In an earlier post I mentioned this game called Card Quest (2017), which I really love but odds are you likely haven’t played. It has some rough edges, but I think it’s worth taking a close look at. It was made by a pair of (I believe) French designers, Baptiste Dubessay and Nicolas Tobias, and for my money, they’re some of the best system designers in the biz.

Card Quest is a “set-based deckbuilder“, you fight through various levels of encounters, defeating enemies with a small, 17 card deck (assembled from a pool of about 100). The small deck size is pretty notable I think; the focus is on piloting a tightly constructed set of cards, rather than on-the-fly acquiring overpowered cards or constructing degenerate combos. Also, it’s one of the very few card-based games I know of that completely eschews the metaphor of a “booster pack”. The design here is laser-focused on the core gameplay, to the exclusion of almost anything else.

I first came across it not long after it first came out, and in the years since I’ve pointed a lot of other designers to it, and sometimes made students play it as well. It’d been long enough since I played it that recently I erased my original save, started it over and 100%’d it from scratch, which is something I never do. In terms of generating a series of interesting decisions out of a tight and elegant mechanical system, I don’t know many games that do it this well.

I want to talk about a particular aspect of the design, but before getting to that, I encourage you to go play the game yourself (it’s on Steam, and there’s also a mobile version). It can be a bit difficult to get into, and I think a lot of the really interesting design doesn’t become apparent until you’ve invested a bit of time into it. In the current moment, games are judged a lot on their level of polish. But I really prize interesting and novel design, even if the overall execution isn’t perfect. Admittedly Card Quest has some pretty glaring interface design issues, and sometimes basic readability is a real issue. You just have to be willing to meet it halfway.

If you decide to dive in, some tips when to get you started:

• The first class listed is the Rogue, so you might think you’re meant to start with that. No, don’t! It’s one of the harder classes. Start with the Fighter instead.
• There’s a “Training” button above the three campaigns, which has a whole tutorial mini-campaign for each class. Do these! Beyond teaching you how to play each class, completing them gets you a useful bonus item for that class as well.
• In general, you’re not meant to trade hits, your goal is to kill all the enemies without ever taking hits back. Think of it more like a puzzle game. That emphasis isn’t super clear at first, but the Training campaigns make it explicit. So you’re generally aiming to cycle through attacks while saving enough energy for blocks and dodges in the enemy’s turn.
• Get as far as you can in the first campaign, City of the Dead. You get a permanent reward after each stage’s miniboss, so try to complete as many as you can.
• You don’t need to finish City of the Dead before you can start the other two campaigns. So if you get stuck, try doing the early levels in either of the other two campaigns as well (which are harder, but not exceedingly so). Then repeat, completing stages and getting better equipment, which gets you better cards.
• If you get bored of the Fighter, try playing the Hunter: It’s more complicated to play, but still quite forgiving.

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A Close Look at Resource Mechanics

There’s a lot I could talk about with Card Quest, but I really just want to highlight a relatively minor aspect of the design that actually inspires me quite a bit: the resource mechanics!

This isn’t the game’s main mechanic or anything, it’s just an aspect of the design which I think is pretty neat. If you haven’t played it or couldn’t get into, that’s okay, I’m going to try and write everything under the assumption you haven’t played it.

The game has two main resources (Health and Stamina) that work about how you’d expect them to. But it also has a whole bunch of “special resources”, which contextually only become visible if you have cards or items that interact with them. There’s more than fifteen different special resources in all. Some of them are linked to the primary mechanics for a given class or subclass, some of them appear across all the classes, and others appear only a single item. In all, I think they’re an amazing survey course in different ways you can have resources work. Most games use resources in such standard ways that you might not have realized there even are multiple ways to go about doing so, so it’s great having a whole bunch of different design patterns all in one place to take a look at.

Resources, or what in the systems world might be called pools or stocks, are the bedrock of system design. Most game design writing will introduce the concept with a very low-level definition, something that boils down to “They’re countable, and used for stuff. Y’know, resources.” That is, resources are a magnitude that will be acted upon by the processes and flows of the system they’re apart of. So far so good, but generally then an author will jump up a few levels to the wider economy design and talk about the purpose these resource interactions have at the gameplay level. Like, going from talking about the idea of having ‘experience points’ to then talking about the overall pace of progression. That’s fine, but I actually think there’s some levels in between those two that we could talk about.

