Innovating Junk Cards in Signs of the Sojourner
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Signs of the Sojourner was the first deckbuilding game that I ever played, and everything about it was incredibly novel. Having revisited with more familiarity with the genre, I’ve realised just how interesting some of its mechanics are.
Signs of the Sojourner uses card-matching to abstractly symbolise having a conversation. You and your conversational partner take turns playing cards, and have successful interactions when the symbols on the edge of your cards pair up.
‘Fatigue’ cards have no matching symbols, and will force a mismatch, both on your turn and the next. You pick them up over particularly long journeys, and while you can plan around them (incorporating rest stops and dog-petting downtime into your route) you’re likely to accumulate at least a few.
The cards in your hand are an abstract representation of the responses you can give to a conversation at any one moment. There’s only so many options you can think of at once - which is why witty comebacks come to haunt us before we sleep. Having those options limited by fatigue is a representation of simply not having the mental energy to think things through. Being forced to play a card that is only ‘half’ a match feels akin to clumsily segueing to a new point, or saying “I agree” and stopping there. Having the option to actually play the fatigue card, if your hand is entirely full, is simply failing to find an appropriate response at all. Of course you get two mismatches in a row - the conversation has to find its flow again from scratch.
I know now that junk cards are a part of the deckbuilder’s toolkit, used to limit the number of useful cards in your hand, and diluting the deck that you draw from. Fatigue cards stood out to me when I thought they were something new, but Signs of the Sojourner didn’t need to reinvent the wheel to do something novel. Instead, it integrates the mechanical tools of the genre into it’s narrative theming, and that’s all the more impressive.
Oh, Also
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Ruth Cassidy is a writer and self-described velcro cyborg who, when not writing about video games, is probably being emotional about musicals, mountains, or cats. Has had some bylines, in some places.
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