Ruins

About Ruins

Welcome to Ruins, designed by John D. Clair and published by Allplay. Ruins is a delightful card shedding game where you can change the values of your hand by adding transparent upgrades. As play continues, your upgraded cards get shuffled back into the deck and dealt out again, escalating the stakes and combos in each subsequent round.

It's a streamlined reimplementation of Clair's Custom Heroes, a personal favorite here in the studio.

Project Overview:

John D. Clair turned in an extremely strong, streamlined design that changed very little during development. Our two key focuses were evaluating all of the new card abilities and ensuring players could anticipate the flow and curve of the game.

We ran testing with a variety of markets, from fans of trick-taking and shedding games to more casual players. Ruins has its core in the classic sheddding game Big 2, and we wanted to ensure that it was still approachable for family card gamers.

Services Provided:

• Gameplay Development
• Playtest Coordination and Analysis

Power Evaluations

Streamlining the power sets for Ruins was a key undertaking in John D. Clair's update from Custom Heroes. He did a great job keeping the game's feel while dramatically reducing the amount people have to learn to play their first few hands. There were a few minor number and power distribution tweaks we implemented, but key was evaluating the special abilties themselves. One of the new core powers Clair proposed was "Take a card from the current pile into your hand."

In theory, this could let you pick up a powerful card another player had played. In playtesting, we found upgrades with this power were rarely being bought and even when they were, weren't being used frequently. Sometimes, there was just nothing you wanted in the pile, or if someone had played something really good, that means your "Take a card" upgrade needed to be attached to something even better. Testers were also hesitant because the goal of the game is to run out of cards, so increasing your hand size can be dangerous.

In the end, we changed this power to "Draw a random card from the discard, then discard a card from your hand." While you no longer have a choice of what to add, your total hand size remains the same, and the ability to sculpt your hand is very powerful in shedding games like Ruins. This tested very well and was still distinct from each of the other powers in the game.

Setup Changes in Development

In Clair's original design, setup was shuffling all 50 cards, then using 9 per player during the game, leaving the remaining ones in the box. While quick, this meant that there was a lot of volatility in the setup for 3 players.

While mostly, my job as a developer is about streamlining, this was one place I felt an additional bit of complexity was worth it. Reducing the volatility in the setup also had some solid knock-on effects for gameplay:

• By starting with a set of 1-10 per player in the game (also how original Custom Heroes started), everyone knows the starting point for the game's arc. This makes the escalation that happens as cards are flipped and upgraded clearer. It's a stronger mechanical "story".
• As an additional benefit, each round starts with a discard pile, which makes the cards that draw from the discard (like our new power) useful right away in a round.

It's been an absolute joy to get to work on the successor to one of my favorite games, and I'm so glad that more players will get to experience the absolute madcap joy that Ruins brings to card shedding.

Brieger Creative Team

• John Brieger