Okay so let’s start at the bedrock. What’s a resource? Here’s my quick stab at it:

Resource Definition

• Resources have a current value
• Resources have a starting value; the current value is set to this whenever it resets
• The current value may be able to be increased and/or decreased (typically by generating or spending the resource, but it could be raised or lowered directly too)
• Resources can have a floor, which the current value cannot go lower than (in Card Quest, resources always have a floor and it’s always 0, but we can imagine resources that have a negative scale)
• Resources can have a cap, which the current value cannot exceed (in Card Quest, resources always have a cap, but plenty of games have unbounded resources)
• The cap and floor themselves may also be able to be increased or decreased

This is the ‘base class’ that all resources inherit from, so to speak. I guess technically speaking, only the first one is strictly necessary (being countable is axiomatic, so it needs a current value to store that). The rest are just required in practical terms.

This is a more thorough way to say “They’re countable, and used for stuff.” But it already suggests a lot to think about for a system you’re designing. Should it start at 0 and count up? Or start at some other number and count down? “Should this be capped or uncapped?” is itself a big question. The presence of caps on resources can have a pronounced impact on the game. If resources are uncapped, then the focus is probably on raw magnitude of accumulation: you either have the requisite amount or not (this is sort of the default approach). But if resources are tightly capped, the focus moves to throughput instead: Are you generating more resources than you can store? Are there things you can’t purchase because the price is higher than your current cap? A cap system adds a whole layer of additional complication and progression, that can be interesting when deployed well (and pretty annoying if not designed well).

Anyway, let’s just keep this core definition in the back of our minds as we dive in.

Resource Mechanics in Card Quest

An exercise I frequently have students do is to take a game and enumerate all the resources in its main systems and to list how they all interact and function. Doing so reveals the sort of questions you can ask when designing something yourself. So that’s what I’m going to do with Card Quest: go through all the special resources in the game, and see how they represent different design patterns for doing a “resource”.

Relative to the game, it’d make sense to group these by class or something. But for our purpose, it makes more sense to group them by how they function. I have a rough taxonomy for grouping purposes, although I’m not sold on the names:

• “Power-up” Stocks: Resources You Generate then Spend
• “Stockpile” Stocks: Resources You Spend, then Generate
• “Threshold” Stocks: Amount Matters, But Isn’t Spendable
• “Persistent” Stocks: Resources That Stick Around

“Power-up” Stocks: Resources You Generate then Spend

This is how resources are most commonly used in games of all types. You start with zero of something, you can get more of it, and then you spend it to acquire or activate something else. Money in many games, wood and stone in a city-builder, or gems and keys in Blue Prince, all of those fit this pattern.

In Card Quest, there are five like this:

• Tactics
• Arcane Charges
• Frenzy
• Faith
• Mirror Images

All of these start at 0 each battle, can be accumulated up to a cap, and the cap itself can be increased by upgrades or equipment. All of these are generated by playing certain cards. And all of them are a cost for playing other certain cards. Following a common convention from Magic: The Gathering, it shows them as little icons in the top right of a card. Besides using them to play cards, having the resource on hand usually doesn’t otherwise “do” anything, they only exist to power cards you’ll play.

Tactics

Let’s take a look at “Tactics”, a special resource used by the Fighter class’s starting “Guardian School” set on just six cards. The first four of these only cost Stamina (the little lighting bolt) but generate Tactics. The last two cost Stamina and Tactics.

There are the entirety of Tactics-interacting cards for the Fighter class. The design here is nicely elegant. We have two ways to generate Tactics: By casting a costly passive effect that gives 1 Tactics per turn for the next three turns. Or, by playing dodge cards, which generate 1 Tactics each. These two methods aren’t mutually exclusive, but both require passing the turn.

Then, we can spend the resource in two ways: On a small utility card (“Tactical Idea”, which costs 1 Tactics and draws cards and restores Stamina), or on a big powerful attack (“Tactical Strike”, which costs 3, and is a big attack loaded with benefits). The design here reminds me a lot of the template used for early Planeswalker design in Magic. The initial five of those all function the same way. The first power generates the resource but is minor and/or conditional, the second one is a small power that costs a little bit, and the third power is a big showstopper. Design-wise, this encapsulates why to have a resource system like this at all: It promotes making tactical choices with tradeoffs. Is it better to forego the small power to save up for the big power? Or use the smaller power while you can?

So for the Fighter, you want to be generating Tactics, judiciously using the Tactical Idea, and saving up to use the Tactical Strike on powerful enemies. Your pool of Tactics caps at 3 (4 with an upgrade), so you can’t hoard it. It’s a tiny little engine you want to keep in motion.

(There’s also a “Tactics” set of cards for the Rogue’s the “Assassination School” set, and it follows a similar template but is a bit trickier to use: There’s a 1-cost utility card and a 3-cost big attack card, but only a single card to generate Tactics, and it makes 2. So until you increase the cap, you need to draw and use the generator card twice, wasting the overage, in order to use the high-cost attack. A small tweak like that can make something play very differently).

