Archetype is an important concept in games, especially card games, and something helpful both to designers (for balancing) and players (to create strategies). When I started creating skills for each School of Knowledge, each School had a set of attributes I wanted to work with or avoid but without a defined archetype. This gave me flexibility and freedom when developing the first set of skills, feeling where I wanted to go.

Certain concepts for each school were clear in my mind, like slower and more defensive skills for Water, blocks and damage over time (bleeding) for Sword and more offensive approaches with Fire and Assassination. These concepts are mostly inspired by RPGs but many card games have similar characterizations like Colors in Magic the Gathering and Classes in Hearthstone. Ambal plays very differently from traditional card games though, the battle is simultaneous and there’s no ramp up of mana, this coupled with other differences required me to think about archetypes in a different way.

I had to analyze what early and late game meant in Ambal since there is no ramp up on Energy gain, and decide what will affect each stage of the match and how resources influenced that. For example, lowering your total Energy in the early game can be a good way to trigger a powerful skill but in the late game it might cost you the match (if your total Energy gets too low you lose).

Resources can be Life, Energy, Total Energy, cards in the Discard Pile, cards in the Out of Play pile, cards in hand, cards from the same School. Anything that can be quantified, measured, increased/decreased can be seen as a resource, each one with different levels of importance.

So this is how I see School of Knowledge archetypes in Ambal Tournament, separated in 3 pairs:

1– Aggressive – Having skills focused on reaching a win condition. This means skills that lower Health or total Energy. These can be done in direct ways like dealing damage or indirect ways like making your opponent discard, leading them to lose total Energy.

1- Protective – Having skills focused on delaying a win condition. This means skills that reduce the loss of Health and total Energy. These can be done in several ways like healing, blocking, recovering cards from the Discard Pile, reducing damage taken, etc.

2- Non Linear – Having skills with a lot of interaction with other players. This means paying attention to opponent’s actions and trying to take advantage of that.

2- Linear – Having skills with little interaction with other players. This means being less worried about interfering with the opponent.

3- Burst – Having skills that use up a lot of resources besides Energy. Using powerful skills to move the game in the direction you want, at a cost (like setting yourself on fire).

3- Steady – Having skills that use little resources besides Energy. Without using resources like health and total Energy it makes you less vulnerable in the late game.

Mixing and matching these archetypes can lead to different strategies, like an Aggressive, Linear and Burst combination focusing on winning the game fast. Or a Protective, Non Linear and Steady combination aiming to control the match and make it last longer. There’s usually a relation between Aggressive and Burst or Protective and Steady, but breaking that relation will be a fun way to create unique Schools.

Each School gravitates towards one concept of each pair, like Water Magic is more Protective, Non Linear and Steady. This isn’t a hard rule when creating skills for a School but it does help keeping things consistent and in theme. There are other concept pairs I could include, like High Cost or Low Cost of skills and Spell or Action skills, but I keep them organized in other ways. It requires a lot of work to create and balance all these layers, but I quite like having these archetypes laid out to guide me through the creation of new skills and possibly new Schools.

Let’s not forget that in Ambal you can build your deck using up to two Schools, meaning the resulting deck might be a blend of the two School archetypes. Fire plus Assassination offers an extremely Aggressive deck, while Sword plus Assassination is less Aggressive and very Non Linear.

Let me know if you want to hear more about archetypes, I might write more about each specific school! Ambal is coming to Kickstarter in the beginning of 2020, sign to the newsletter to be notified.