QR codes printed on the cards

Other Games SotM Game Engine
1

In the next edition of your card game, can you guys print a 3QR code, (sometimes called a 3D bar code) on every card?

This would be really slick, because with a small amount of space on the card’s face, you could facilitate a smart-phone style app that could be used to keep track of everything happening in the game so things don’t fall through the cracks.

Recently I picked up the Vengeance expansion and go together with my regular people to enjoy it, and although we were excited about the heroes, no one wanted to take on the villain encounter because the general consensus was: more cards in the game, more stuff gets forgotten (or even if not, the game is just elongated.) No one was thrilled to add four more villains, their cards, and the process of going through their turns.

The game is a lot of fun though.

Since we’re all software developers and designers, we had a quick conversation about how one could overcome such a challenge, and a QR code on each card would be it.

With QR codes, we could setup something like:

 

Specify hero players and turn order

Specify villain

Specify environment.

 

For each turn (villain/all heroes/environment)

Start phase:

                Show all of the math that has happened: dmg out, buffs, etc

                Have players resolve decision points (ties for most HP, selecting an ongoing to destroy, drawing a card, etc)

Main phase:

                Villian/Environment: draw and resolve a card

                Heroes: progress through the turn (draw/play/power or draw/draw)

End Phase:

               Basically a repeat of start phase, but for end-phase effects

 

Anyway, it wouldn’t take much to write a simple app to do this, and the QR codes would allow the smart-device to quickly know what is going on.  Obviously the concern is “wouldn’t it be just as easy to make an all-digital Sentinels of the Multiverse?”, but with this system, you still get the ambiance of playing a card game with friends,  and making sure everything happens true-to-form with the rules and nothing is missed (also, it wouldn’t take two hours to finish a game)

 

 

 

2

Where would you find room on the cards?

Because you can't be suggesting a QR code instead of text, surely?

It's a cool idea, but i see a bunch of people sitting around the table fiddling with their phones, getting lazy because the app will track everything, and then forgetting to scan something, which they will then fail to pick up because they aren't checking every turn.

And personally I think you need to be able to follow everything manually (so to speak) in order to understand how things work. So the app tells you you're doing 4 damage to yourself as Absolute Zero and 6 damage to another target, why those numbers? Oh no, Wraith's Razor Ordnance is only doing 4 damage now instead of 5? What happened?

3

Those are very valid points. When we were discussing it, the idea was that you wuold only have one centeral user of the smart device, passing it around for people to do their turns.

Absolutely do not replace the text, you'd have to be able to play the game without using the smart devices, it would just be an additional feature of the game. Following the game and knowing what is going on is vital to enjoying it, the app would not just "do" everything, it would have to produce a log the states why it did them, where the bonus' came from, etc. It's all the stuff you would have to explain as you were playing it, just written down, and more importantly, accurate.

Because there aren't any random factors (besides the cards being shuffled), a computer could pretty easily track the amount of cards in your hand, and such.

As for where to print them, they wouldn't have to be incedibly large, but if no space could be found on the face of the card, there's always the back (I hope no one thinks that people would start being able to read QR codes themselves)

I dunno, seemed pretty simple, but i can see your points

4

I could envision QR codes linking to animated card art as something functional, thematically sound, and not nessesary for gameplay

5

That's what's really great about QR codes. All they would do is uniquely identify the card. If you are running an app for augmented reality (well, maybe just something as simple as a video or art of the cahracter), then you scan the card and get that.

But if someone has written a full game-tracking app to use to amange the whole game, the QR code would also facilitate that, because all it does is say "I'm this card"

Kind of like an identifier for the digital world to use however the app your using decides.

 

Now, talking crazy for a bit, if they had RF transmitters to say "I'm this card, and my coordinates on the planet are X,Y, my roation is R, and my orientation is O" then wow, you can do some amazing stuff, like have a hologram of the champ appear right out of the card (when looking at the card trhough a smart device's camera)

6

But I want to plan my turn before it's actually my turn, otherwise games take forever. And I can't do that without knowing the game state, but someone else has the device because it's their turn. So I ask them and interrupt their turn, wait until it's my turn and lose the ability to plan out-of-turn, or assess the game state from the cards on the table (in which case we might as well not use the device at all).

7

But you could still do that because all of the cards are still on the table in front of you,  you could plan it out just as well as you could now... Unless I missed something?

 

Just to clearify, the game would still exist exactly as it does today, but Greater Than Games adding QR codes to all of their cards allows people to develop smart-device applications that are aware of the cards that are played. That's pretty much it.

Then if you guys wanted to develop an assistant app to manage a game for people, you could, but also the open-source communities and individual groups of enthusists can write their own code that utilizes this feature to do tons of cool stuff, the one I outlined was a game manager.

 

In the gaming areana, people write mods to extend a game, make thigns easier, or whatever they like. In the card-game arena mods are pretty much periphrial hardware, like dice contains, custom tables, etc. Adding a QR code lets people write actual digital mods to the game.

