Exponential combinations

After many weeks of work, I have finally finished the card pool of the initial 4 archetypes that I started with. The last one being the Flyer.

Today, we have now the following archetypes in each aspect.

• Ego:
  • Flyer
  • Mad Scientist
• Disposition
  • Fearless
• Instrument
  • Rubber Chicken
• Injustice
  • Abusive Relationship

All of these together give up ~100 unique cards to combine with each other. And since you always combine one archetype of each aspect, at the moment there’s effectively 2 types of runs you can make: Flyer/Fearless/Rubber Chicken/Abusive Relationship and Mad Scientist/Fearless/Rubber Chicken/Abusive Relationship. 80 cards in your pool per run.

The plan for release is to have 3 choices in each aspect, which will give us 81 possible run combinations. And with each new archetype added to the pool in the future, the combination start increasing exponentially. Adding one new archetype to each aspect then, so to bring it to a total of 4 each, we end up with 256 possible combinations of runs.

And since you do not see the full card pool in each run, and each run being fairly unique in the combination of card drafts and curios discovered, the unique runs are practically infinite.

One of the goals of my design is that I am aiming for a degree of differentiation between each run that exists nowhere else. Ultimately I want to achieve a state of the game, where memorization of all possible combinations is futile. I want people to play the game as a self-isolated experience. I want even the best players to play in the present, instead of having to study wikis and guides to get better due to the inherent advantage of having memorized all “builds”.

I am not sure when I will be able to achieve that. Human brain is a wonderful tool which varies massively in capabilities. I believe when we have around 5 archetypes of each aspect, or 625 card pools, it will bring it outside the memorization and crunch capabilities of most humans. But (if successful) I’m sure a few massive nerds will exist which will live and breathe this game to become the best at it, and might manage it. But at that point, each new aspect, is going to massively complicate things for them.

I truly wonder where the limits of human capacity for crunching information are, and what strategies hardcore players might come up with to tackle a game with such an amount of combinations. My plan for now is to keep expanding exponentially until I find this limit. Maybe it will be at 10 archetypes per aspect. Can someone truly remember the crunch for 10K combinations of card pools? 100K? I doubt it, but I’m sure methods to crunch in a more abstract way will be found and I’m curious to see what they will be.

So, today we start at 2. Tomorrow at 4 and then at 8 and we keep going :) Grab the latest version and try it out!