Tesla: Go Interaction

Hello again, everyone! Last week, I gave everyone the challenge to design progress mechanics that encouraged or facilitated interaction - but, because I like to be tricky, I didn't take any efforts to define exactly what counts as interaction. In your designs, many of you explored different forms of interaction in gameplay - and in the comments, there was some great discussion about what is interaction, and what isn't.

This week, I'm going to try to go over a few of the more frequent forms of interaction, using mechanics submitted or brought up last week as examples.

Battle-Forge, or Battle-Charged as it's been known before, has been a popular mechanic since its initial suggestion. Battle-Forge uses combat as its vehicle of interaction. Combat is an essential part of Magic, and is vital to every Limited game - so a mechanic that revolves around combat is definitely one of the best ways to encourage interaction. Battle-Forge follows the precedence of mechanics like Battle Cry, Renown, and Cipher, in that it explicitly calls out combat.

Battle-Forge is a mechanic with a lot of promise, simply because of the sheer variety of gameplay it offers. Combat itself varies a lot depending on the board state and the players' cards in hand - as Jenesis noted two weeks ago, certainty and uncertainty are both involved in combat at different times, giving it a lot of variety. In addition, Battle-Forge itself - as can be seen on these four example cards - has a lot of design space, so there's plenty of flexibility in how we use Battle-Forge in Tesla. I think, at the least, that Battle-Forge warrants further exploration and playtesting.

When the topic of interactive progress was brought up, many people, including myself, immediately thought of Outlast. Outlast gives creatures the ability to grow themselves, at the cost of lowering your defenses for a turn. (Really, as jack noted, "anything with '{T}, only as a sorcery' is somewhat interactive.) This shields-down moment is probably the second-most common form of interaction you see in Magic. Similar to the previous examples, Outlast uses combat to its advantage - but instead of encouraging you to actively engage in combat, it encourages your opponent. By giving them a temporary opportunity to strike, they're incentivized to attack that turn. Assemble, designed by Mike George and taking into account suggestions from Tommy and Jenesis, works similarly to Outlast. However, its multifaceted nature sometimes gives it even more of a shields-down moment than Outlast, if you tap down two creatures for it! That's pretty cool. I definitely agree that I tentatively love this mechanic, and I think it deserves further exploration!

Advance / Industrial Revolution is yet another mechanic that's been popular amongst the designers. In terms of interaction, it sometimes works similarly to Outlast in that, if you tap one or more creatures, you're left with a shields-down moment. However, its more prominent form of interaction is the idea of vulnerability - the mechanic is reliant on creatures, which are susceptible to your opponent's removal and attacks. Another mechanic that relies on vulnerability is advancement/progress, as lpaulsen brought up in his comment last week - and in the replies to this comment, a wonderful discussion sprung up, debating whether vulnerability was sufficiently interactive. I highly recommend reading the entire discussion!

One mechanic that squeezed under the finish line last week was the 'civilization counter' mechanic, designed by jack, with inspiration from Steam Fu. For this post, I took the liberty of melding it with "Poison counters that count up", which Tommy brought up. However, this fusion isn't necessary to make the mechanic exciting, as jack's submission shows. In this form, civilization counters foster interaction by giving your opponent agency. This includes choices, as seen here and in Tribute, but also mechanics like Jules' "if you cast the largest spell this game", which provide your opponent with the ability to directly compete with you in some way. 

However, there's an issue with this form of interaction: if too much agency given to your opponent, we run into 'the lawnmower problem'. In this case, civilization counters hold the promise of letting you win the game, but present your opponent with a choice - they can keep you from winning, or try to win the game themselves. Is this too much agency? Is this mechanic interesting enough to be worth that chance of frustration? What do you guys think?

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One of the big questions brought up by HavelockV was whether our progress mechanic really needs to be interactive. I firmly agree with Jenesis that we want to avoid encouraging "solitaire resource accumulation games" with Tesla, and I think one route to fostering a healthy and normally-interactive format is trying to make sure our Progress mechanic is interactive, or facilitates interaction, in some way. 

In addition, I think approaching the goal of designing progress mechanics from a new and constrained angle is valuable, as it has lead to some interesting and fun new designs, that hold a lot of promise for Tesla. And this is a great segue into my discussion topic for the week!

This week, I'd like you to nominate one or more mechanics from last week's design challenge that you think deserve further exploration. Argue on the mechanics' behalf - why is it a promising mechanic? Why is it a good fit for Tesla? In addition, try to refine the mechanic further, develop it in new ways, or design some new cards with the mechanic that show off interesting design space.