Arcane Charges

This mechanical set-up, generating a resource to power cards, is how a lot of the Wizard class’s cards work. The default one is called “Arcane Charges”. But rather than being restricted to a single set of cards like Tactics is, there are multiple sets that all use it. Too many cards to be worth showing here, but here’s one set:

They all function on this template. There are typically one or two generator cards which are either relatively weak, or are over-costed in terms of Stamina. Then there are some cards which are generally powerful and under-costed in terms of Stamina, but they use up your Arcane Charges.

The prevalence and emphasis matters. For the Fighter, a special resource is a subsidiary system that powers special moves, and most of their attack cards just use Stamina. Whereas for the Wizard, the whole playstyle revolves around managing this special resource. Because cards can have a Stamina cost, an Arcane Charge cost, or both, playing well involves skillfully converting Stamina to Arcane Charges and then into damage.

Frenzy

There are other ways to generate and spend a Power-up stock like this though. Here’s a one-off Rogue weapon which generates a resource called “Frenzy”:

Each “Tear” attack generates a single point of Frenzy. The “Mangle” finisher consumes all the Frenzy charges you have, doing more damage for each point. This “Use All” pattern changes how budgeting works. Instead of generating and spending individually points of the resource, you generate points, but can only spend “all”. This is a nice bit of differentiation: It’s both more flexible than a simple high-costed attack, because you can cast it at low Frenzy (or even with none). But it’s also less flexible, since it means you can’t save up the resource, or follow up the finisher with another one.

Then the extra twist here is that the Frenzy charges themselves actually boost your damage by +1 each. So now the tension is: Is it better to keep the Frenzy on hand, boosting all your attacks? Or expend them on the Mangle, doing big damage but leaving you doing low damage afterwards?

Faith

That “use all” mechanic can also work with a low cost/high cost system as well. An elegant expression of that can be seen with all the Fighter cards that interact with “Faith”. There’s one set for each slot of cards:

Any one of these sets can function on its own, at least theoretically, because each contains at least one generator. But it’s most effective with all three sets together. In all this gets the player four generators of Faith: a passive, three blocks, and an attack. This can in turn be spent on a debuff attack that hits all enemies (“Shield of Faith”, which costs 2), or saved up for a heal spell which costs 5, or, used on the three “Sword Smite” cards, which consume all your Faith and do +4 damage for each point consumed.

Even though the functionality here is similar to Tactics, this is a much different spin on it. There’s only four generators, although one of them is a good attack card on its own. But we have more ways to spend it. There’s the same “low cost vs high cost” divide between the debuff and heal, but also, we have Smite cards which are anti-synergistic. They consume all the Faith you have, so they can be powerful finishers, but will clear out all your accumulated Faith. This creates interesting little decisions. Like you may have 4 Faith. Is it better to play a Shield of Light and then a Smite for 12 damage? Or spend it all on a Smite for 20 damage but then be unable to play the Shield? “True Strike” generates 1 faith, but is significantly better when played after other cards, so it can be played before a Smite to increase the latter’s damage, or played after a weak Smite to be stronger itself.

The Wizard’s “Book of Lightning” set does something similar to this for Arcane Charges. It gives you four weaker attacks which generate Arcane, a stronger one which costs Arcane, and then a finisher which consumes all your Charges. That creates the same tension with the ordering of how you play your cards.

Mirror Images

Lastly, another flavor on this kind of resource is the Wizard’s “Mirror Images”, another one-off special resource only used in a single secondary card set. Thematically it’s about having duplicates that confuse your enemies.

It gives you three good dodge cards that are free in terms of Stamina but that consume a ‘Mirror Image’. The only source for those is another non-free dodge card, “Split Image”, which also costs Arcane Charges as well. So you get some good free defensive dodges, but you have to set it up with the Split Image, otherwise you’ll be stuck with Mirror Images you can’t actually play.

Interlinking special resources like this seems like a great design space for enabling interesting builds: Having cards that generate or cost multiple resources, or a set of cards with different generators or costs. But this is actually one of the only instances of that in the game, surprisingly enough. Most card sets are tied exclusively to a single special resource.

