The modern Card game from a Retro digital Game

Cardstroids
2-5 players

30 min-1 hour

Happy Thanksgiving! This is our retro game from the Atari system that we made over the thanksgiving break. We had to make a card game from a number of different games made for the Atari system. Our Huge Pixel Gaming group decided to make a card game from the old classic, Asteroids. This game had great mechanics and gameplay which was very addictive for all its players as it ate many quarters back in its’ day. However, this game was only a one player game and that became our first problem we needed to overcome.

What we right away came up with is have attack and defense and have a player be the ship and another player be the asteroid. This gave us a base mechanic and the ability to play with more than just one player. We wanted to give this more though. Design block had a beat for the weekend right up until Monday night when a great idea came out involving a good old game we as kids use to play called ‘007’. This classic hand gesture game was also fast and addicting to play. So we managed to merge the game Asteroids and 007 into a great, fast paced, and addicting card game.

Here’s how it plays out, first a player nominates themselves to be the ship and all the other players are asteroids. The players have three options, charge attack, activate shields, and attack just like in the kids game but with an Asteroids twist. How we incorporated more players is we made all other players asteroids and the ship would get one extra move equivalent to the amount of other players. So simply the game was 1 vs x amount of players. The players will always start off charging their attack because they start with zero attack and from there comes a game of prediction as to what your opponent plays. The ship plays one card for each respective asteroid. The ship has three lives in total so when he gets attacked he loses one life. If he loses all three then the ship player rotates clockwise around the table. Asteroids don’t die so the game becomes a survival game. Whoever survives the most rounds as the ship wins. The point to attacking asteroids is to remove their charge so that player can survive more rounds.

This was the core dynamic and set of mechanics we decided to use as our final. There were other versions where there is a deck and players draw cards to see what their options are. The problems with that was the players would run out of charges and not be able to continue the game. We tried splitting the decks but that showed the other players what your options were and reduced the prediction aspect of the game.