Flipping the Strip — ep 1

There are two primary categories of development cycles: fast and slow. Slow occurs mostly in a sealed environment. Lots of ideas come forth and for quite a while all ideas seem like good ones because it is a drawn out period of only ideas. The ratio of testing to development is very low so it becomes hard to discern where sacrificing vision for playability is important.

This is a… retroactive development diary for my trading card game Mobius Flip. The game exists in design and the dozen or so times I’ve looked it over since settling on what it is I have been unable to find anything to change. Mobius, however, went through a “slow” development cycle. It hasn’t truly been playtested (ie more than just me) and the game mechanics design is very complex and of course it’s a TCG so there are hundreds of cards.

This being the first of many entries and the fact that all of this happened in the past we’ll start with what it is and a bit of how it plays before getting into the actual history of the thing in future installments.

Mobius consists of 5 sets (fights) of actions. In each fight both players choose an action to play which resolve (by flipping, like the old card game War) simultaneously (a round). This repeats until one player is dead (0 health) or exits to another fight.

The primary trick is the game is about time travel. Players can leap out of a fight into the next empty one or back into any round of an existing fight. If a fight had 5 rounds a player could leap back into round 2 invalidating the subsequent 3 rounds sending them to the discard pile and play out the fight differently.

You only succeed by killing the opposite player within the context of a single fight. If they leap out they survive. There are other win conditions but those will be covered in part of the history.

There is a large element of cat and mouse type strategy. Predicting what the opponent will do or herding them where you want them to be is key to victory.

Each player chooses a “character” with an innate ability and stats. (some have higher health, etc) The deck consists of actions (like punches, kicks and leaps) and equipment (armor, guns, swords, etc) with the chosen character and the locations you want to use set aside. Leaping to new fights allows you to set the location from your set of 5. There are no rules against duplicate locations in the same match if both players choose to have the same ones in their lists. The great thing about time travel as a theme is very little wont make sense.

Getting into much more here will end up with too many reveals I want to save for future entries so I’m going to do my own leap and leave it until episode 2.