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So those are the examples of “Power-Up” stocks, resources which you generate and then use to power something else. To summarize some of the different patterns we’ve seen so far:

• Difference in kind between how the resource is generated, versus what it’s spent on (eg. generated by blocks but spent on attacks)
• Different cost price points and differentiation of low cost and high cost effects
• Use as a supplementary add-on system, or as a widespread primary mechanic
• Interlinking the generation or costs of different “Power-up” stocks
• Necessitating converting between different stocks, having actions under or over-costed in terms of one or another
• Costs that “Use all” and consume everything on hand, rather than a discrete amount
• Having a passive benefit to holding the resource unspent

“Stockpile” Stocks: Resources You Spend, then Generate

All of those “Power-up” stocks start at zero, and you need to generate them before spending them. This is natural enough, but an easy tweak to this would be changing “starts at zero” to “starts at the cap”. This is really just a slight variation, but it plays and feels quite different. Instead of getting and spending, we begin with a stockpile that we draw down from and can replenish. Card Quest has a handful that work this way:

• Stamina
• Disk Energy
• Undead Guards
• Arrows

Although it’s a small change, it really changes how the mechanic works. With a “Power-up” stock, we need to save it up, and a low-costed expenditure is a temptation while we’re saving it up to spend on a big cost. But with a “Stockpile” stock, we start with it all, so you can use the expensively costed action right away, which obviously impacts how things are balanced quite a bit.

Stamina

I guess the first of these isn’t really a ‘special’ resource. “Stamina” is one of the primary ones the whole game revolves around. It’s the primary resource cost in the game’s action economy, since it’s the primary resource constraint on playing cards. I think starting high is pretty common for cost systems like “Stamina” or “Mana”, where we decrement down from the cap. Every card has a stamina cost (although it can be zero, or discounted to zero), and your stock of Stamina is the primary limiting factor on how many cards you can play during a turn.

Since you start each battle with your Stamina already at its cap, you don’t need to generate anything to start playing cards, you can start playing everything right away. You get a pool of 15 or so points (it varies per class) to spend on cards and actions, so there are a lot of outflows on Stamina. There are two utility cards that generate Stamina that every class gets, and a handful of other cards sometimes generate Stamina. The pool is also replenished automatically each turn, but not by the whole amount. You only get +5 per turn (about a third of the total). It’s very possible to play a lot of cards and overextend yourself, leaving you unable to do much while you recover.

So that gives a very different texture of play. Instead of performing an action to generate the resource, saving it up to spend on different special actions, this is more about having to balance drawing down from the resource against how quickly it’s generated. You can take less actions and play sustainably, at the risk of doing too little, or play aggressively, at the risk of ending up exhausted.

Disk Energy

Stamina is the main resource all the game is costed around. But we can see the dynamics of the “start high” resource in simpler form in the Rogue’s “Cursed Disk” secondary weapon, which runs on a one-off resource called “Disk Energy”:

It’s only four cards. There’s two powerful multi-hitting attacks, and they cost 2 Disk Energy and some Stamina. And then there’s two defensive cards that block to generate 1 Disk Energy. So it’s a lot like the “Power-up” stocks we saw before. Every two parries we do, then we can use a powerful attack. The only twist here is that we start with 4/4 Disk Energy charges, not 0/4. It isn’t a big difference, but it means we don’t need to play those generator cards first, which means the attack could potentially be used a turn earlier. But it also feels quite different: Because the generators only make 1, but the attacks cost 2, it there’s a sense of risking overspending the resource. Like, you do you use this conservatively, attacking once, and then parrying once or twice before you throw it again? Or, do you go all out and attack twice, doing a lot of damage but then not getting to use it for awhile? It changes the dynamic from “save it up a little or a lot”, to “use it a lot and wait awhile for it to recharge, or use it slowly”.

Undead Guards

Starting at the cap also lets have resources that don’t have a generator. The Wizard has a secondary which uses “Undead Guardians”. It gives you three powerful block cards which cost 1 of those, and a strong counterattack which costs 3 (thematically, they’re skeletons sacrificing themselves for you, I guess). And then that’s it, there’s no card that generates Undead Guardians, although it does regenerate slowly on its own. You start at 10/10 and passively generate +1 per turn. But it happens that you typically need to block more than once per turn. So this means you’re getting some powerful cards, but they replenish slowly- more slowly than you’ll be spending it, so you can’t rely on it forever. That’s a very different cost profile, and impacts how it’s played. For example, this makes it better against smaller groups of stronger enemies, than against larger groups of weaker ones- differentiation like that is good!

It’d be possible to have a “Stockpile” resource like this that doesn’t generate at all, like, you start with 10/10, and once you spent it, it’s gone until the next fight. In Card Quest specifically that might be a bit awkward (with the small deck size, you’d be seeing those dead cards in hand a lot), but plenty of games have non-renewable power resources like that.

Arrows

Those previous two are just one-off items. But this “Stockpile” resource idea is actually the central mechanic for the Hunter class, with “Arrows”.

