Codex is on Kickstarter now. I want to share with you a series of three articles about the design and workings of Codex, followed by a whole bunch of articles about the heroes and their specs. This is the first of three articles about the overall game system.

Introduction to Codex

Customizable card games usually involve decks that are designed to do one narrow thing really well. For example, imagine if we turned Starcraft into a card game and then made a deck that captured the idea of a Zergling rush. This deck would let you attack early with lots of weak, cheap units. In the real game of Starcraft, that’s a legitimate strategy, but not one you’d want to play over and over and over. If you did that, it would probably be boring and you’d want a new deck. And even apart from it being boring, if you only had access to such a single, narrow strategy in your “deck” then you’d have way too many unfair matchups against all the other narrow-strategy decks that happened to beat yours really hard or lose to yours really hard. It just wouldn’t be fun to play a single deck for very long and you’d often win or lose the game before even sitting down at the table.

The actual game of Starcraft isn’t like that at all. You don’t take just one narrow strategy into the game—you take a whole huge set of them. Rather than picking “Zergling Rush” before the game starts, you pick the entire race of Zerg. It’s interesting to play Zerg over and over and over because each time you can play a different subset of all the Zerg units, and that lets you create many different strategies. Having access to so many different units—more than you’d ever play in a single game—also gives you the resilience to stand up to a wide variety of strategies thrown at you. That helps keep matchups more fair.

Codex is based on this same idea. Your “codex” is a book that holds all the cards available to you during a game—more cards than you’ll actually use each time you play. In other words, the cards in your codex are analogous to all the units Zerg can make, but you only make a subset of those in any particular game. You build your deck as you play, adding cards from codex to your deck as the game unfolds. Your opponent doesn’t know which cards you added until later when you actually play those cards. This is a bit like the fog of war in RTS games, which is really cool!

Now that you have the high concept, let’s look at something really fundamental to real-time strategy games and customizable card games: the resource system. When you see how this works in Codex, you’ll see how it interacts with the high concept above.