Category Archives: Crossfire

In a previous article on Teamwork in Shadowrun: Crossfire, I wrote briefly about the damage track on each obstacle. In this article I’ll expand on that topic by telling you the story of how we got there.

The early versions of the game were vastly different from the final design. The main elements that survived are the Black Market and general deck-building concept, and the idea that obstacles show up to threaten the runners.

We started out with a simple HP number on each obstacle. It represented the total amount of damage you needed to defeat the obstacle, much as you’ve seen in many other games. To make the game cooperative, we allowed multiple players to defeat an obstacle together.

In order to combine cards from different players, we experimented with simultaneous turns. This direction had some major problems. To be efficient with their damage dealing, players had to talk very explicitly about their hands. That didn’t feel good, so we tried not discussing our hands; but that led to a game of chicken to see who would play the first card. For example, if an obstacle has 6 HP and players A & B each have a 4-damage card and a 1-damage card in their hands, while players C & D each have 2- and 3-damage cards in hand, what should happen? Player A tries playing a 1-damage card. Player B follows with the same. Player C adds 3 damage, for a total of 5, but then player D has to waste damage. Why wouldn’t player A play a 4-damage card, then player B pass, and player C play a 2-damage card? Without explicit hand sharing, it was hard to communicate well enough and frustrating to play, and we felt a little stupid trying to force it to work out.

There were plenty of other problems with simultaneous turns, including fighting over who gets to make the first buy out of the Black Market. In the end we felt we had to abandon that design.

So we tried taking turns and using counters to track the damage dealt to everything. The gameplay was okay, but there were a lot of counters and a lot of math. It also wasn’t interesting enough overall, though it was sometimes interesting to figure out what you wanted to defeat first; but then you’d just do that, making the game too easy. We needed another hurdle for players to overcome—we wanted players to first figure out what they should defeat, but then sometimes have trouble figuring out how to actually get the job done.

We were also starting to feel that the runners were all the same. In an RPG party, each player makes a unique character whose skills defined their role in the team. We wanted the same thing for Crossfire.

Finally, we hit upon the big break. We broke up the HP of each obstacle into a series of smaller bites. Instead of 8 HP, an obstacle would have HP of 3, 2, 2, 1. This helped clue players in to how to spend their card damage. You have a card that deals 3 damage? You should be the one to start damaging this obstacle. You have only 2 damage? You should wait, or you could combine cards with 2 damage and 1 damage to deal the 3 damage.

At the same time, we added colors to these new “damage tracks” and to the cards the players use to damage the obstacles. That 8 HP obstacle now looks more like: 3, Green, 2, Black, Black. If you’re holding two Black cards, you know what your role will be in defeating this obstacle. If you’re not holding any Black or any Green, you know you’re going to be responsible for the 3, the 2, or both.

This design philosophy also gave us the “we want to, but we can’t” scenario that we were looking for. When there are several obstacles in play threatening to drop you, the team has to figure out not only the ideal order to beat them, but also the efficient order to beat them given what cards are in the players’ hands and whose turn it is. Making these decisions together as a team turned out to be very fun and very interesting. It also gave each player a clear role in the team, one that we were careful to reinforce with the configurations we provide for the starting decks of each role.

—Gregory Marques, Lead Designer

The Black Market deck is the heart of Shadowrun: Crossfire. It’s where you and your fellow runners pick out the tools you’ll need to get the job done. And you won’t be disappointed. Our design philosophy for the Black Market cards was that every one of them should be special. We cut anything that felt like filler and left it to rot in an alley.

You’ll run into some tough decisions when deciding what to buy from the Market. The first one is: do you buy for the long-term, or do you buy for the situation in front of you right now, which is rapidly going downhill? When you buy a card, it goes directly into your hand where you can use it the following turn, so it’s easy to buy tactically based on short-term plans. But if you don’t buy strategically to improve your deck, you’ll curse yourself later on.

The second dilemma is related to the four colors of cards, each of which is best at doing a single kind of damage. If you want to handle tough obstacles on your own, you’ll need the ability to do whatever type of damage is required. However, several Black Market cards reward you in subtle ways for focusing on one color. For example, Deathtouch does more damage when you have more spells in your deck, and Pair Programming requires you to discard another Hacking card to get its most powerful effect.

