Devlog 6 - The Crew and Exploding Kittens

Playing both The Crew and Exploding Kittens made me realize just how different card games can be. 

The first thing that I noticed was how much more flavor text The Crew had. James Ernest's Writing Effective Rules talks about the preamble of a game and how it can be a simple sentence or multiple pages. The Crew had an entire page of preamble while I don't remember Exploding Kittens having any, or if it did it wasn't needed to understand the game. The Crew's preamble is important to understand the game that follows as each round builds on top of it. It is so important to the game that it has its own book separate from the rules.

The sequence of play portion of both games is where the differences were really apparent. For Exploding Kittens, after the initial set-up, you can pretty much figure out how the game works as you play with little confusion because every card has an explanation on it. The rule book was also very clearly laid out. The main reason we checked it was for clarification on how a card could be used, which is mentioned in Section 7 of Writing Effective Rules (whether a Nope card would negate a Defuse card is an example of something we had to look up, which the rules specify it can't). 

The Crew was a lot more complicated and had a lot more moving parts that seemed less intuitive to me. Such as the rockets being called a 'trump card', but not being able to play it whenever you want. Writing Effective Rules talks about adding hints or strategy to the rule book as additions and to make them distinguished from rules, which is one thing I noticed Exploding Kittens did. It has an aside on different ways to use the cat cards, which can only be played if you have 2 of them.

Going into making our own card game and trying to conceptualize an entirely new idea, I've been thinking about what I want the player experience to be and how the rules put in place will help or hinder that experience.