You start each battle with a full stock of arrows, 6/6. In the other examples we’ve looked at, any given set of cards usually had both generators and drains. But because every single Hunter weapon uses Arrows, it means the functionality can be split up. So every Hunter weapon has cards that use Arrows (and none that generates them), and then they also get a “Quiver” secondary set, which has the generator “Recover Arrows” card (and no attack cards).

So the Hunter has a resource that starts at its cap, and most all of their attacks are costed with it. That seems to map exactly to a resource we already have that functions the same way: Stamina. Stamina and Arrows both start at their cap, are consumed as a cost by cards, and generated by a handful of specific cards. So what’s the point, and why have two?

By having a second resource which functions in a similar way but is costed differently, cards can be costed in terms of one resource or the other, or both. That allows making tradeoffs between them, just like we saw with “Arcane Charges” earlier. Hunter attack cards can be differentiated by costing more or less Stamina, or more or less Arrows. So the player is managing two interlinked economies instead of one, trying to favorably exchange between them. The Hunter can be frustrating to play, because if you play too aggressively and run out of Stamina then you can’t play cards, and if you run out of Arrows you can’t play many of your cards, and if you’re out of both then you’re really in trouble. But it also creates an interesting cadence, where you can lean into attacking (expending arrows), and then pausing for recovery (generating them), while needing to manage the Stamina costs to facilitate both. It works, and it’s cool!

It also lets the designers throw some further twists by differentiating the cost profiles. Some of the Hunter’s weapon sets are bows, which come with six moderately Stamina-costing attacks that consume arrows. But then some others are crossbows, and the crossbow attack cards are much cheaper in terms of Stamina, but crossbows come with a lower cap on arrows, and more make the arrow recovery card more expensive. This, somewhat unlike real life, makes crossbows rapid fire but slow reloading, and feel very different to play with.

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So those are “Stockpile” resources, which you start with and then spend down. Summarizing some of the different design patterns for those:

• Virtually the same as “Power-up” stocks, but frontloaded, and many of the same design affordances
• Works better with passive generation (+X per turn) than Power-up stocks tend to
• Could potentially have no means of generation, just a finite starting stock that’s spent down
• Having costs that outweigh generation creates a tension of overspending versus budgeting

“Threshold” Stocks: Amount Matters, But Isn’t Spendable

A third category of resource we can see are what I think of as “Threshold” resources. For resources like this, the amount you have goes up and down, but not because you spend it. Instead, it’s more like a water level, a measurement we care about that rises and falls, and things are tied to hitting certain thresholds. An example of this might be something like morale, or population happiness in a citybuilder, where things raise and lower it, and maybe there’s a bonus if it’s high or malus if it’s low, but you don’t directly “spend” it. Or a more complex example would be “Electricity” or “Power”. You don’t usually earn some “Electric Points” and then expend them to purchase a Lightbulb turning on. Instead, you’ll generally care about if the things we have that consume electricity outnumber the amount we’re generating. Those are all ‘threshold’ resource patterns.

In Card Quest, these take the form of special resources that cards interact with, but that aren’t directly spent as costs.

• Demonic Awareness
• Hunger
• Rage
• Fire Magic
• Fey Magic

Demonic Awareness

The simplest version of this is seen as a one-off on the Hunter’s “Demon Bow”.

It has a unique resource called “Demonic Awareness”, which starts at 0 and is capped at 9, and decreases by 1 each turn (a negative automatic replenishment rate, which we haven’t seen yet). The basic attack cards it comes with will increase Awareness by 1, and the two powerful attacks increase by 3 (but only if it’s a killing shot). So you generate it with attacks, but you can’t actually spend Demonic Awareness on anything. Instead, once it reaches 9, the bow “awakens” and gives you a buff, making your attacks stronger and undodgeable. So you don’t save up the resource to spend it, instead, it’s like we’re trying to fill up a leaky bucket. This wouldn’t make sense as a stock, instead it’s more like a dial, measuring the current value and triggering at certain thresholds.

Hunger

Another example is a one-off resource on what I think is one of the better designed weapons, the Rogue’s “Cursed Dagger”. It gives you these five attack cards:

Using the iconographic language the game uses elsewhere, you might think “Vampire Stab” costs 2 “Hunger” and 3 Stamina to use. But actually, confusingly, it doesn’t! For “Threshold”‘” resources, the cost in the top right means you need at least that amount to use it, but it doesn’t get spent (this is true of the “Demon Shot” cards above as well; you need to have 2 Demonic Awareness to play those, but it isn’t spent). That distinction isn’t documented or explained, and doesn’t really make sense given how its displayed, which is… pretty bad from an interface design standpoint! But that’s okay, communicating it better seems like a solvable problem, so let’s just ignore the visual issue and concentrate on the game design implications.

