Design Diary #2: Replacing Dollars with Points
While far from perfect, the core mechanic—pushing our luck to roll for better cards—was so much fun that it was clear there was a real game here.
In my previous post about my yet-to-be-named non-betting poker game, I had just figured out how to implement a simple push-your-luck dice rolling mechanism for collecting cards to build poker hands. What I hadn’t figured out, however, was the actual goal of the game.
Alex
I had already defined a basic turn:
- Roll the dice as many times as you want and take all cards in the matching numbered slots
- OR if you roll the same number twice in one turn, you get no cards.
The most conservative player would get one card per turn, but lucky players could find themselves getting four or more.
I asked my partner to play a round with me—even though I wasn’t entirely sure what we were doing yet. I shuffled the deck and slid a joker about three-quarters of the way down, marking the end of the round. And so we rolled, and rolled, and rolled.
Is There a Hand Limit?
After a few turns, my partner had over ten cards. As she organized her loot, she asked, “Is there a hand limit?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but the trick is to not let them know that!
“Oh, right! Discard down to seven cards.”
And so we discarded. Eventually, the joker appeared, triggering our final turns. Since we could see each other’s hands, we knew exactly what we needed to beat each other. The final round became a frenzy of dice rolling to build the absolute best hand possible.
The rolling was exciting, but the surprise of the poker hand reveal was missing.
While far from perfect, the core mechanic—pushing our luck to roll for better cards—was so much fun that it was clear there was a real game here. We played again, and sure enough, it was still fun, but a few things became very apparent:
- Each round resulted in the same high-value hands, like a full house or flush.
- Discarding so many cards felt unsatisfying.
- It was hard to track which numbers had already been rolled during a turn.
Playtesting Early and Often
Ask any game designer for advice, and they’ll likely tell you to playtest early and often.
I’ve dabbled in game-making before, but I spent so much time on spreadsheets, card design, and placeholder art that I barely got to test if a game was fun until much later—at which point, I’d inevitably realize that no, the game was not fun, which can be discouraging after so much work.
This playtest taught me a lot.
Confident that I had a workable game, I set out to improve it. My goal was to define a win condition, smooth out the rough edges, and find something worthwhile to do with all the discarded cards.
Breaking Down the Changes
I added the following to the game board:
- The probability of rolling each number.
- A red bar at the bottom of each card slot to track rolls—simply slide a card up to reveal the red bar.
- Ranked poker hands with assigned point values.
- A score track.
- Arrows indicating where cards slide to fill empty slots.
Rolling two six-sided dice makes 7 the most common result, I adjusted the board so that cards slide toward 7 each turn and are replaced in the lowest and highest slots. This makes unclaimed cards easier to take later while making new cards harder to claim.
I added structure with a score tracker. The game would play in several rounds where after 3/4 of the deck had been used up the round would ends, and players would compare hands. Players would get points for their hand, and the player with the best hand would get 3 bonus points. This turned the game into a race where players would roll to build the best hands and get the most points faster than others.
Solving the Card Discard Problem
I needed to solve the problem that discarding so many cards felt unsatisfying. I added special ability card that could be purchased with discard cards and played on future turns. The costs was often a low ranking poker hand with effects that got better with higher hands. There would be a deck of these and four would be available on the bottom left of the board.
I was pleased with all my changes, so I started printing and cutting to get ready for the next playtest.
Prototype Files:
I include protype files relevant to this blog post so you can see the inner workings of ongoing designs or even try the game at this early stage. I often use the Affinity tool suite for digital workflows.
Additional Components Required:
- Standard 52 card deck
- 2 dice
- a score tracking token per player