Flipping the Strip: Design Decision #1 — ep2

I’m really big on identifying where ideas come from even if the final product looks nothing like its origins. In this case I feel like I kept it pretty close, though, which is uncommon for my designs.

Most of my designs start as a criteria. With my tcgs Epic! and Siege! (I like exclamation points in names) I started wanting to specifically make a tcg with no permanent state and no non-permenants respectively. The themes grew out of the most obvious way to tackle each problem. Epic! is a superhero brawl. Loads of puches, kicks, eye lasers and disposable henchmen. Siege! is a literal castle siege. One side builds up a fortress to defend it and the other sets up camp and tries to knock it down.

The rest of my designs start as a theme translation. Mobius was brought to life following watching the movie Jumper. I also ended up reading the book series which has its own interesting evolution. There were books which begat a screenplay but then had the original author writing a book adaptation of the screenplay.

So Mobius is essentially a game about a world where some individuals can teleport at will. It stands to reason that throughout history those gifted with such power would also end up being worthy of legend. What better way, then, to completely punt on one aspect of the design than to take a stab at implementing time travel as the central tenant. So Mobius became Jumper by way of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures.

The first design decision started small but would become a much larger factor than I ever anticipated. Stealing a bit from one of my favorite board games Talisman each player would be able to set from the start a “character” to play. Each character would be a knock off legendary figure from history with their own innate ability and stats.

Originally this was meant to accomplish a few things. It gave me an easy out to include any genre of content I wanted. Medieval warriors, modern day savants and ruthless criminals, and futuristic spacers. I’m basically always looking for an easy out on the writing tasks so I included a Ghengis Khan lookalike, the fictionalized mesmer Rasputin, a knockoff Ozymandias from Watchmen, my own roleplay characters from my D&D days, my main character from Eve Online (for the future) and a few ripoffs from old cartoons like Thundarr among others. The backstory became like taffy stretched and pulled from there.

Keeping with the theme there really are two main components. If the game is about people who can teleport (through time) you need the people teleporting and the places they are teleporting to. Jumper included quite a few iconic locations to give us some eye candy for the movie. (whereas the books are far more boring places like offices, airports and the desert)

Next up was places. Players would be able to have location cards and willfully choose where to teleport to; we’re not playing Defender afterall. Tossing in a bunch of generically iconic places just for the heck of it seemed pointless. What’s the honest difference between landing near the pyramids in Giza versus the top of the Great Wall of China versus the Arch di Triumph?

Design decision #1 reared its head. Each character would have a location. Some would be more iconic of the era and area they originated from (like the Parsian catacombs) and some would simply be their personal space. Not that I can take credit for inspiring this but a similar effect is used in Overwatch. Each map tells a bit of the story augmented by the animations and comics that Blizzard releases. You can load into Hanamura and see the slash marks and arrows from the two brothers animation. When Doomfist debuted the Numbani map was changed to reflect the animated fight Winston, Tracer and Doomfist had over the doomfist… fist.

Locations also have passive and active abilities either player can take advantage of but are most aligned to the character they are themed for. Another nod to decision #1 that would later shape the rest of the design. Before that, though: raw mechanics.

TCGs have a number of resources but architecturally the most prevalent one is your deck. Quite a few TCGs dictate that the game ends when your deck runs out. This felt like a bad design. Pulling from Epic!’s mechanics the deck is simply a resource pool. If it runs out the discard pile is simply reshuffled and becomes the deck. This produces a vegas style solitaire scenario. Quite a lot of the actions revolve around cycling through the active draw deck. Adding in actions, locations and characters that can manipulate the discard pile, then, becomes counter intuitive. It makes sense in, say, Magic The Gathering where the draw pile running empty ends the game but Mobius is about people teleporting around having quick fights. It’s not about strategically organizing the deck order. You act and react.

This informed the second major design decision: The win condition.