• ◍ word mountains
• ◍ interacity
• ◍ meme forest
• ◍ realiclouds (physical puzzles, jigsaws, conundra, etc.)
• maybe cards in each suit can share loose mechanic “themes” like mtg, examples:

• many ◍ cards Sap ❖ energy, using excess ❖ energy to gain health or draw cards
• many ◍ cards tend strong, but Discard a card from your hand when played
• many ◍ cards are animals, have Rush: deals damage immediately when played but doesn’t attack normally on the first turn
• ◍ cards affect other cards / are spells like Silencing cards or Printing duplicates of a card
• ◍ cards can Stack on top of one another to combine their stats

The base game is like Inscryption/Air Land Sea/Marvel Snap.

• Start with one ❖ energy to play cards. Gain one more ❖ energy each turn.
• Start your hand with three cards, draw one card each turn.
• Play cards from your hand to a board with 5 spaces in a line.

• Replace existing cards on board with cards in hand for a discounted cost.

• Both player and enemy turns resolve simultaneously. Cards attack their opposing card if any, killing it if it has more strength than its health. If there is no opposing card, damage is dealt directly to your LIFE POINTS.
• When either the player or enemy’s LIFE POINTS is reduced to 0, the battle ends in either failure or success.

In order to fit the constraints of a particular puzzle, the rules of the game may change slightly, eg. a different number of spaces or lines, or a different win condition. For example, the Ms Yu puzzle may require a larger grid in order to be suitably challenging. These changes can be introduced separately before being combined.

You start with a base deck of 10 basic cards. As you gain more cards from puzzles, you can swap new cards into your deck. As not all puzzles will use each element of each card, each puzzle can potentially have a “suggested suit” to guide solvers towards a relevant deckbuilding strategy. In some cases, particular suits or cards may even be banned to stop a puzzle from being trivialized, or you are only allowed to bring a limited number of certain “legendary” cards.

(Optional: replaying battles)

You can replay battles to upgrade that card, but the replay is harder (stronger enemy cards, debuff on your cards, higher enemy HP, etc.)

(Optional: minipuzzles)

If the design space for a puzzle is overly constrained by being incorporated directly into the card game, successful completion of minipuzzles (with answer submissions) may change something about the state of the game or cards in your deck, such as upgrading cards.

Risk analysis

How hard will it be to actually design the hunt (e.g. card game itself, hunt website, puzzles, etc.)? Is there a way to make the structure more friendly to beginners? Are there fallbacks in case we run behind schedule?

I want everyone to be involved in making our card game, and this allows every writer to own their own battle as well as their puzzle’s card. While this creates a very unified experience for players, this puts writing constraints that don’t exist in typical hunts with “anything goes” style feeder puzzles.

Because of the interconnected nature of the battles, every puzzle card will need to be carefully balanced, as well as puzzle unlocking order. We will have “metagamers” (these can be our head editors or a different role) responsible for maintaining card balance across our puzzles, making stat buffs/nerfs and iterating through the core design. We should set an early deadline (April?) for all battles designed (equivalent to all answers assigned in past hunts) so that we have as much info and time to rebalance cards & lock down the details of individual battles.

We will need a tech team that implements the base game and acts also act as “postprodders” for writers: we will expose an API for writers to implement their puzzle mechanics, which will include:

• Game state: information about the current board, such as the player's hand, the enemy's board, and the turn number
• Card creation: create new cards with unique abilities, stats
• Card placement: specify where cards are placed on the board
• Interactivity:

• eg. When X [is played/attacks/dies], change Ys to Z

Designing a puzzle battle can be as simple as creating a deck of cards (list of stats) and an order to play those cards in, but writers can also use the API to create scripted interactions based on the cards players play. More technically demanding puzzles with unique rulesets or strategies can work with “postprodders”/tech team to make sure their mechanics are feasible and implement them. This will be more work than usual, but I hope not significantly more than already implementing a card game. I hope to leverage the time of all our talented writers here to contribute our game.

Not having set “metas” gives the advantage of not having a strict puzzle count. If we are behind schedule, we can cut puzzle count to focus efforts on implementing the designs that are furthest in development, as well as pad the game with simple battles without special mechanics. In general, I think “beating the game” should be a shorter experience than “solving a past GPH” – for instance, we can start Friday/Saturday and target a Sunday finish for the majority of teams.

For beginner teams and the larger community, I hope this kind of context change will give them more equal footing with experienced teams, since much of the institutional knowledge (extraction techniques, solving tools) won’t apply in our game.