Card Thief is a solitaire style medieval stealth game
played with a deck of cards.

Shadow-Step

It’s been some time since we last posted about the design of Card Thief. Today we want to talk about one of the advanced mechanics in the game.

As you might have guessed already Card Thief evolves around the idea of light and shadow. Each card is influenced by it and can change it’s state depending on their current illumination. While regular cards change their value, we were looking for a way to adapt this idea for the player card. Since the player doesn’t have the exact same properties as a normal card we needed some kind of interaction that would work with the player card in an elegant way.

One thing we introduced early on is the way how stealth and light work. The player is always invisible, even when illuminated and looked at, to enemies as long as she has at least 1 stealth point left. If the player then decides to take the risk of falling to 0 or less stealth points she becomes vulnerable to being caught instantly. As soon as the player is visible to an enemy the game ends. It’s a really nice risk reward system where the benefits of stealing a high valuable treasure due to a long path can instantly result in being caught in the next turn, because you’re stealth had run out.

This mechanic only influences the dynamic of the end of a turn. This is why we wanted to have something that could also influence the starting state of the player. Due to the system of how the interaction between cards work (only forward) the player can not change his starting state. This means that it should become important how you would end a turn to influence the starting state of the next turn.
We had several ideas to make the starting condition influence each round but couldn’t find anything that would be conceptually and mechanically interesting. While thinking about the issue of getting caught with 0 stealth we came up with the idea of „what if the player could move freely while hidden in the shadows“. Thematically it’s a cool idea that a thief that walks through the shadow could perform movements that wouldn’t be possible while illuminated. In addition to that this would introduce a completely new idea to the game that you could actually play a card without removing it. While the regular mechanic always forces you to remove a played card, just changing position with it would introduce some new tactical options.

We tried out several ideas but settled with this final rule „If the player has 0 or less stealth and is within the shadow, she can move past any other enemy card that is also within the shadow“. In addition to that we kept the stealth cost of moving past an enemies the same. Since moving „totally free“ without any restrictions was just to powerful. This mechanic added a bunch of interesting dynamics to the game such as the ability to move out of otherwise impossible situations or reaching a sneak or hide card while moving past guards. Due to the openness of the system a player can enter the „shadow form“ also while moving along a path. As soon as your stealth drops to 0 or below you can use your shadow form to manipulate enemy positions. This can be used for both defensive but also offensive tactics.

For the final version of the game we will make the mode switch visually more appealing to have a clear distinction when you remove and when you pass by other guards.

As always if you add one new thing to your game make sure it solves at least two problems and maybe open new ways to interact with your core system.