The first question a lot of people ask about Time of Crisis is, “How does it compare to other deckbuilding games?” This is something Wray and I thought about quite a bit throughout the development process. When we first conceived of the base design for Time of Crisis, deckbuilding was still a new mechanic on the scene and we were clearly not the only ones who were intrigued by it. Since that time, many new deckbuilding games have come into existence, many exploring new territory. We knew we had to give Time of Crisis its own fingerprint, to make it distinctive in some way among games that utilize a similar mechanic.
First, what exactly is a deckbuilding game? We need to begin with the first real ancestor, Rio Grande’s Dominion. There may have been games in the past that used a deckbuilding-like mechanic, but Dominion is the one that really gave it an 
identity and turned it into a genre. I suggest that the essence of what makes a deckbuilding game, as seen originally in Dominion, can be captured in the diagram to the right. The main “loop” of actions in the game is to draw new cards and play those cards, thereby generating points that can be used to purchase new cards, and repeat. Some of the cards that you buy are worth victory points (VPs), the accumulation of which is necessary for winning the game. To make the game interesting, most of the cards allow the players to perform special actions, which may modify or enhance virtually any element of the game. Seeking ways to exploit combinations of these special actions is a big part of the game, but it doesn’t change the fundamental core of the game, which is to create an engine that can buy victory points more efficiently. Note that all of the action in the game is entirely encompassed within the scope of the player’s deck of cards. Every action is about simply moving cards, from supply to deck to hand and into play.
Deckbuilding games that followed soon after Dominion, for example, Alderac’s Thunderstone, Evertide’s Mr. Card Game and many others, primarily tried to offer more options for player actions, generally in the form of new, more varied, and more thematic means to acquire cards and generate victory points. Alderac’s later game, Trains, is a notable example, for moving some of the game action to a board. (It wasn’t the first to do this by any means, but it was the simplest extension of the deckbuilding concept to a boardgame.) In Trains, players are offered the opportunity to use some of the purchase points generated by their cards to place pieces on a board that are worth victory points, as seen in the diagram above. However, the underlying loop of drawing, playing, and buying new cards remains essentially unchanged. The ability to buy cards worth victory points is even retained, so the board action could theoretically (if not effectively) be ignored.
I believe the first game to really bring post-Dominion deckbuilding concepts to a boardgame was Treefrog’s A Few Acres of Snow. In this 2-player 
wargame, players are moving armies on a board to capture territory, driven by the abilities offered by each player’s deck of cards. This is a fundamental idea that has also been used in many, many games, but A Few Acres of Snow builds on it by giving players the ability to gain new cards and new abilities for their deck throughout the course of the game. However, as shown in the diagram to the right (the simplicity of which belies the actual richness of the game), this is where we see something of a departure from standard deckbuilding concepts. Rather than cards being gained by generating purchase points, many of the new cards available are gained solely according to which cities the player controls (the board state), and these cards can also subsequently be lost if the board state is changed. There are cards that can be purchased in a more traditional deckbuilding fashion, but these purchases, as well as the generation of the in-game currency that serves as purchase points, are folded into the standard action menu of the game. (This concept is pursued even more completely in Treefrog’s later A Study in Emerald, in which virtually all cards are gained through board actions, rather than being purchased directly.) Ultimately, the victory points necessary for winning the game are entirely acquired through a players’ position on the board, cementing A Few Acres of Snow as a true boardgame with deckbuilding elements.
In the early development of Time of Crisis, we knew that we wanted to build from the basic framework of a card-driven game (CDG), popularized by many successful GMT Games publications. In a “standard” CDG, we see that the main game flow is for a player to draw cards from a deck (either shared or individualized) and play those cards, thereby generating points that can be used to “purchase” various actions on the board. Most of the cards allow the players to perform actions (instead of or in addition to) the basic menu of on-board actions, or to modify virtually any element of the game. This all is very well-aligned with analogous concepts in deckbuilding games, except that there is typically no way for a player to consciously modify his deck throughout the game, which would be the missing trademark of the deckbuilding genre. (Yes, some CDGs do feature the removal of cards from the game, usually after a unique event is played, or the addition of new cards into the game, perhaps to reflect a new phase of the game, but these changes are not really true deckbuilding under the control of the players.)
