Apex Legends: The Card Game - The Game Design Workshop at GDC

As part of the Game Design Workshop at GDC 2019 I worked on a team of 6 to build an analog version of Apex Legends. We were asked to find a single emotion that we wanted our paper game to imbue onto our players. We decided the emotion we wanted our game to elicit was “thrill”. We were also asked to list 3 words that represented the digital version of our game. We agreed that our 3 most important words could be boiled down into LOOT, FIGHT, and MOVE. We knew that representing the totality of a Battle Royale match was too much for cards and dice with only a few hours to design. So we needed to figure out which part of the game was the best to represent “thrill”. We started with the idea of abstracting away the actual fighting, instead having the game be a series of checks to see if your loot and your luck was good enough, progressing through a series of checks until you become the champion. We instead decided to focus the game on a single fight between teams. We wanted the players to feel the thrill of immediately getting into a fight and (hopefully) coming out on top, and honestly most of us only get into one fight per match anyways.

The Loot:

We started by building the loot deck, a deck of cards full of loot found in the digital game: weapons, armor, health items, weapon attachments, and grenades. We never actually considered including ammo, I think all of us either forgot it was a pick-up or realized how un-fun managing ammo counts would be in a card game. One thing I am sad about is that we never got time to differentiate the weapons, we just ended up making them all use a six-sided die. If I decide to come back to this project one of the first things I will do will be to differentiate the weapons by having different dice or damage output or both. The Mozambique needs to mostly do nothing, so that you feel that much better if you manage to win with it. There were also too many weapons in the deck, play testers focused on getting armor at the expense of weapons because armor was much more rare than weapons in our short time building the game.

The Drop:

Apex Legends: The Card Game starts with The Drop; each player rolls a six-sided die. The values of all the dice are added together and that many cards are revealed from the Loot Deck face up on the table. Looting begins with the player that rolled highest, that player picks one piece of Loot from the table followed by the player who rolled the second highest, continuing until all the cards have been taken or all the players’ inventories are full.

We started in a 2 player game with The Drop being a set number of cards, five to start with. Late in the day we decided to add a third player and thus had to change the starting card amount, so we decided on this dynamic loot system so that player didn’t need to reference a table every time. This system also re-creates the idea of dropping in a “low-tier” loot zone from the digital game. In doing so allows the game to re-create the thrilling moments of punching and kicking an enemy before they have a chance to get their bearings and good loot.

The Fight:

After the drop when the players have their loot they pick up their Action Cards, which read “Fight” and “Loot”. Each player picks a card secretly and plays it face down in front of them, all players’ Action Cards are then revealed at once. Players who choose Fight must also choose a target, if there is more than 1 other player. Players who choose Fight can roll the dice noted on one of their weapon cards and deal damage to the target player. Players who choose Fight can also decide to use one of their items like health packs, shield cells, and grenades. Players who choose Loot get to draw another card from the Loot deck and add it to their inventory. This continues until only 1 player remains, that player wins!

Combat was the system that took the longest for us to get to a place we were happy with, we got looting down and feeling fun quickly, but it took us a while to figure out what the number rolled on the dice meant. Does it just deal that much damage to the other player? How much health do they have? How does armor affect that? Do players loose cards to represent their health? The armor question was the last one to be answered. We tried a few ideas starting with armor having different values, between two and four. If the attacker rolled a number less than your armor value the attack would not do damage, instead it would decrement the armor making it less effective in the future. I really liked this system but I think there were already a few too many dice to manage and without some other balance changes would make the fights too long. We ended up having armor act as extra health that was depleted first when you take damage. Players start at 6 health, with a six-sided die to represent it, and are dealt damage equal to the other player’s die roll. For example if you have five health and an armor with value 3 and the other player is attacking you and rolls a four, your armor is depleted and your health goes down to four.

When we added the third player it was remarkable how much better it made the game. It made the decision to Fight or Loot more interesting. With 2 players it was simply: Is my loot better than theirs? Adding a third player added several more questions each player had to ask themselves; Who is that player going to attack? Is this a turn I can get away with healing, or even looting? If those 2 players are going to fight each other, who do I think will be left and can then finish off? Adding a third player also allowed for the popular “Third Party” phenomenon from the digital game, where a team shows up in the middle of a fight to take advantage of the chaos and damaged players, to happen in our game. Since the third player was added so late we didn’t have time to include a system for looting a defeated enemy, but looking back I think this would give players more of a reason to finish off a player rather than letting them fight the 3rd player while you wait and gather loot. But without any play testing, it’s difficult to say how exactly it would turn out.

I had a really great time working on this project. It reminded me that I really love designing games, the whole process; coming up with an idea, making it playable, testing it, finding out it’s actually terrible, and trying again. The joy of finding a mechanic or designing a system that feels good, or invokes emotion, or is simply fun is something I need to keep doing. This workshop also reminded me that I can do game design, and do it well. I’m not going to claim that all the good ideas that ended up in the prototype were mine, or that all the ideas I suggested were good but I was good at listening to teammates’ thoughts while they played to try and find what 1) the actual problem was and 2) how we can fix it.