Order and Chaos Duels: Rock, Paper, but no Scissors

Order and Chaos Duels is a Collectable Card Game I played on my phone.  The game takes a large stable of basic fantasy tropes and turns fits them into a variety of creatures, spells, and heroes.  Very reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering, Order and Chaos Duels does what it can to mitigate the steep learning curve and more frustrating aspects as much as it can.

But something I feel is missing from Order and Choas Duels is a good sense of counter play.  If you've ever been new to a fighting game, you may have found that one move that just plows through most of your enemies.  We'll call it Punch.  To stop that from being the only tactic, designers add a counter move, we'll call Parry.  Now, two players with Parry and Punch can interact a little.  Not much, because it makes no sense to do anything but Parry, since Punch can only lose to it.  So we add one more ability.  Let's call it Throw.  A Throw can trump a Parry, but loses to a Punch.  Now we have a dynamic system.  Now it matters what you do and how well you opponent can predict it, because each move has benefits and weaknesses.  This is an element of counter play.

Put more simply: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Competitive games of all types use counter play in fantastically complex ways, like every card's interaction in Magic, or every fighter's moveset in Super Smash Bros. or Guilty Gear.  This is where I see Order and Chaos duels miss the mark.  This interplay isn't really present in the game I played.  Creature cards line up on each side of the field and slam into one another, turn after turn, and whoever's numbers were highest generally won.

Also, as your main Hero card levels up, you gain additional health, but you also gain a larger maximum deck size.  In CCGs, you almost never want more than the minimum number of cards in your deck, because every card past that number is not one of your best.  You decrease the chances of drawing your best cards by adding more than needed.

The best kind of counter play is the kind that creates choices and options for both sides of battle.  For instance, a spell in Magic that destroys all creatures destroys both mine and yours, so I have to build my deck to account for the fact that my creatures might not be around very long.  Or, even crazier, I build it with no creatures at all.  You have options of favouring creatures who can't be destroyed, or can easily be returned to the battle.  But in Order and Chaos duels, cards can't really be responded to.  In the entirety of the game I played, I never got a chance to really prepare or react.  All I could know was what the stats of the creatures on the battlefield were.  I never got a sense of what my opponent might play, because there weren't really any limits or consistent archetypes, and I never got a sense of building a coherent deck with a single plan for the same reason.

Take a look at how this kind of counter play exists in the simple games that have lasted for so long.  Go Fish has awesome counter play.  Whenever I name a card, I'm getting a chance to earn a pair, but I'm also risking a little by revealing part of my hand.  And that mechanic is most of the game!  It's harder to build at more complex levels like a massive and sprawling CCG.  Order and Chaos Duels attempts to fill this in but its slow progression and steep difficulty curve cause many of the threats to be unanswerable, and its pushes toward simplicity remove too much depth to be worth it.

Next time I'll talk about Castlevania: Circle of the Moon for the Game By Advance.