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Designer Diary: To Deck Management and Beyond, or The Making of Stellarion

by Shadi Torbey

From the Skies…

In Aerion‘s designer diary, I explained how I stumbled upon deck management largely by chance: I was looking to create a dice game in which you’d need to gather resources (cards) by rolling appropriate dice combinations, but with no free re-rolls to improve your result. Instead, you would pay for re-rolls by discarding the very resources you were trying to acquire with your rolls.

To avoid adding the randomness of drawing cards to the uncertainty of rolling dice, I divided the cards into decks whose content stayed the same from one game to the next, with open knowledge of the cards.

This had the expected result of drastically reducing the randomness in the availability of the cards, but it also added a new layer of decision-making: Knowing the composition of each deck meant choosing which card to discard was no longer determined simply by how useful the card in question still was, but also by the probabilities of revealing a card you actually needed in its place.

This deck-management aspect turned out to be an essential part of in-game decision-making.

…to the Stars

I started to wonder: What if I used deck management as the main mechanism of a game?

What about a game centered on a series of decks, with every decision directly related to manipulating those decks, and cards that could be discarded either to obtain a victory condition or to trigger a helpful effect?

The theme imposed itself. After the Garden and Aquarium of Onirim, it was time to take a closer look at the Observatory and the infinite skies that surround it.

In Stellarion, your goal is to launch voyages into four galaxies. A voyage needs four cards: a ship card (which is specific to this destination), plus the stars, nebula and planet cards of that galaxy (as if you were triangulating your co-ordinates). Once you have those four cards, you discard them and get closer to victory.

As in Aerion, the cards are distributed between pre-constructed decks (eight here instead of six). Their contents stay the same from one game to the next: four decks are specialized in one type of card (for instance, one deck will have only stars), and four decks are specialized in one galaxy (for instance, one deck will have ships, nebulas, stars, and planets belonging only to a single galaxy).

You can play only with the first (face-up) card of each deck, so your aim is to have the four cards needed to launch a voyage on display.

If you don’t have the cards required for a launch, you must discard two cards of the same type, e.g., two ships, which will trigger a helpful effect.

The effects offer various options for manipulating the decks: a limited but certain search for one specific card, a broader but less certain search for several cards, the retrieving of discarded cards, and the option to set cards aside for later use (which expands the “pool” of available cards).

If both discarded cards are from the same galaxy (i.e., they are identical), the effect is doubled, adding an extra layer of dilemma.

Since each card can be used for a launch or to trigger an effect, this can make decisions rather tricky as all the cards are rather limited, with only four copies of each card being available.

The Oniverse Is in Expansion(s)

When it came to the expansions, there was a great deal of experimentation. Here I’ll name two options that failed to make the final cut:

The first version had several levels of difficulty, including an introductory level without any effects; discarding two identical cards served only to “unblock” situations in the search for the cards needed for a launch. This played like a very simple phone app, but was ultimately rejected for failing to offer enough challenge, even for an intro game. This “multi-level” system (similar to Castellion) was instead replaced by a system consisting of base game + modular expansions (similar to all the other games in the series).

The Glaucous Sun’s pawn first traveled from one deck to another, wreaking havoc on your card combos. This version was fun but a bit too chaotic, and eventually the pawn got its own board (making Stellarion, when playing with the expansion, technically the first “board” game of the series).

Eventually the game stabilized around four expansions. Each adds extra voyage cards to the game, raising the number of these cards (and the victory condition) from 8 (base game) to 16 (when playing with all four expansions combined).

Each expansion allowed me to push the deck-management system further: black holes block the decks but yield a high reward; theories require more cards on display than needed for a launch, but without the need to discard them; the Glaucous Sun encourages the sacrifice of some effects to avoid defeat; and mirrors are useless for the launches but increase the number of effects triggered.

After this journey of discovery and in-depth exploration of deck management, I was ready to get back to the more familiar shores of hand management…or should I rather say hands management? But this will be the object of another diary, in one year from now (if everything goes to plan).

In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy Stellarion!

Shadi Torbey

inPatience

P.S. If you’re at SPIEL ’22, you can come try it out at booth 5-I104.

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