[I]FIRST[/I] Trading Card Co.

FIRST General Forum
1

FIRST Community,

After Dean Kamen’s inspiring speech at World Championships this year - “Make It Loud” - I spent quite a lot of time musing over how exactly to take this message to heart. With the help of a few other enthusiastic individuals, I think I have finally developed a way of promoting Coopertition, Gracious Professionalism, and Making in Loud. The FIRST Trading Card Co. (FTCC) is a design for a trading card game based on the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC).

The game is designed to play based on data collected throughout the FRC Season. In order to make this possible, many different teams from across the country will need to participate in the same scouting system. I am in development of a scouting app for Apple and Android Devices, where the data collected will be reviewed by peers and pushed to a server containing a Statistical Analysis Database (SAD). The SAD contains analysis beyond many other scouting systems, and is based on FIRST Team 701 the RoboVikes’ World Championship Scouting Database known as the Chadabase.

Following is a link to the basic design of the game, including information on gameplay and possible cards.

Having read all this, what are your ideas as to how the FTCC may work, and if it will work at all? What kind of impact do you believe that a shared SAD will do to the competition aspect? What are you thoughts on the concept, and design.

If you want to help contribute to the project, we could really use mentor information. Contribute a mentor from your team, with a picture (optional), and a brief description of what they do on the team. Not looking for Woodie Flowers nomination essays here :D. Also, if you have statistics on how well your robot performed last season, send those in as well. Send all information to :

[email protected]

I greatly appreciate all contributions to the project. We are working in Alpha Testing right now, and once that stage is complete, those that contribute to the project will have a chance to work in beta testing.

Hope to get some great feedback. :]

Joseph Lewis
Head of Scouting and Vanden Robotics

2

Well this is certainly an interesting idea, and one I think could be epic if executed well. I have reservations, suggestions and ideas.

Is scouting data the best way to determine the stats for robot cards? And how exactly would they work? How would the data being entered be verified? The data entry could be run like the FF league on Delphi somewhat. Or you could contact a team or two going to each regional for data.
Or you could use OPR if that’s applicable (or accurate) for the year.

Will the cards be cross-year? I’d love to have cards for this year’s game and next year’s game be able to mix somehow. In which case, it would have to focus less on the specific game from that year and more on the general aspects of FRC. I’d love to see someone have a 2011 deck and someone else have a 2013 deck and they go at it somehow.

How would the cards be distributed/purchased? What if you created some sort of template that one could use to make their own cards and share them possibly on Chief Delphi. And there’s a list of cards that are “officially approved” for use or something.

Is there a better way to do voltas? (Also a better term- voltas is kinda funky.) I like the idea of using a set supply that you use to activate robot cards, strategy cards, and stuff, but it’s a bit clunky as is.

If you’re going to call this the FIRST Trading Card Game, it can’t only involve FRC. It should have cards relating to FTC and FLL. Unless you were to rename it the FRCTCG. But I think it’d be cool to somehow include the smaller programs.

I’d love to see this pan out. Imagine going to CMP and playing FTCG with some kids from other teams during an official break.

Now here’s another idea, and it would be a considerable change from what you currently have laid out.
Have you ever played a deck-building game? You should try one sometime (i.e. Dominion, Ascension, etc.)
The premise of a deck building game is that everyone starts with the same few cards, and then you can use your in-game money (perhaps voltas) to buy other cards. Your money cards and the purchased cards are shuffled back into your deck after your turn basically. The goal is usually to purchase as many of the “Victory Cards” as possible, but in order to do so efficiently, you have to buy other cards to create combos that allow you to purchase more of the victory cards. It’s less complicated than it sounds, and they’re very fun to play.
What if your FTCG became a deck-building game? Everyone starts with say three “Plowie” cards, and seven “Student cards”. Then, every turn you draw a hand of 5. Using your student cards you can purchase robot cards, strategy cards, mentor cards, etc. And then every time you place a combination of three robots whose “point value” exceeds a certain number, you receive a “Match Win” card. The highest value robots have the highest cost in students, and higher value students can be purchased with other students as well (i.e. Experienced Student, College Mentor) Different student cards can also have different effects (CAD Student increases the value of any one robot card by 3, etc.) The mentor cards can have similar effects, or have a larger role in causing your values to have different multipliers, etc.

I don’t know if it would work as well as it is in my head, but it would be cool. It would also easily allow for the integration of multiple years of robots.
I don’t know if that’s the sort of feedback you were looking for, as that’s basically a completely different game, but I decided to go for it anyway.
Anyway, good luck!

