Designer Diary: Unstoppable, or A Roguelike, Momentum Deck-Building Game | BoardGameGeek News

by John Clair

Callouts and Credits

I want to lead off with some callouts and credits.

As ever, the many good folks who playtested Unstoppable deserve noteworthy thanks. Their time, feedback, and patience through the good and bad versions along the way is an essential part of making good games.

Thanks is due also to the good and talented folks of Renegade Game Studios, Brieger Creative, and all the contributing artists, writers, and contractors who played a part in enhancing and actualizing my original design.

Finally, I always like to call out some of the crucial game designs upon whose shoulders this particular design stands. As with any deck-builder, Dominion deserves its recognition. In addition, heuristics from Magic: The Gathering, Shards of Infinity, and my own prior card-crafting designs such as Mystic Vale and Dead Reckoning all bear notable influence on Unstoppable. And while quite different in execution, Slay the Spire helped inform some of the overall game structure.

What is Unstoppable?

Unstoppable is a roguelike/lite/dark/up/down/whatever “momentum” (oohh!) deck-builder for solo or two-player co-operative play.

Before this game hit Kickstarter, I thought I had a good understanding of what “roguelike deck-builder” meant. However, subsequent Kickstarter consternation and comment kerfuffle educated me into a state of confusion where it turns out the definition and distinction between “roguelike” and “roguelite” is hazy and rather up to interpretation. I don’t claim to be an expert on these definitions, and perhaps Unstoppable is actually a roguelite-like-ish game? It seems under some interpretations Unstoppable fits nicely into one or the other terms, and for other interpretations it seems to sit just outside one or both terms. It is its own game.

Regardless, if you are familiar with roguelike/lite deck-builders, such as Slay the Spire, I think this game makes sense in a category with them. That said, the “momentum” concept is probably more important and certainly the more unique aspect and classification for this game.

“But John, what is a ‘momentum’ game? I’ve never heard of that. You can’t just go making up terms!” Yes, I can, and I will! Every term is made up at some point! I’ve discussed my made-up term “kinetic design” in some of my other articles, and you can’t take “card-crafting” from me, and so now I’m making up “momentum”:

“Momentum” as an element in a game means, most generally, an undefined set of sequenceable primary actions in which each action either adds to your ability to do more actions or subtracts. A “momentum game” would be one in which the fact that you can (and generally want to) sequence actions as long as reasonable is a major feature of the game.

As an example, Lords of Waterdeep is NOT a momentum game since you place four workers each round, then get them back and do it again, whereas Tapestry IS a momentum game as your round goes on until you have a turn without useful or possible moves.

“Momentum” should not be confused with combos or with abilities that sequence. For example, I would not describe Dominion as a momentum game because its general structure is draw five cards, play five cards, repeat; the fact that card effects let you make turns bigger and go beyond five cards per turn is an important element, but does not change the core pattern. In other words, even if you hadn’t done any cool card effects, the game structure still pushes you forward.

Unstoppable is a momentum game in that card draw is entirely player driven. The standard draw-a-hand, play-a-hand sequence of a deck-builder is removed and instead the only way you draw cards is by doing actions (e.g., defeating threats) that let you draw cards. If you fail to maintain card draw “momentum”, you run out of cards and very quickly lose.

Origins

Sixteen years ago, my best friends and I busted out our fresh copy of Dominion. We decided we’d dole out tasks, so one of us started reading the rules while the rest of us teamed up to shuffle all the cards together…yup.

When we finally got to playing, I pursued the epic “Village, Village, Village, Village, Village, Village, buy a Silver” strategy.

What a remarkable creation Donald X. Vaccarino‘s Dominion is! Way back when the only game I’d licensed was my kids/family/speed/chaos game Rumble Pie, I was going through the interview process for a “game designer” job at Fantasy Flight Games. Who knows what trajectory that might have taken me on, but we won’t know because I didn’t get the job.

Anyway, one of the interview questions was something like “Describe a game that is important to you and why?” I answered Dominion because the concept of deck-building as a game was such a rare example of a design breakthrough creating enormous and easily accessible design space. It represented for me an achievement in game design to aspire toward, to create something both so compelling and so new that whole new landscapes of game design were possible.

Unstoppable is not that kind of game — but it is probably one of my most innovative games.

•••

As an aside, one of the compliments I was most proud to hear for my card-crafting system when it first debuted with Mystic Vale in 2016 was that it represented “a new breakthrough similar to Dominion“. Turns out that was true only in theory and, for a number of reasons, has not proven true in practice.

Unlike deck-building, card-crafting is not a game engine; it is merely a design tool that can be used in games with cards, and one that is particularly difficult to prototype. Designing a “deck-builder” means the designer starts with their foundation pre-made on a highly compelling core-engine; it’s like starting with a half-built design that is guaranteed to not suck. It’s like a cheat-code for game design, so it gets used all the time.

Designing a “card-crafting game”, on the other hand, still requires the designer to create or borrow a core-rules foundation. It doesn’t help you design a good game, even if it does offer largely untapped design space to do new things with cards.

Aside within an aside! I’m still waiting for a publisher who is ready to take on a card-crafting TCG with me — so much potential to genuinely stand out from the (re)saturated TCG market!

In the end, it’s perhaps not so surprising designers have not borrowed the card-carfting system for their designs with anything like the ubiquity of deck-building.

•••

Back to Unstoppable: What’s the connection to Dominion? Turns out the “Village, Village, Village, Village, Village, Village, buy a Silver” strategy (and its more interesting variations) is pretty fun. Card-draw and action-sequencing to create long chains of effects feels pretty clever.

