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Connect with Ambal Tournament (Bernardo Bittencourt):
Ambal Tournament Website
Ambal Tournament Article about Faction/Archetype Design
Ambal Tournament on Instagram
Ambal Tournament on Discord

Connect with the Nerdlab Community:
Nerdlab Website
Nerdlab Facebook Page
Nerdlab on Twitter
Nerdlab on Instagram
Join the Nerdlab Discord

Hello fellow adventurers and welcome to the Nerdlab – Where we transform our gaming passion into incredible game designs and learn how to nerd like a boss. 

My name is Marvin and I am an ambitious game designer on my quest to develop a co-operative fantasy card game.

For this podcast, my vision is to take you with me on this exciting journey. Together we will explore the secrets of different game mechanics and reach the next level as a game designer.

In Episode 53 of the Nerdlab, we are going to talk about action selection in card and board games. 

Most games in the area of strategy card games like Magic, Keyforge and most of the others as well are sequential games. That means players choose their action one at a time before the other players do. But what I’ve always been interested in, is exploring games where players select their actions at the same time. Instead of sequential action selection, we now talk about simultaneous action selection. Luckily for me and for you, I am following an expert for simultaneous action selection on Instagram. He is a game designer creating exactly that kind of game. A strategy duelling card game with simultaneous action selection. And let me tell you: This is one of the most promising games I have seen in a while. The design looks very very clean and when I read the individual cards I instantly want to play with them because I can imagine how to build nice strategies and combos with them. So overall the game looks very very promising to me with regards to game mechanism and artwork as well.  

So I am very very proud that Bernardo accepted my invitation to be part of the show today to tell us a bit more about his experiences with simultaneous action selection and the design process of his game Ambal Tournament.

Topics we covered during the interview:

  • Challenges during the design process of Ambal Tournament
  • Definition of simultaneous action selection
  • Advantages and disadvantages of simultaneous action selection in games
  • Design challenges that come with simultaneous action selection
  • Tools and process of designing different factions and how these can guide the design of individual cards (please take a look at the following illustration how Bernardo designed his different factions)