Indie developers from titles such as Minit, Broforce, Disc Room, Heavy Bullets, and more banded together to make a tabletop card game about cars called Dustbiters. Dustbiters is a card game for two players who challenge each other to a car race on the outskirts of society in a post-apocalyptic world, but as a sandstorm approaches it destroys the car at the end of the convoy each turn. Players can use three actions per turn, out of four different actions available. Some of them can be tricks that may shift the whole board around with strategic thinking, as there are lots of different options coming from all the cards in the deck.
Because Dustbiters is not a game with extra elements like dice or tiles, its cards are everything. This means that each car - or other vehicles, like a bike or horse - has to be quite special for it to stand out and feel both unique and on-par with the others in terms of power. This is especially true because of the small-scale deck, which in Dustbiters features just 21 cards, making it a quite fast game with matches lasting an average of fifteen minutes. Game Rant talked with Dustbiters' creators Terri Vellmann, Jan Willem Nijman, and Robbie Fraser about the game's characteristics and Kickstarter campaign.
How Dustbiters Deals With a Small Deck of Cards
Dustbiters was conceived by Nijman and Fraser while they were on a road trip, and only had pen and paper to make something to play with in the evenings. When they started, Nijman and Fraser had lots of different ideas for all sorts of cards to include, but when the playtesting phase began they started to trim down the total by removing options that didn't feel fun - even those they cared about the most. This process has been long, considering Dustbiters was created around six years ago. Now that the Kickstarter campaign is heading toward its end, the team is still happy about the size of the deck and the duration of the game, according to Nijman.
Any card that wasn't fun we threw away. If you keep doing that for a long enough time, in the end, you're only left with something that works. Something that's fun and interesting. We had to make a lot of hard decisions, where a bunch of cars that we really loved were too powerful or they broke the game.
Having a finite amount of cards and a handful of methods to get more means there is a specific timeframe within which players can expect the match to end, as at some point cards will run out. The game builds to a climax, where players will only have a few cars in play, and that too is bound to change because of the never-ending sandstorm that destroys them every turn. There are cars like the Necromancer, however, that can take cards from the scrapyard (the discard pile) and recycle them into play, but once the deck is over there is no reshuffling. Plans for the game will continue beyond its Kickstarter, Vellmann said.
We have a thing in our Kickstarter where people can get a custom card, a unique one just for them - a single card that's going to get printed just like the other cards. That's something we're going to do right after the campaign, but it's just going to be a few cards for a few people. Then, just really the waiting for our final decks.
Still, the team is happy about the game's deck size, and none of the creators wants to make expansions because it would be hard and defeat the purpose of those long playtesting sessions. Having 21 cards total might seem like a small deck for shorter sessions compared to other board games, but because players are not guaranteed to be able to use their favorite cards in each game, and due to all the different permutations, every match ends up unlike the others.
Dustbiters is set to release in November 2021 for Kickstarter backers.
Post-Apocalyptic Game Pioner Has Serious STALKER Vibes
Source: Kickstarter