Please review my card text!

[3XXXDDD]

Been working on proper formatted text for my card battle game and would like some of you to review it very much!

I've narrowed it down to 3 separate parts.

Timing Activation - When you can activate the effect
Cost - What you have to do to activate the effect
Effect - The resulting effect of the card.

There are three types of timing activation

AUTO - When an Event occurs, you may/must respond with the effect

AUTO Timing always starts as "When X Happens"


CONTINUOUS - As long as a condition is present, the effect is active

CONTINUOUS Timing always starts as "While X is present, Y is also present"


ACTIVATE - If a condition is present, you may activate an effect

ACTIVATE Timing always starts as "If X is present, you may pay the cost, to do effect"


Cost's come in two main forms


MANDATORY - The cost must be payed if the condition is present.

MANDATORY Costs always start as "You must do X, if you do, do Y Effect"


OPTIONAL - You may pay the cost if the condition is present; If you don't, the effect doesn't activate.

OPTIONAL Costs always start as "You may do X, if you do, do Y Effect"

Question here: Should it be "You may do X, IF YOU DO, DO Y" or "You may do X TO DO Y"

E.g 1 "When you play this card, you may discard a card, if you do, destroy a card on the field"

E.g 2 "When you play this card you may discard a card to destroy a card on the field"

(Personally, I feel while "to do" saves space, "if you do" makes it a lot more implicit/explicit that you HAVE to fulfill the preceding cost before activating the card. I'd also love to hear any alternative suggestions you might have!)

The majority of times any specific notes regarding an effect is covered previously by the Timing Activation and or the Cost. However, usually if a cost isn't present, an effect may start with "You may" or "You must" to differentiate between Mandatory and Optional Effects.

So while all of the divisions of the text is written, I've been attempting to make things even clearer by adding punctuation.

E.g 1 [Timing Activation] Cost: Effect
E.g 2 [When you play this card] You may discard a card, if you do: Draw a Card

If there would be no Cost, there would also be no ":"

E.g 1 [Timing Activation] Effect
E.g 2 [When you play this card] You may Draw a Card.

If there would be no Timing Activation, there would be no [] either

E.g 1 Cost: Effect
E.g 2 You may discard a card, if you do: Draw a Card

If there is only an effect, it would simple be a line of text

E.g 1 Effect
E.g 2 You may draw a card

Note: You may also notice that whenever I start a new part of the text, it always start with a capital letter. This is to signify we're moving onto the next stage of the text.

Full Examples

CONTINUOUS - [While you control a card] This card gains 500 Points

AUTO - [When you play this card] You must discard a card, if you do: Draw a Card

ACTIVATE - [If you control a card] You may discard a card, if you do: This card gains 500 Points.

Additionally, there is one more part of text I'd like to address, what I call "conditions". Conditions are simply called conditions so they can't be negated by cards that negate effects. They are created in a similar manner to MTG's Keywords. They will always have (Reminder Text in brackets like these) and sometimes bolded keywords beside them.

E.g Lone Wolf (You can only play this card if you control no other cards)

Thank you for taking your time to read this far. You're awesome even if you don't comment!

[Ziadross]

How could I not reply after that last sentence? You're a crafty one

I know you were working on a game called Chimera (which I am still interested in playtesting) that used a relatively low number of cards and a lot of symbols. If these are for that game, and each card is limited to a single Timing, Cost and Effect, then I see little problem with how you're wording things here. The only thing that bothers me is that it feels very wordy. I understand that there is a need for things to be as clear and straight forward as possible to avoid confusion, but cards with multiple costs/effects are going to quickly become annoying walls of text. If a player has to constantly reread their cards every turn because of an abundance of text, it will cause analysis paralysis and slow your game down a lot.

My only real advice would be to limit each card to one of each. This is of course without the context of which game you're referring to and the game is played. Again, if these are for Chimera which uses symbols, if may be better to represent things like the timing activation with symbols to not only stay consistent with the design of your game, but also to limit the overall number of words that are on each card.

To answer your question about optional costs, I feel that the 'if you do' is probably necessary. While I'm not completely satisfied with it, it feels like it's needed to connect the cost to the effect. 'You may discard a card: Draw a card' feels like the card is forcing you to do something or worse, offering something for free. I would leave it as is for now.