We have three “Thirsty Jab” attack cards, which each generate 1 Hunger, and 2 if it kills. Then we have two “Vampire Stab” finishers that we can only use if we already have 2 or more Hunger, and once played they lower it by 5. The last thing we need to know is that Hunger isn’t just a passive resource, it has some intrinsic effects:

It replenishes on its own, but it also has a trigger when hits the cap. Unlike the Demon Bow though, this trigger results in something negative. So Hunger is a resource that goes up over time on its own, and goes up faster as we attack (and kill) monsters. If it goes too high, it hurts us! The sole way to lower it is by playing the “Vampiric Stab” cards (or finishing the level, since it restarts at 0 each battle).

This is some fun design. We get some powerful cards; they do good damage and are very efficiently costed in Stamina. But as a drawback, we need to manage this additional resource. It’s a nice bit of thematic and mechanical cohesion- it’s a cursed dagger, if it doesn’t get to feed on enemies, it’ll feed on you! You can misplay it quite easily (I’ve had a run end when I was at 2 health and Jabbed while at 4/6 Hunger, killing the enemy and then myself, whoops), which also works thematically- it’s an evil dagger, you gotta be more careful with it than a regular knife.

This is all very different than generating a resource and spending it. Here, we’re generating something more like an externality. You can play it carefully so the downside doesn’t ever trigger. Or strategically ignore it when needed, playing attacks aggressively to quickly finish a fight even if it means taking damage from the dagger. Rather than being a stock we directly trade for cards, it’s an external system we need to manage alongside the main economy.

Rage

Those two were one-off weapons that use unique special resources on just a couple of cards. But a “Threshold” mechanic is used more thoroughly in a few subclasses. The Fighter has a “Berserker School” that interacts with a special resource called “Rage”. It starts at 0 and has a cap of 6. No other card sets directly interact with Rage, but there are a number of equipment items that do (for brevity and clarity I haven’t been mentioning items much, but they can do minor effects like generating or consuming various special resources, but don’t contribute cards to your deck).

Besides a couple items, Rage is primarily generated by the “Resist Hit” block cards. There’s also an “Inner Rage” utility card, which generates 2 Rage, but you need to already have 2 Rage to play it. Nothing consumes or lowers Rage directly, but it goes down by 1 each turn on its own. It’s primary effect is triggering a state change.

At 5 Rage, you gain the “Enraged” status, which makes all of your defensive cards cost +2 Stamina, except the “Resist Hit” ones. But your attack cards deal +2 damage, and cost -2 Stamina. The effect lasts until you fall below 5 Rage again. So you want to generate Rage, both for the couple cards that check it, and for the powerful “Enraged” buff, and you need to keep Rage topped off to maintain the buff. But getting +2 Stamina to defensive cards can be a big liability, so you sometimes want to let it run down at key moments as well.

Fire Magic

A more complex set of triggers like this can be seen with the Wizards’ “Fire Magic” special resource. It starts at 0 and caps at 10, and is associated with various pyromancer cards:

Many of these cards generate Fire Magic as an effect, but they also frequently require a certain threshold of Fire Magic to use. In the set shown above, you need to cast the “Ignite” cards to get your fire level up enough to use the more powerful “Fireblast” cards. Fire Magic runs out very quickly, you lose 2 of it per turn automatically, but if it ever hits 10, you take 3 damage (which is a lot, especially to low-HP Wizards). Note the implication this has for that “Firestorm” card too: you need at least 6 Fire Magic to cast it and it generates 4, so it’ll always deal 3 damage to you as well.

So this is a resource that functions somewhat like Hunger, where it’s an externality you need to manage: cast too many fire spells and you burn yourself up. But it’s also somewhat like Rage, in that you want to maintain it at a certain level: If you’re at 0, you can get stuck with a handful of cards you can’t use. I think this is wonderful flavor for a fire wizard, it really feels like you’re trying to keep something at just the right temperature. If you burn hot you could hurt yourself, but get too cold and you can’t cast anything.

Fey Magic

Drawback triggers work well with threshold resources, but they could be entirely positive also. There’s a resource called “Fey Magic” that appears on some Hunter cards (and a handful of Rogue cards) that works like that.

Fey Magic starts at 0 and has a cap of 9, and decreases by 2 each turn. The Hunter gets a few card sets that interact with Fey Magic, generally following a pattern of having a few cards that generate it (like the “Phase Shift” dodges above, or the basic attacks of the “Fairy Bow”), and then one or two stronger cards that require it be above a certain threshold to use. In that respect it functions somewhat like a “Power-up” stock.

