Heard a guy at the game cafe rant about deck builders being "lazy design" and it got me thinking

I was at a cafe in Portland last Saturday grabbing a coffee between games when this guy spent 10 minutes complaining that every new board game is just another deck builder with a different theme. He said the whole genre is basically Dominion with a fresh coat of paint and people eat it up because they don't want to learn real mechanics. Do you think deck builders are actually a crutch for lazy game designers or am I missing something deeper in how they work?

3 comments

3 Comments

blairwhite1mo ago

Deck builders work great for players who like short term combo planning but get bored with long term strategy. That's not lazy design, that's just aiming for a different kind of puzzle.

masondixon1mo ago

Hold on, let's not act like every deck builder is some high art puzzle game. Half of them just throw random cards at you and hope you figure it out in 20 minutes. I mean, it's fine for what it is, but calling it a "different kind of puzzle" feels like giving it too much credit. A lot of them just boil down to "pick the biggest number" after a few runs. You're basically just clicking buttons until something explodes, then you reset and do it again. It's barely strategy compared to actually planning out a full game from turn one.

finleyk8723d ago

Haven't you ever had a run where the numbers just click and everything starts working together, even if you didn't plan it out from the start? I get that some deck builders are shallow, but the good ones force you to adapt on the fly, and that's a different kind of skill. It's not all just picking the biggest number, sometimes you have to weigh a risky combo against a safe card.