After my first play of Dominion, I remember feeling disappointed that the right choice on your turn was often to make your deck less fun by buying a VP card rather than more fun by buying the combotastic cards. In subsequent plays, I learned to appreciate the cost/benefit of this choice, but like every designer ever after playing a deck-builder for the first time, I was inspired to create my own deck-builder, in my case, a deck-builder in which sequencing and comboing into card-draw was the goal of the game — not a tool to help you win, but the actual win condition.

Fortunately, I was too much of a novice game designer to immediately recognize the obvious flaw of a player infinitely drawing cards on their turn or I might have abandoned the idea without further consideration.

This is concept art from Chronicles of Riddick, not my art, but I used it in my first prototypes as a reference image because I thought it was a great representation of what I wanted the game to feel like

Momentum Deck-Building

I built a prototype in which all the cards in your deck were double-sided. On one side were your normal action cards. On the back side were monsters representing endless hordes of demons. Players were angelic warriors standing in the breach between the demonic horde and humanity. Thematically your goal was simply to hold the breach long enough and kill enough demons to meet your protector-angel-quota and retire in glory. The first player to do so won.

In the game, this meant drawing through your deck five times, but card-draw was not some free upkeep thing you did each turn; it was the game’s fundamental currency. The monsters on the backs of your cards had HP, and in order to draw the top card of your deck, you needed to kill the monster shown there. You needed to play cards to do damage to kill monsters to draw cards to play cards to do damage to kill monsters, etc. Along the way, you would gain currency to buy new and better cards.

Monsters from the first version of the game, called “Apocalypse” at the time. These are reference images I found online for the prototype, not my art.

Essentially, you were trying to build a deck that could achieve momentum of actions such that the card-draw could become self-sustaining. Early in the game, this would be impossible, and you would have to end your turn and do an upkeep phase, which meant taking damage from the top monsters of your deck but then drawing them to set up your next turn. Eventually, hopefully, you would achieve critical momentum and be able to run through your whole deck at once, sometimes even knocking out the final couple of deck cycles in a single turn.

But guess what? A fifteen-minute combotastic turn is fun for you, but totally not fun for everyone else. At the time, I did not recognize the solution nor have the tools in my design chest to solve the game’s other problems, so the design got shelved. I think that was 2011.

Becoming Unstoppable

2020 (obviously) was the year I realized the solution was to make the design a solo game. A fifteen-minute combotastic turn to win the game isn’t a problem when you’re the only person playing. Lots of other changes also occurred — a total from-the-ground-up endeavor — but not needing to constrain the game to a multiplayer environment made finding the right solutions easier.

This is from an early draft of the new version, which was initially called “Epic”. This was my first foray into trying to do card-crafting with weird-cut cards instead of transparent cards. In the image, you can see the cutout parts on the left (front) and right (back) sides of the cards. These didn’t work great and one of the quickly learned lessons was to avoid cut-lines at right angles to the direction cards are sleeved. Nevertheless, the merit of getting this approach to work was clear: much cheaper production costs than plastic cards.

I also had design tools, like card-crafting, that I did not previously have. One of the attributes of card-crafting in a deck-building game is its inherent avoidance of deck-bloat. In deck-building games, adding cards to your deck reduces the frequency of all your other cards; it is essentially a hidden cost.

Most deck-builders end up with possible moments when you don’t want to buy any of the cards on offer — not because they are bad or uninteresting, but because adding those cards to your deck has become strategically worse than adding no cards at all. These are often unfun moments that can feel like the game design is breaking a little. Modern deck-building designs have used clever ways to minimize this issue, often in ways that add to the fun of the game.

For better or worse, card-crafting skips the issue entirely; improving cards you already have has no hidden cost. (Sort of — if you want to get really nitty-gritty, each time you sleeve an advancement onto a card, you are essentially using up some of your deck’s real estate for additional, maybe better, advancements in the future. In that sense there is still a “hidden cost”, but as long as your deck has plenty of real estate to last until the game ends, it’s a negligible “cost”.)

This was much closer to the final prototype, now called Unstoppable. You can see the cut lines here are angled to avoid catching on each other while sleeving. However, shuffling these when unsleeved was still annoying.

In the end, I found that a single cut zone that could fit both advancements was the way to go and would alleviate, if not quite entirely solve, the annoyingness of pre-sleeved shuffling

Conclusion

As ever, there is more to be said, but I shouldn’t make this article too long. It was important to me that the game worked as a two-player co-op game, and I think the system achieves that well. It makes a great couples’ game imo.

As mentioned in the opening, much solid work was put into the game from Renegade, Brieger Creative, and other contributing artists, writers, and contractors. On the design side, the Boss system in particular should be credited in good part to John and Jordan of Brieger Creative. They turned my hand-off version of the “boss” concept into quite distinct “Boss” options with their own stories and rules and flavors. Though the primary variation of experience (replayability) still comes from the card pool and the many ways to build an effective deck, the Boss flavors are a big value add.

I’m super proud of Unstoppable. I think the momentum system makes for a unique take on deck-building, on card-battling, and on solo gameplay — and it’s FUN imho. I’m not supposed to include my own games in my “favorites games” lists, but if I can make an exception here, Unstoppable is currently my #1 solo tabletop game of all time. I intentionally scaled the highest difficulty option really high and even included a scoring system with achievement bonuses to keep the game always challenging me to do better the next time. My best so far is Kai Silver vs. Triumvirate on expert, scoring 434. Beat that!

Thanks for your time. I hope this article was worthwhile reading. Thanks to all the Kickstarter backers — I hope the game lives up to your expectations! For the rest of you, if the game intrigues you, hopefully you will get a chance to try it.

If you have questions on the game design or its development history, please put them in the comments below, and I will try to respond as I can.

Happy gaming and stay playful!

John D. Clair