But it also has a triggered effect. Once you hit 4 Fey Magic, you “Enter the Faery Realm”, which makes all enemies unaware (a debuff that makes them unable to attack), and gives you +2 damage and -2 Stamina cost for “Faeric” abilities. Which abilities are Faeric? Okay well, there isn’t an indicator for it so you sort of just need to guess, but it’s basically all the cards that come with Faery items. And there’s a second trigger: when you drop below 4 Fey Magic, you lose the buff, and all your remaining Fey Magic too and it gets set back to 0.

This creates an interesting cadence to playing these cards. In general you want to generate it, both to use your cards that require it, and to get the powerful buff. The buff is powerful, making you deal more damage and able to play more cards, but maintaining it can be a challenge, since you’re losing 2 per turn. But also, just triggering the buff is powerful in of itself: it makes all the enemies unaware, but, they lose unaware status when you attack them. So after attacking it can be worth it to lose the buff and go to 0, just so you can retrigger it again.

So playing with these cards, you want to be dancing in and out of the faery realm, making the best of being there, and then strategically dropping out to re-enter again. There’s a lot of things to consider there. If you’re at 3 Fey Magic, is it worth it to play a card and trigger Entering the Faery Realm this turn? That could be used defensively (making the enemies unaware) or offensively (because of the buff). But if you don’t have any more Faery cards, the buff might be a waste and you’ll lose it the next turn, so maybe it’s better to wait. And so on. It’s complicated (and a little poorly explained), but really fun once you get a handle on it.

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In all, these “Threshold” resources are complex, and because they are similar to but different than ‘spendable’ resources, it’s confusing to properly communicate them. I think it’s probably a mistake to have them use the same visual language as the more traditional stocks, since they work so differently. But, they present a whole different mechanical design space distinct from regular stocks.

• They can passively increase or decrease, and/or be raised as an effect of some other action
• They can function somewhat like a cost, by having actions requiring they be at a certain level
• Or it can provide an alternative to a cost, by presenting a drawback to usage
• “Thresholds” typically have triggered abilities of some kind, tied to certain values
• The effects they trigger can be beneficial effects or detrimental ones, or both
• Positive triggers (and negative passive generation) makes it a leaky bucket to fill.
• Negative triggers (and positive passive generation) make it an externality to manage.

“Persistent” Stocks: Resources That Stick Around

Everything I’ve described so far are resources that completely reset for each fight. They’re stocks that start at zero, or at full strength, for each fight. But of course an easy twist would be to have stocks that are persistent, they retain their value and do not reset each fight.

Of course not every game has a clear temporal breakdown between a level (or round, battle, etc) and a campaign (or run, etc), but where there is such a distinction, having resources persist or not is can be an interesting design choice.

Technically, the game’s “Gold” is like this. It starts at 0 at the start of each campaign, it increases as you kill monsters in each level, and you spend it in shops after some boss fights. It’s a long-term resource you generate and draw from. Gold gets its own separate dedicated place in the UI, but maybe it should’ve been a special resource that cards interact with as well.

Each of three resource mechanics we’ve seen so far can be made persistent.

• Souls (Power-up)
• Revenants (Power-up)
• Health (Stockpile)
• Alcohol (Threshold)
• Toxicity (Threshold)

Persistent “Power-up” Stocks:

Souls

There’s a special resource for the Wizard’s Necromancer subclass, “Souls”, which functions in every way like a “Power-up” stock: You start with 0, you generate it (from cards, but also from killing enemies), and it’s a cost needed to play many cards.

The only twist is that the value persists from level to level, instead of resetting to 0. This gives it the feel of being both a “Power-up” stock and a “Stockpile” stock. Because even though it starts at 0, once you’ve hoarded enough, you can easily start battles at your cap. But while per-battle “Stockpile” resources reset, so you can spend them freely to zero towards the end of a battle, this is something you need to budget across multiple fights. It’s functionally similar, but gives a very different feel. You get the benefit of longterm saving (getting to start with your savings), but also need to take the longterm into consideration: It’s a bad idea to spending all your Souls during the fight just before a boss, for example.

Revenants

There’s even a second Necromancer resource that functions just like Souls, “Revenants”, that is also a permanent value. It’s used on just one set of cards, a “Book of the Dead”, themed like they’re zombies you’re raising. All of the cards that have a Revenant cost also cost Souls and Stamina too. It’s kind of funny to imagine a necromancer as needing to separately manage having both bodies and souls on hand in order to work their magic. It’s an interesting idea having cards with three costs, so having Souls vs. Revenant vs Stamina costs to manage, but unfortunately it’s underexplored on this one-off set, and Revenants end up being pretty duplicative with Souls.