I'd love to talk games more, but it's late. I eagerly await your reply.

Cheers, Z.

[3XXXDDD]

Not Chimera. This is actually a CCG game in the veins of Yugioh, Magic, Vanguard and so on.

When you saying limit a card to one each are you talking about limiting to one effect per card? (Because it doesn't make sense to limit to a card to one of Timing Activation/Cost/Effect by itself)

[Typherion]

This is a topic I'm really interested in so I'll try and add my 2 cents. I've approached things slightly differently because I don't think there is much difference between activation timing and cost. So I'm just treating specific timing requirements as another kind of cost. I'm separating each requirement using commas, then using ":" to separate what happens at activation from what happens at resolution.

Eg: When this creature enters the field, if you control no other creatures: This creature has +2 Attack this turn.

Taking your examples of:

E.g 1 "When you play this card, you may discard a card, if you do, destroy a card on the field"

E.g 2 "When you play this card you may discard a card to destroy a card on the field"

I think it depends on what else the card is doing.

For example, if the card doesn't remain in play and is discarded after use then I think the best option is to simply say "Discard a card: Destroy a card." Because choosing to play the card is the same thing as choosing to activate its effect. If I didn't want to use the effect then I simply wouldn't play the card.

But if the card remains in play to do other stuff, I would word it like this:
"When you play this card, you may discard a card: Destroy a card."

I would say that it is not grammatically correct to say, "You may do X, if you do: Do Y." You would either need to use, "You may do X, and if you do: Do Y." or "You may do X. If you do: Do Y."

Also, I really don't think it's necessary to use "if you do" so much. Probably the only reason I would consider using it is where multiple things are happening at resolution (not activation), and I want to make some things happening conditional on other things.

Eg: A card's effect does things A, B and C at resolution.
If I wanted them all to happen individually then I might separate them with commas and "then." Or I might only want C to happen if A and B happened, so I might need to use "if you do" to make that clear.

However, I would not use "if you do" in the text for activation requirements, because it should already be clear that the stuff before the ":" is required for the effect to activate. If you can't do it then the effect can't even be activated. So I would disagree with Ziadross.

'You may discard a card: Draw a card'

I think this is fine, but that's because I've made the choice to structure all of my effects using a similar system consistently. If players have the choice to activate the effect then I would even cut out "you may" and just have "Discard a card: Draw a card." If they want to activate the effect to draw a card then they will do so by paying the cost of discarding a card.

Now the most important point: None of this really matters and its probably just delaying you from finishing your game. If Magic and Yuigoh have taught us anything, it's that you can worry about fixing the text up after your game is finished. As long as people can understand it, it's probably better to just focus on finishing. I'm giving advice to myself here, because this is something I'm very guily of!

[Ziadross]

When you saying limit a card to one each are you talking about limiting to one effect per card?

Yes that's what I meant, my apologies. I feel that it would be better to have a single activation timing/cost with only one effect on a card then to have cards that do too much but that's a different topic altogether.

Typherion brings up a good point about consistency in card text. You can get away with concise effect descriptions if all the cards are worded similarly. I'm certainly no English major, but card games can get away with with a lot more than more forms of writing.

If players have the choice to activate the effect then I would even cut out "you may" and just have "Discard a card: Draw a card." If they want to activate the effect to draw a card then they will do so by paying the cost of discarding a card.

I fully agree with this.

Like I said in my first post, I'm not a fan of 'if you do' and I'm glad that someone has thought of a better way to word things.

Finally, in regards to finishing a project, this is something I am also very guilty of. I would choose the simplest and most direct way to word things when designing the cards. You can always go back and alter the text later.

Thanks for the counter argument Typherion and hope this helps XD³!

[3XXXDDD]

FYI, Majority of my game is close to being finished. I'm just waiting for some art/design and printer issues.

• "If you do" is a redundant addition due to the fact prerequisties are already implied by ":"
• "If you do" may exist after ":" as an effect if an effect has more than one part and requires earlier parts to be fulfilled before completing later parts
• "You may" is a redundant addition due to the fact that all effects should be optionally inherently (Mandatory effects are seperated because they start with "You Must".

That's what I've gleaned from your reply Typherion.

Also I've been thinking of just doing this instead

Timing: Cost; Effect instead of [Timing] Cost: Effect. The latter was a bit more unsightly.