Category Archives: Crossfire

When Pandemic came out in 2008, a lot of game companies were looking for cooperative games. I have never been a huge fan of co-op games, since I often feel that they are best played by having one player tell everyone else what to do. So imagine my surprise when Greg Marques showed me a mockup for a deck-building game with a co-op play model. I was even more surprised that it actually worked. The added fact that the team was a pretty strong offering of Seattle’s design talent was enough to convince me to join them.

The design team had some obvious roles. Rob Heinsoo is the type of designer that I often call a “spigot,” where if you ask him for a couple of cards, he will give you ten. Many of the team members, including Jim Lin, Jay Schneider, and Rob Watkins, worked in the past at Wizards, where it was very common for the development group to add in some elements during the testing process, so there were constantly new ideas flowing in. My particular role on this team was as more of a filter. I feel it is important to keep games as simple as possible, so when new material was added to the game, I would weigh it and determine whether or not the complexity and fun it added was worth the extra rules baggage. While I want as much flavor in the game as possible, I also want players to be able to jump into the game quickly and not feel like they are digesting a huge rule set to play. With the structure we had, the development went fairly smoothly with very few major arguments.

Shadowrun is such a deep and well-developed property that you could essentially spend weeks mapping all the different elements to a game. Anytime you can have a full role-playing game built around a property, you have so much material for flavor that you are essentially trimming down from the start. This is a challenge for a game like Shadowrun: Crossfire. You want to get as much of the feel of Shadowrun in the game as you can without making the game so complicated that following the rules is a challenge. The final game is what I often call a “toolbox” game. This type of game has a lot of modular rules and can be modified in a number of ways to make the play experience different. While the base game has a high replay value, between playing different roles, getting different events, and seeing different threat cards and market cards, when you add in the various modifications that can be made to the game with scenarios and variants, the replay value of the game is really amazing.

While the game is co-op, each player must evaluate how to build out their deck and what their focus will be during a particular game. This is often a combination of the players’ play style and what cards are available in a particular game. The game solves the commander issue by having a large amount of data to digest and by constantly changing gameplay with events that alter the play strategy. While it might be possible for one player to attempt to coordinate everything, in actual gameplay you need all of the players thinking about what they can do to successfully win the game. Often there are several possible strategies and the group must decide which one is more likely to succeed, and the flip of a card can bring the best laid plans crashing down and force the group down a new path.

We trimmed out a few elements to keep the base game fairly simple, but don’t be surprised if you see some of these ideas pop up later, because who makes just a base game these days.

Mike Elliott

The Year of Shadowrun is in full swing, chummers! With even the most scant of information being given about production, Shadowrunners noobie and veteran alike are excited to see their favorite setting experience a new Awakening (or get a full-body Alphaware augmentation, if you prefer a cyber-metaphor). Shadowrun Online and Shadowrun Returns are in full production mode, and we’ve got some sweet tabletop action going with a brand new Edition to the role-playing game proper, as well as several other nova-hot tabletop games.

Starting off this very auspicious year is the Adventure deck-building game Shadowrun: Crossfire from Fire Opal Media. Crossfire is in great hands, featuring some very strong talent in card game design: Gregory Marques, Mike Elliott, Rob Watkins, Rob Heinsoo, Jay Schneider and James “Jim” Lin.

There’s plenty on the ol’ screamsheet of the game to get your inner runner excited:

Shadowrun: Crossfire is a cooperative deck-building card game for two tofour players set in the gritty, cyberpunk fantasy world of Shadowrun. Playa shadowrunner team and take on tough jobs such as protecting a clientwho’s marked for death, shooting your way out of downtown when a rungoes sour, or facing down a dragon. In each game you’ll improve your deckwith a mix of strategies while earning Karma to give your character cyberupgrades, physical augmentations, magical initiations, weapons trainingand Edge. Shadowrun: Crossfire includes an obstacle deck, black market deck,race and role cards, scenario cards, augmentation stickers, and personalmissions that test a team’s allegiances.

Great! A Crossfire game that doesn’t involve fragile plastic guns or easily lost metal pellets! As awesome as it sounds, it still leaves you wanting a bit more, doesn’t it? Natch, chummer! The good Doctor Belmont has your fix. I was able to conjure up an interview with designer Gregory Marques!

