“How does the game compare and contrast with your team’s concept?”
High Stakes: https://krystman.itch.io/high-stakes
During this week, I was working on my first team project called High Rollers, which centers on gambling, risk, and luck with a mild board game structure similar to dungeon-crawler. Therefore, for this critical play, I chose to play High Stakes as a comparative game on a browser. High Stakes is a short card game created by Krystian Majewski. It was built in PICO-8 and it can be played by anyone on HTML5. This game’s targeted audiences are people who enjoy quick casual games, gambling mechanics, and pixelated art aesthetics.
The core mechanics of High Stakes are actually really simple, making it fun. Each round consists of 9 face-down cards. Eight of them are numbered from 2 to 9, inclusive. The last card is a “vampire” card, representing 10. With each card flipped successfully, the stakes increase since flipping a vampire card would lead to an immediate loss. The game also contains 3 Hint Tokens: completing rows or columns unlocks them, providing you with opportunities to gain information about hidden cards. One token reveals that a face-down card is a certain number or higher. Another tells you if adjacent cards have higher or lower values than the chosen face-up card. The last highlights a 2×2 area where the vampire must be. Finally, if the player thinks they know where the vampire card is, they can use the stake to stab it. A correct stake leads to an immediate win while an immediate loss otherwise—confidence equates to gambling!
Looking at the MDA framework, High Stakes’ mechanics are flipping cards, passing matches, earning Hint Tokens, and staking the vampire. These mechanics come together to create tension, counting cards, and greed. In my first few rounds, I played very slowly because I was still learning the game as I played. After about 5 rounds (5 rounds per match), the game became more fun because the mechanics became familiar, and I no longer had to recall what each hint token did. I started calculating faster what card numbers were left and if I should flip, use hint tokens, or stake.
The game also uses formal elements well. The objective is to survive rounds and gain blood. The main conflict is between greed and safety. I really appreciated that each card only appears once, which helped me to gamble better since I didn’t have to worry the same number would appear again (like an elimination process for strategy.) However, some final moments still come down to just luck with a 50-50 chance to win or lose. When only two face-down cards remained and they were 9 and vampire, I felt the most hesitation and tension in those moments.
Compared to High Stakes, our High Rollers also included social interaction mixed into luck-based mechanics, where strategies can also lead to dueling other players. However, our earlier playtests revealed that our “gambling gates” tiles were a bit boring since they were too difficult and not rewarding enough, so our players just ended up farming for tokens rather than taking risks (the main mechanic of our game.) High Stakes ensures this problem doesn’t occur since every move is a risk, providing immediate results.
Therefore, the main lesson I would take from High Stakes would be clarity. A gambling mechanic in a game works best when the player immediately understands what is gained or lost, tempting them to continue. High Rollers could differentiate itself better by turning gambling into a more social and spatial experience through simple movements, duels, sabotages, and escapes. The game would capture the thrill of risk better if the process of collecting tokens to unlock the gates or to duel had a more immediate gain or loss mechanism as well, like flipping the cards in High Stakes.
——
[Attached are images of when I had only 2 cards left to flip with the most tension and when I staked successfully with the most happiness, my two favorite moments: ]
