Designer Diaries - Stax: Galaxies
When I first started designing card games, I’d often begin by writing rules on playtest cards, either by hand on slips of paper or on the computer. I liked the freedom of starting with a blank canvas and crafting what I wanted, but this process also had some drawbacks. For one thing, it was time consuming, as I needed to create all of my game components before I could experiment, and if something wasn’t working, I had to spend the time creating new components.
At some point I decided to try experimenting with using standard playing cards to design games. When gamer designers are working on custom dice, for example, they don’t necessarily create the custom dice right away while they’re still iterating – more likely they’ll just use a standard d-6, for instance, with a table of values dictating what each number means (“1=run, 2=attack, 3-defend, etc.). I figured I could do the same thing with playing cards.
During this process, Stax was born. The setup went like this: lay out seven cards in a row face-up (Why 7? It just felt right.). Then draw a hand of 3 to 5 cards (we tried various numbers, eventually settling on 5). You can play your cards in a “stack” below one of the cards in the row of 7, and once your stack’s value is greater than the value of that card, you get to place a token and claim that card. There are also rules about stacking your cards – initially, they needed to be low to high, although we eventually loosened it to ascending or descending. Each turn, you could play one card and move one “stack” of one or more cards one space to the right or left. Every time we loosened these “one play, one move” limits the game got less fun and strategic, so they’ve been in place throughout most of the design process.
You’ll notice that some of the mechanisms are similar to Plotz, and these games were designed right around the same time. However, while Plotz is a fun family game, it quickly became clear that Stax had a lot of strategic depth, which is what really makes this game a blast to play. At first I played mostly with my wife (and Good Idea Games co-founder), although the first person to really playtest with me was my 9-year-old son.
As we playtested, we added some rules. Since face cards didn’t have numbers, we decided that they should have a special ability, and the “fortress” was born. This card went through a lot of evolutions to get where it is now. Initially, J, Q, and K were all fortressed, but it soon became evident this was too many. So we changed the J so that it could be played as another “10” on a stack, and also had a special discard ability where it could destroy a card in an opposing stack (like a knight).
We didn’t know what to do with the Ace at first, and tried a few things before eventually concepting it as a “mountain” with a value of 30 – very difficult to hold. Also, since limitations breed creativity, it was decided that no fortresses could be played on a mountain (the Escorial notwithstanding). We also tried the Ace with various discard abilities. Eventually, once the shift was made to custom cards, the Ace’s function split in two, becoming both the “black hole” worth 30 where nothing could be played and the “spy”, or 1 card, which has the ability to take over any “station” (fortress).
The Joker was another tricky bit. We eventually just played it as a desert, meaning no one could claim it or play a fortress there, but once we made the jump to custom cards the Joker was actually just removed from the game entirely.
Around this point, it was decided that the game needed some flavor. Hannah has been pushing me to avoid some of the typical fantasy-game tropes like “King” and “Queen”, which are becoming increasingly dated in this democratic age and which are over-used anyway. We tried several different themes before settling on a sci-fi/planet/spaceship theme. It just felt right for the 7 cards to be planets in a solar system and the stacks to be fleets of ships moving around, and “Stax: Galaxies” was born. Because the rules system can accommodate any theme, we made an intentional choice to leave design space open for other versions in the future (“Stax: Naval Battles”, “Stax: Orangutans”, “Stax: Breakfast Cereals”, etc.)
After playtesting for a while, it seemed like there was a need for the low value cards to matter more, since we often skipped playing them in favor of cards that would add more points to our stack, which we limited to four cards early on in order to make the math simpler, avoid moving huge piles of cards, and build in more strategic decision-making by limiting what could be done.
The discard abilities on the Jack and Ace played nicely, and so the “Scout”, “Freighter”, and “Transport” cards were born.
With so many discard abilities, we needed to figure out how the rules accommodate them. We tried having them replace a play or move action, but this felt too restrictive. We tried making them unlimited, but this led to huge swingy turns in which you could chain three or four discard abilities, which undercut a lot of the careful strategy and decision-making which had made the game fun so far. Eventually, I settled on just allowing one discard action per turn. This felt clean, since it functioned the same way as play and move actions, and it also felt like to appropriate power level.
Regarding the tokens used to claim planets: these went through one very important iteration along the way. At first, each player had their own tokens, and you’d replace the opponent’s token with your own (just like in Plotz). At some point we realized, hey this is a two-player game – what if the tokens were double sided and you could just flip them over. Hannah designed some awesome looking chits with little spaceships and nebulae on them, and the Stax tokens were born!
After a bit more playtesting, it was on to making the cards look beautiful. Hannah took my concept and applied her graphic design magic until we arrived at the gorgeous-looking cards we have today.
There was one more addition that I requested juuuuuust before we were going to print our first prototype (and after Hannah, bless her, had already begun to upload cards for printing). I’d been thinking it looked weird for the discard effects (“Scout – draw two cards”) to appear as just a text box along with the image of a planet, since they didn’t have anything to do with one another. The text boxes felt very inert, as well as being confusing. (Was the planet the scout?) The big challenge with the Stax card design had always been that the cards had multiple functions depending on their in-game use: they could be planets in the initial 7-card “flop”; they could be “spaceships” as part of a “fleet” (stack); or they could represent the specific kind of ship keyworded in the discard ability.
The solution to this issue was an example of a designer needing to “kill their darling.” This old adage says that sometimes the thing we’re most attached to will need to go, for the greater good of the overall design. In this case, the thing that needed to go was the game being played with a single deck of cards, which were used for everything. Hannah made the suggestion to switch to two separate decks – the planet deck and the spaceship deck. When I begrudgingly made that change, it cleared up all the confusing aspects of the cards and made the visuals directly align with what the cards do. While Hannah realized the need for this change early, I was more stubbornly attached to the original idea, and only changed my mind once I had the first round of prototype cards in hand. I learned that, sometimes, I need to really see something, and hold it, and play with it, in order to appreciate the strengths or weaknesses of a design.
With that final change, Stax: Galaxies was finished – or at least professionally prototyped. It’s been a complex process to move from standard playing cards to a uniquely designed deck, but it’s been rewarding at every step along the way. We’ll be sharing it with our local playtesters at our next event, and I can’t wait to share it with all of you! It’s a fun and surprisingly strategic game with nice looking cards, and I hope you enjoy playing it as much as we have.
Until next time, may you enjoy the process as much as the result, and may your partner accommodate your craziest last-minute requests with the same grace as our own co-founder and graphic designer extraordinaire.