Persistent “Stockpile” Stocks:

Health

Stamina is one of the game’s primary resources, and it’s a “Stockpile”, starting at its cap each battle. “Health” is the other primary one, but it does not reset each battle. Health is a resource you want to preserve. It isn’t usually spent, instead it’s decremented when you’re taking hits, which you want to avoid. Because it has a triggered effect- when it reaches 0, you lose the game. For most loadouts, you never want it to decrease. So, of course, it’s easy to imagine putting a twist on that by turning it into a resource that you spend (and sure enough there are a handful of Wizard Necromancer cards that do just that).

This is a stock that starts high, and you don’t want to deplete. And because it persists, it’s the buffer for mistakes across multiple battles.

Persistent “Threshold” Stocks:

Lastly, there are two special resources which are “Threshold” resources, but are also persistent. Neither of them appear on any cards, instead they’re externality-style drawbacks to provide a cost to some beneficial items.

Alcohol

The Fighter has an “Alcohol” resource, which is generated by items you can drink like a “Wine Skin” or “Dwarven Ale Cask”:

Alcohol starts at 0 and caps at 9, and automatically goes down 1 per battle (rather than per turn). It has two triggers: At 6 you become “Drunk”, which makes all your cards cost +1 Stamina, and at 9 you become “Heavily Drunk”, and it becomes +2 Stamina to all cards.

So the resource is an externality cost, which imposes a limit on how much you can use the beneficial effects of the alcoholic items. Drinks restore your stamina and have other beneficial effects, but overuse will get you drunk, costing you Stamina. So it gives you a tradeoff: Do you use the item occasionally, getting the benefit but keeping it under the threshold? Or in an emergency do you over-imbibe, and hope you can lower it over the next few fights? That’s the main difference versus other drawback “Threshold” resources is that the penalty carries over into the next fight as well.

Toxicity

Lastly, the Hunter has a similar resource called “Toxicity”, which is tied to potion items they’re able to equip. It’s identical to Alcohol in most ways’ it also comes from beneficial items as a side effect, is also persistent, and also goes down -1 per battle. The difference is only in the penalty. Once it’s above 6 you become “Intoxicated”, which increases Stamina costs by +1 for each point over 6 you are (so +2 at 8, +3 at 9), and it also does damage to you whenever you gain any above 6 as well. It’s a neat mechanic, but underdeveloped, as there aren’t many items that interact with it and they’re pretty underpowered. But the idea is there!

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So “Persistence” isn’t a distinct category, but a modality that applies to other mechanics.

• Persistence changes the time profile for decisions, allowing for carryover benefits (via saving up) and mistakes
• Persistent stocks function as a blend of Power-ups and Stockpiles, since you can start at 0 or at the cap, depending on how much you’ve saved up
• Persistent Thresholds can act as a limiting cost that stretches across multiple levels, so let’s you cost something such that it can’t be used every battle.

Resource Mechanics and Formal Systems

So that ends our survey of all the special resources in Card Quest. So why look at this in so much detail? I think the different approaches to these show just how much mileage you can get out of slight tweaks to these costing mechanics. These are pretty low-level design decisions, “close to metal” so to speak. How different resources work can provide an interesting framework for all the main systems in a game.

Note that all this is a related, but entirely different kind of design question than what the resource costs should be. Balancing and tuning is often the focus when we talk about resources. I think Ian Schreiber has probably written the most about that, with a great couple of articles and an associated talk, and his co-authored Game Balance (2021) book. But before we can assign the actual numerical costs, we need to know how the cost system itself works, and as all the preceding shows, there’s actually different ways we can approach how these work.

I think one of the only works I’ve read that goes into any detail on the mechanics associated with resource spending is Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design (2012) by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans. For their systems diagramming tool ‘Machinations’, they elaborate on various common design patterns. This is one of the only attempts to formal describe “how resources to buy stuff” that I’ve come across.

But while ‘Machinations’ makes it very easy to visualize stocks that move around, like “Power-up”/”Stockpile” action point systems, it’s a little less effective at showing “Thresholds” effectively. And I suppose, since it sort of represents everything as a stock, conceptually it can make some systems harder to distinguish from one another (which isn’t always a bad thing though).

But I wanted to go through the trouble of documenting this because whenever we’re designing systems, it’s incredibly useful to have a palette of these little resource mechanics close at hand to reference for ideas. The various examples from Card Quest have a nice variety, showing the kinds of tradeoffs and interesting decision making that can grow out of having different resources that are generated, spent and work in different ways.

So anyway, I hope this sparks some ideas for you!