Wow – the title of this alone has brought in comments. Here’s my thinking:
Shuffling is the worst part of deckbuilders. It’s annoying, it takes time, it can damage your cards, and worst of all, it gets people into interminable sleeve vs no-sleeve debates. Nevertheless, randomizing purchased cards is at the heart of the deckbuilding genre. If you get rid of it in favor of a no-shuffle approach, you’re really building a whole new kind of game – a deck-sequencing game.
A deck-builder with no shuffling needs to address a few things: how can cards change sequence, and how can the game retain interest if you keep playing the same cards in the same order. I have a few thoughts on the matter, but it will have to wait for another post.
Super smart idea. I have often thought about this (unconsciously), and the idea of thinking about when a player adds a card to the ‘deck’ impacts when said card appears in the game itself… it’s pretty cool. I presume some of the cards in this deck would allow players to reconfigure their deck, or at least their hand?
does something similar. At the end of your turn, you send all of the cards that you used that turn to the discard pile in whatever order you choose. When you need to refresh your deck, you simply flip your discard pile over without shuffling.
It could be a neat mechanic for something in the style of where players could try to stack their decks such that they synergize with each other.
Wow did I ever butcher that HTML. Should be “City of Iron does something similar” and “something in the style of Legendary Encounters…” =P
The fun of ordering, rather than shuffling, is that you can guarantee your combos. But this can be achieved in other ways too. For instance, some cards might stay on the table from turn to turn. I also like the idea of a ‘burning ladder’ – that is, in many deck-builders, once you build your engine, you stop buying new functional cards and just buy scoring cards. But what if, in a no-shuffle deck-builder, your earliest cards get discarded – that is, the rope ladder your climbing starts burning from the bottom up – and you need to buy new cards to deal with that?
This is a really cool idea. I might try to play with it and see what I can come up with. I think a deck-sequencing game, with the burning ladder element would be awesome.
http://fb.com/playrar
Rococo is an example of a deck sequencer. Each turn you look at your available deck and choose 3 cards. You may gain new cards that are added to your hand. You play all the cards in your hand and discard them. Then you draw the next 3 cards in your deck to choose 3. If there are not enough cards in the deck, you pick up your discards and continue to pick freely from them. They are then placed down as your new deck for the next turn. It is a very interesting take on hand management.