3

Sounds crazy. I like it. I’m currently in limbo in terms of mentoring. If my college schedule allows it I will try and mentor a Boston area team this winter. I agree with the deck building idea since a “standard style” game, as with most other TCG’s, creates the problem of he who spends the most wins the most.

I think that instead of a trading card game you would almost be better off with instead creating a catalyst league or something electronic of that sort. Costs would be less and the access would be about as wide.

If you would like any information about 3173, my former team, message me and I will let you know anything you would like.

Good luck!!

EDIT:

I also started a Fantasy FRC league this year for my team during CMP. Each person picked teams and then earned points based off of that teams robot and team performance using a scoring system loosely based off of the FiM point system. We set up the draft on a google doc and then I was the commissioner and live tallied up the scores for each person while watching CMP or at night after most of the action was over.

This is the thread on it. I believe that I made quite a few changes to it since I originally posted it.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116309&highlight=Fantasy+FIRST

4

When I first glanced at this thread I thought you were talking about something more like collectable “baseball” cards showing stats, info, pic, etc. I think this would be pretty cool. (And I call dibs on the rare 2056 rookie card!)

My biggest problem with your game is that each year thousands of robots are designed to do the exact same game task. The robots that do this the best win (skill based - similar to sports.) Alternatively, in a game like you are trying to make there needs to be lots of different ways to play and win (strategy based.) If this isn’t the case then the game will be one dimensional and not fun to play. This does not seem to jive well with what you are trying to do.

I guess the root of the question I’m trying to ask is, what is to stop me from playing with only 254, 1114, 2056, and 67 robots from the last 5 years then crushing everyone? Alternatively, why would I ever want to play with a robot with a losing record? Finally, how do you take the hundreds of very similar robots that have near zero OPRs and make unique cards that people actually want to play out of them?

Cheers, Bryan

5

Forgive me here, not very good at the whole card game thing. I think it’s a very interesting promising premise though!

When I first saw that and then read the document, I was thinking that if the voltas were spent for each robot, that means you would have to balance your cards.

Eg:
Powerhouse/Einstein team=4 voltas
Solid Rookie defensive blocker team=1 voltas

If Voltas were spent, you would have to wait until round 2 to have only a Powerhouse team. That kinda represents the way you need to balance your alliance.

Kind of makes sense I hope.

6

Thank you to everyone’s suggestions and feedback so far. As I reread the OP I began to realize that I never quite explained how the game would work (retail / marketing wise).

The game would be designed to be played on an App on any Android, Apple, or Windows device with internet connection (against other players) or not (against a computer opponent).

The volta system is still in the works, as it is, I know, very clunky and confusing right now. I am considering the idea of the deck building game…

The idea of linking scouting and the data on the cards was meant as a way to encourage teams to scout with the same system, so that the information would be pooled together. Perhaps I was vague. As you scout more on the system, your account in the Trading Card Game would gain points if your data fell within the standard deviations of data collected for that same match. Other teams at the event would look at data collected at that event and decide if it really was accurate or not. The more accurate you are to the actual score of a robot (all our scouting data is based on individual robot performance) the more points you would receive (based on the avg from the data collected). You would then spend those points to purchase card packs that contained random cards. The general community (not of FIRST) would spend $0.99 per card pack (having started with basic deck for free), and the money would raised would go towards funding FIRST Teams. Those who don’t participate in the scouting could also purchase cards this way.

The idea of limiting the players from simply playing the same best cards over and over was residing in the voltas. If the really good robots (254, 1114, 2056, 67, etc.) all cost say 10 voltas, then they couldn’t enter play until much later in the game, and certainly not all in the same round. The idea is to make a deck that includes the lower performing robots in order to be able to play in the earlier rounds.

I love the idea of adding FTC and FLL into the game. Perhaps something lies in the strategy cards? Adding FTC and FLL teams in as strategy cards could hold some promise. I’ll look more into working them into the game. Maybe you could even play FTC and FLL team robots onto the field as robot cards? (beyond the 3 FRC ones). I will definitely find a way to work that in. I want the game to appeal to the entire FIRST Community, which includes FTC and FLL.

7

Not gonna lie when I started to read this I thought of this.

Thunderchicken.jpg
Thunderchicken.jpg373×521 35.7 KB



Thunderchicken.jpg
Thunderchicken.jpg373×521 35.7 KB

8

We made a robot card for years based on FRC 1002 design(and more recently FRC 1730’s design). There are several teams over the years that have made cards but no universal design to cover all of FIRST.

9

Well then. . . . How about a FIRST version of Fantasy Football. This would have to occur during competition season and use OPR ratings, etc as matches progress.

May need to partition regular regionals from districts.

Just a thought . . . .

10

You mean like Fantasy FIRST?

11

Wow. Now that’s what I call fast service!