Finally, there’s the constant question of whether to spend your money now—since time is short and things are looking pretty bad—or save up for something big. The Black Market deck has four real doozies that each cost 9 nuyen, and they’re all game-changers. Odds are, one of them is going to be available . . . do you go for it?

Either way, my contacts in the Market assure me that your satisfaction is guaranteed.

—Sean McCarthy

What’s going to work? Teamwork!

In Shadowrun: Crossfire, just as in the RPG, you are a team of runners working together to accomplish a mission. This direction meant that one of our major goals for the adventure deck-building game was to make it a cooperative team game. We built in several mechanics that create opportunities for players to help each other and to work together. I’m going to walk you through some of those now.

The most central co-op mechanic is baked into the core mechanic of overcoming the bad guys, and it’s a new mechanic that we invented for this game. Each obstacle to success that you face has a damage track. This track consists of two to eight steps. On your turn you use your cards to clear these steps, one by one. The foe is not defeated until the last step is cleared, but even between turns the obstacle will remain damaged to the step where you left them. In the early game, no one player can defeat a foe alone, but each player can make progress, and two or three of you can take down a foe together. Some of the steps require specific types of cards (Skill, Spell, Weapon, or Hacking), so players often need to plan and work together to defeat the foes efficiently. Just to make sure, we gave players starting decks containing different proportions of these four card types. Your team will be depending on you to come through with the type you have the most of when the team gets stuck on a foe with a damage step of that type.

When you do defeat a foe, you gain nuyen that you can use to buy things. The player dealing the killing blow, however, doesn’t get all the money—that would lead to very uncooperative situations. Instead the nuyen is distributed around the team. That way, everyone is happy when you defeat a foe, and everyone cooperates to defeat each foe.

We also wanted a way for a player to play cards on another player’s turn. The game would be a confusing mess if you could play any card on another player’s turn, so we created a mechanic to handle it called Assist. It appears on some of the cards you can buy and add to your deck during the game. Assist allows you play the card during another player’s turn, often for a slightly different effect than you could play it for during your own turn. You feel really great helping your teammate handle a foe they couldn’t deal with using only the cards in their hand. Plus there is a subtle power advantage for using Assist—it lets you play some of the total cards the team is holding earlier, which lets the team defeat obstacles earlier, which gets the team more nuyen earlier, and that makes the team more powerful earlier in the run.

All this and more add up to a cooperative experience that’s more than sharing a common goal. It’s sharing a common method of reaching your goal, and having everyone engaged during every turn.

—Gregory Marques, Lead Designer

Hey chummer, if you’ve got the cred, I’ve got what you’re looking for!” —random flashdealer

Street vendors, ripperdocs, ponies, skagmen, fixers, and a myriad other different contacts all provide opportunities for your Shadowrunner to acquire the perfect equipment, knowledge, spell, or whatever else you might need for Mr. Johnson’s super important mission. If you’ve got the cred, opportunities abound in the black markets of Shadowrun: Crossfire. As you wend your way through your run, you will have plenty of opportunities to meet up with your contacts and see what wares they have for sale. If you have enough nuyen, then you can do a simple cash and carry exchange. We represent this type of transaction in Shadowrun: Crossfire by having purchased resources go straight to your hand. Your brand new toy is ready to go when you reach your next area of operation.

In Shadowrun: Crossfire, runners are able to visit the black market after they have drawn their cards for the turn. The cards they purchase go straight into their hand, augmenting their capabilities for their next turn. This allows the runners facing particularly stalwart challenges to visit the black market and procure what they need to prevail. It also opens up a multitude of varying strategic options each turn. Do you immediately spend your nuyen as soon as it comes in, augmenting your capabilities as you go? Do you save up your nuyen for that particularly choice piece of equipment? Do you clear random weapons and abilities out of the black market in the hopes that it will be restocked with what you really want? Do you hoard up your nuyen and spend it all at once in a gluttonous shopping spree that will allow you to annihilate all opposition at some point in a future scene? All these options are valid strategies at varying times. Choosing which strategy to pursue in the everchanging landscape of Shadowrun: Crossfire is an important and stimulating part of the game play that each runner must decide upon for themself.

Taking cover in the same sprawl that you are,

—Rob Watkins