Greetings and welcome to the Final Fracture, a beginning concept for a brand new trading card game (TCG). In this post, I'll try to briefly explain the core ideas behind it as well as talk about the plans for the foreseeable future.
Before that, I'd like to give a little bit of backstory. I have been playing various trading card games on and off throughout the years, both on and offline. While I enjoyed many of them, I often couldn't help but get the feeling "I wish this card did this instead of that" or "this thing this card game does is so cool, why doesn't more card games do this as well?!" Sometimes I would also try and create some custom cards for various TCGs trying to introduce a bit of my own spin to them (I even did an entire set a long time ago). I would also sometimes encounter various content creators talking about card game design, things to do and what to avoid.
All of this gradually led me to start thinking of making my own card game. One that would combine all that I enjoy about them as well as allow me to introduce some of my own inventions. And to be fair, I haven't thought about this just recently, rather that idea has been stuck in my head for at least a few years. However, this is the time I finally started to actually try to make it happen.
What are the goals of this project?
There are 2 main goals I set for myself while creating Final Fracture:
- Combine as many things other TCGs do really well as possible while adding some of my own ideas into the mix.
- Create a game with easy to understand mechanics, that still leaves its players plenty of room for skill expression while both making their decks and actually playing.
Final Fracture's defining features
Here are some of the core ideas I established when creating Final Fracture.
Five clearly diverse factions
Having factions or otherwise diluting card pool into some kind of archetypes is very common for TCGs, Final Fracture however pushes that idea to an extreme degree. Not only is every faction different in terms of what type of mechanics it has access to, or what types of mechanics it doesn't have, not only players can only use their chosen faction's (or neutral) cards when building their decks, but they even have a type of cards that they "specialize" in (although in case of Eternally Damned and Spirits of the Forest that type is the same). Additionally, while not directly tied to factions, they each use a different draw ability. In most TCGs all players draw a card when their turn begins, but in Final Fracture each players uses their commandant's draw ability instead - and that ability is different for each commandant.
Energy system (every card is a resource)
Final Fracture uses an energy system, which is similiar to mana systems in many other TCGs. Some oldschool TCGs use a system with dedicated cards that serve only as resources, while other, mostly digital TCGs have a system where each player automatically increases their mana pool by 1 each turn. Final Fracture fits somewhere in the middle of those solutions: while you have to burn cards in order to turn them into a permanent source of per turn energy, you can do so with any card you have in your hand. This makes it so players can make meaningful choices while avoiding being burdened with "dead cards" in their hands.
Arena with limited space
In Final Fracture players have limited room to place their units and constructs in. Additionally, their placement is important for certain effects such as cover (when one card is in the same column as another one, meaning only the one in the upper row can be targeted). Players have limited ability to change the position of cards within the area at the cost of making them unable to attack on the same turn, all of this creating even more room for meaningful choices and skill expression.
Final Fracture's current state
Firstly, I'd like to mention that everything you see here right now is potentially a placeholder for future updates. This includes all the mechanics, cards, designs, rules, descriptions and particularly artworks, all of which have been generated with Stable Diffusion.
Secondly, as I'm writing this, there are 150 different cards already created for Final Fracture, each faction having roughly 25 cards (the remainder being neutral cards). There is also a separate section containing all the rules, a brief introduction to the lore as well as descriptions for all the factions. Naturally the balance of said cards and faction is most certainly way off as barely any playtesting has taken place thus far.
What lies ahead for Final Fracture?
Frankly speaking, I have no idea as of now. This project has been rapidly developing for a last month or so and I finally feel like there are anough cards in place to allow for testing the game. There is probably a long way before everything will be polished enough to gather any kind of interest, assuming that would ever happen. Therefore, it's still too early to say whether Final Fracture will become anything more than a concept. However, if you'd still like to join me on this journey and potentially help with playtesting and developing the game, I'd like to invite you to join our Discord server, where you'll be able to share your feedback and discuss Final Fracture.
—Reel, the creator of Final Fracture