 

I dunno, just a suggestion. There's a lot of card-games out there, but IMO Sentinels is the type of game that engages people. I think this could add on to that engagement as technology moves forward.

8

Then what's the point of the app that tells you the game state?

9

I'm genuinely curious, what's the advantage?

10

I'm with Silverleaf on this one.  QR codes have lots of really useful applications, but I don't see how injecting a middleman into the process of playing the game would really help.  We already have HP tracker apps and the Sidekick; aren't they enough?

Now, this sort of thing CAN work.  There's an app for Arkham Horror that has all of the text of all of the in-town and Other World location decks and will track them, which can save a huge amount of time spent shuffling or uselessly discarding until you get the correct card.  But for a game like Sentinels, that sort of phone interactivity isn't really needed.  (And that app doesn't use QR codes or anything, it just has a database of card text.)

11

It's just to keep track over everything on the table so you don't miss anything.

We're pretty casual players, so it's kind of a bummer when we realize we haven't been doing X dmg from some minion because we forgot after reading it or something.

Really we didn't even consider anything like this until everyone was reading over the setup for Vengence, and everyone went "well… I don't really wana keep track of 11 decks with all their cards out, lets just play vs a single boss"

 

The idea was basically just a helper app, keeps everythign straight for you. But if you don't have something as simple as scanning a QR code, then you would have to have an interface where you tell it which card was played… which would just be a solid "no, never, ever"

The game is fun because it's a card game, I dunno how fun it would be as a purely digital game, so the idea isn't to turn it in to that; it's just to leverage a smart-devices to make sure you keep track of everything.

 

I do want to say I'm a pretty big fan of SofM, you guys have done a great job. It's hard to find a game to play (board or card) that has a level of sophistication that is engaging, but not so much so that no one wants to learn how to do it.

 

 

12

This would look rather obnoxious to us non-smartphone people.  Would not buy, though if there were QR and non-QR versions of the edition I'd be fine with that.

13

Well possibly, but you'd want to rely on the designers to avoid such a thing. Honestly a QR code may not be required, a thin strip of barcode at the bottom may be enough, as it just needs to resolve to a unique number that identifies that card.

14
I can see the value of this to some degree... it could work with something like the Sentinels Sidekick App but instead of typing in what card you got you could just scan it when it comes into play and it automatically populates it... but that doesn't quite save you that much time.
However, if you are trying to use it to actually update the game state as the actions occur it would still be diddly and require a lot of follow up since a lot of cards have multiple actions that you may or may not do, so you would have to scan the card then take some onscreen action to identify the actions you are taking. You would also need a way to identify targets, so you might need to scan a card, then perform an onscreen action and then scan the target card. So it starts to get almost as fiddlyness as the game itself. 
 
I think such a system could work on a game if it was integrated from the start. Retrofitting an existing game into it might be more work than it is worth. 
15

Oy, people stomp on stuff so hard around here sometimes.  If the cards had a code on them in a way that didn't get in the way of my current enjoyment of the cards, I don't know why I'd care.  And if it enables other people to play in a way they find fun, then more power to them, says I.

16

Well, agreed that far.  A tiny, unobtrusive foil barcode at the bottom might not detract from my enjoyment of the game at all (as long as it didn't require increasing the price).  But a QR code, which was the OP's suggestion, most definitely would.  Those things are larger than a postage stamp and they look hideous.  Would hugely and negatively impact the comicky visual appeal of the game.

17

I don't have a smartphone or tablet or anything like that, so I haven't really gotten to play with Sidekick. How much of this does Sidekick already take care of?

I suspect QR codes wouldn't be enough to capture the game state. Things like Galvanize, Counterpoint Bulwark, and Predator's Eye give benefits not by their presence, but by their use. Just saying "this card is on the table" wouldn't be enough to determine the state of things without one or several more scans each time they are used. This seems like it would interrupt the flow of the game, but maybe that's just me.

I also feel like QR codes would ruin the appearance of the cards. This game is really good at creating an immersive experience and putting a barcode on everything would detract from it.

I could see this as potentially a useful teaching tool (another way to visualize all of the extant effects and where they come from), but I wouldn't want it to be a permanent part of the game.

18

How do QR codes handle errata? Is the QR merly a link to a centralised hub that stores all the info on it, thus text on cards might not match up with what the app says happens?

19

Your phone will shoot a laser that will burn the errata'ed card and automatically order you a replacement. 

 

20

I agree that from the ground up that would work.

 

As a crank old person myself I have no desire to play a card game that minimizes the importance of the cards, and the actual calculations.

But then I don't actually own a Cell Phone, so yeah.

 

I can see the appeal of scanning a power, and the target and having the device calculate all the periphery stuff.

I think this app would be eclipsed pretty quickly though since the digital game is coming.