Wildcard West

Wildcard West is a Tabletop RPG that was made as an academic project. I was the sole designer on the project.

The game has a western theme mixed with fantasy - elves in cowboy dusters wield wands like guns, while dwarven prospectors pan for mana stones in the river.

Actions are resolved using cards instead of dice, with bonuses applied if you can form a poker hand.

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Character Sheet

After turning in the project, I wanted to improve on it. I resolved to make a set of quick play rules, play test them, and fix any problems that arose.

The quick play rules included a character sheet. Though not the intended purpose, this put a lot of the game mechanics in one place, giving some clarity to what the system needed to become better.

Skills

The Problem: Players are having trouble figuring out which skill to use, or not realizing a skill exists.

The Solution: Reduce the number of skills.

Initially, there were 28 skills. This proved to be far more than necessary, and problematic for players who had trouble keeping track of them all.

The skill list was reduced to 15. Many skills were either combined into one, or dropped entirely as not fitting with the theme or being seldom used.

Fewer skills means less effort to look through them to find the skill you want.

This had the added benefit of freeing up space on the character sheet for other things.

Wands and Magic

The Problem: Players don’t understand the difference between the “Wands” skill and the “Magic” skill.

The Solution: Combine the “Wands” skill with the “Ranged Weapons” skill

Wands are basically guns in this system. As the primary weapon for most characters, they were given their own skill.

However, wands were also used to reduce the MP cost of spell casting. This confused players, who thought that some spells required the wands skill, and some spells required the magic skill.

Rolling the wands skill into ranged weapons also helped reduce the number of skills, which was a separate problem.

Wands were also given a more in-depth description in multiple places in the book, emphasizing their role as a common weapon that even non-mages used.

Cheat Sheet

The quick play rules included a cheat sheet, which put all the most commonly used game mechanics in one place for easy reference.

Besides being a helpful tool for players, play testing this also helped me to see what was genuinely confusing about the rules, and what was just forgotten.

Matching Cards

The Problem: Players aren't matching cards.

The Solution: Include a step-by-step info graphic.

As part of action resolution, players draw cards and match them based on suit or number (they can also form poker hands instead). Players are only supposed to count matching cards.

Players thought they just counted all cards drawn, completely ignoring the rules for matching.

Even when condensed down into a cheat sheet, people don't want to read a big block of text.

Images are eye catching, so putting these rules in an info graphic instead will make them stand out more and be easier for players to digest.

The info graphic is currently in the works.

Poker Hands

The Problem: Players think poker hands always succeed.

The Solution: Clarify poker hands in the rules.

Forming a poker hand during action resolution is the equivalent of a critical success in this system.

However, unlike most systems, you can have a poker hand that is also a very low result.

Players thought that having a poker hand meant they succeeded, even when the hand's total was less than their opponent's hand.

Rules were re-written to clarify that poker hands are not an automatic success (but do grant benefits even if you fail). These clarifications were capitalized, underlined, and/or made bold to draw attention to them.