Read Full Article.

Designing Shadowrun: Crossfire has been a happy blend of translation and innovation.

Translation matters because Shadowrun goes beyond being a beloved roleplaying game. Shadowrun is one of the touchstones. Even gamers who have never played Shadowrun know that the game takes cyberpunk, magic, Native American shamans, elves, and orks, and purees them into its own brand of Kurosawa-touched street noir.

Shadowrun struck a chord when it was published in the 80s and it’s still finding new chords for new audiences. I’ve met Native American parents proud that their kids were playing a game in which Native Americans take the country back. I’ve met gamers who shudder when they talk about what happened to Chicago.

From a game design perspective, we had to translate the things that give Shadowrun its identity into the framework of a new type of experience. Catalyst helped by providing a list of ten essentials for the Shadowrun universe, a list I think you’ll see in SR5. But even before he had that list, Crossfire lead designer Greg Marques had established a core gameplay experience that takes the familiar figures of a shadowrunning team and forces them to cooperate turn-by-turn to take down threats that no single runner could deal with on their own (at least not until you play the solo missions!).

As a game designer, I believe there is a special line where translation and innovation blur. To truly translate an originally innovative game into a new genre, you should come up with ideas that strike the audience as new, and that get people excited the same way they felt about the original game’s innovations. It wouldn’t do justice to Shadowrun to produce a deck-building game that struck dedicated deck-builder players as the same-old/same-old.

Of course, it’s a bit strange to talk about the deck-builder genre originally created by Donald X Vaccarino with the brilliant Dominion as if it could already have a same-old/same-old. But the new mechanics created by Crossfire co-designers Greg Marques and Mike Elliot point out that there were some assumptions that other deck-builder games have been making and that those assumptions can be elegantly refreshed. Dedicated deck-builder players are going to uncover something new playing Crossfire.

And when they do, they’re going to be doing it as the members of a team of shadowrunners, embracing the roles that long-time Shadowrun players know from hours around the tabletop: Street Samurai, Decker, Face, Mage. When Crossfire players start looking for more on the world behind their game, and Shadowrun 5 players note that the Crossfire Level must have increased because there sure-are-a-lot-of-people shooting-at-them-all-of-a-sudden, then everyone ends up with new people to play with.

Yours in a bright Post Mayan-Apocalypse,

Rob Heinsoo
Lead Designer, Fire Opal Media

Danger lurks behind every card in the Shadowrun: Crossfire adventure deck-building game. You and up to three friends can take on the darkest allies and most powerful corporations of the 2070s as you make a run through the shadows. You’ll improve your character as you play by buying Hacking, Spell, Weapon, and Skill cards from the Black Market to add to your deck. Each turn you’ll use some of these cards to overcome a variety of obstacles to your mission and threats to your lives. You will also have to contend with the dreaded Crossfire deck. Every round a new Crossfire event will throw you a curveball, you know, just to keep things interesting. You might have a Reversal of Fortune, encounter an Astral Surge, juggle a Grenade! or have to deal with the enemy’s Hardened Defenses. Each time you play you can choose from one of three missions contained in the box, each more difficult than the last. You can cut your teeth on Caught in the Crossfire, gain experience running an Extraction, and finally you might have to Deal with a Dragon. But don’t worry, it’ll be easy . . . Trust me!

It won’t be easy. We designed Shadowrun: Crossfire as a cooperative game, to create a quick and fun way to experience the Shadowrun universe. Just like the Shadowrun RPG, our game world is deadly and difficult. You shouldn’t expect to win more than half the time when you get together with your friends to play. Since runs go bad so often, we added an Abort mechanic. You’ll have a chance to at least get out alive once you’ve failed your mission. Why would that matter? Well, we’ve also made Shadowrun: Crossfire into an evolving game. Your character will gain a little Karma even on an aborted run, and much more if you complete the run successfully. What can you do with that Karma? We’ll explain that soon enough. Keep an eye out for more updates from the Shadowrun: Crossfire team

—Gregory Marques, Lead Designer