And so we sought to fully merge together the essential cores of two different game genres: take the “Deck” portion of deckbuilding games and the “Board” portion of CDGs, and you have the core framework of Time of Crisis, as seen below. We really wanted to retain as much of the original flavor of both genres as possible, particularly the twin and parallel ideas of a) your cards generating action points that allow you to perform on-board actions, and b) your board position generating deck management points that allow you to perform deck modifications. Other deckbuilding board games to date have not quite replicated this critical “bi-directional” point-based player action loop.
You’ll find a few other secondary differences from traditional deckbulding boardgames in the Time of Crisis design, as well.
- Most importantly, Time of Crisis permits players to select the cards they wish into their hand each turn, rather than drawing them randomly. During playtesting, we found that many players wished for more direct control over what actions they could take on the board. Random draws could sometimes result in really inopportune hands that could cripple a player’s position through no fault of his own, especially in a multi-player game. We decided to allow players to manage their own card flow. However, there’s still no escaping the eventual appearance of every card in your deck, as in most deckbuilders, so players still have to manage their deck and plan ahead carefully.
- Time of Crisis gives players the basic ability to “trash” cards from their decks. Most deckbuilding games offer trashing only as a special action with certain cards, but again we found that boardgame players were wishing for more control over their resources. Thus, players get “deck management points” that can be used for buying or trashing cards, rather than purchase points only useful for buying cards. Deck management points will have value throughout the game, providing players with some interesting decisions regarding when to gain new cards vs. when to trash obsolete cards.
- Finally, all card-based special actions solely modify actions on the board. We really wanted to focus player attention on the on-board action, rather than potentially allowing them to short-circuit the deck/board paradigm with optimized card builds.
Taken as a whole, we feel this is finally “closing the loop” between deckbuilding games and board games. We hope that this design results in an enjoyable and highly accessible challenge for fans of both genres, and that this framework may provide the basis for a new expansion of CDG-type games.
Author: Brad Johnson
“Most importantly, Time of Crisis permits players to select the cards they wish into their hand each turn, rather than drawing them randomly.”
Does this make it more like a hand-building game (c.f. Concordia, Lewis & Clark), then? One of the big reasons deck-builders and CDGs have a randomized hand is to reduce the number of decisions you need to make, and increase the need to roll with the punches. I’d be curious to see what the trade-off was for the manual-hand decision.
Adam – good question. I would distinguish a hand-building game from a deck-building game in that games like Concordia and Lewis & Clark let you choose from all of your cards (as if your entire deck were in your hand) each turn, but most deck-building games only give you a subset of your deck in hand each turn. In Time of Crisis, it’s true it’s kind of in the gray border somewhere — Each turn, you select your hand for next turn from your available deck. But then you only have what you selected for your hand available to play in that turn (and then you select again for the next turn.) I think that makes it a little closer to traditional deck-building, but opinions on that could vary.
We playtested Time of Crisis for a long time with standard deck-building-style hand-drawing (exactly as in Dominion and most other games of that type). I think if there was enough “public demand” for us to switch back to that method, it could be done and the game would still be playable. But what we found was that in a multi-player wargame setting, players were pretty consistently expressing a desire for “more control” over their cards. What I mean is: If a player spends one turn setting up a takeover of a certain province, then they wanted to have some degree of confidence that on the next turn they would be able to continue pursuing that course of action. At least some players (probably the more grognardish ones) were expressing frustration when they set up a good move and then failed to draw the cards needed to finish their plan. In a pure Euro game like Dominion, each turn being (nearly) completely independent from the next is acceptable to most players, but wargamers wanted more “continuity” from turn to turn. So we felt letting them select their cards for their next turn (from the ones that are available to them) seemed to be a decent compromise, and playtest feedback has been quite good on that.
Like I say in the article, players’ control is still not perfect though, because in true deck-building fashion, you are still constrained by the cards you’ve chosen to put in your deck, and you still have to work your way through all of them eventually. But at least you get to choose the order and combination of how you see them.