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Once upon a time during a quarantine time long ago, I was remembering the feeling of dance. You see, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantining, I had chosen to try learning swing dancing! You know, that newfangled dance that’s too hip for tradition and the sanctity of ballroom dance?

Joking aside, I was enjoying swing dance. It’s a joyous dance, with excellent music (swing music, of course.)

There’s tension and release in the swing out, a dance move in the Lindy Hop, that is super gratifying to feel–you lead your partner in a turn, using its momentum and guiding them from a closed position to an open one. And when you open up together, you’re still connected by the tips of your fingers. Like a spring, you can lead your follow as they groove out at the tips of an orbit, then ask them to come back to compress and contain that energy…until you’re ready to swing out again.

You couldn’t really get another feeling like it. When you have a proper connection in a partner dance, you can talk and communicate without saying anything. Dance partners who can speak the same language of dance effectively can improvise a dance together through a physical or visual, near-psychic connection.

I missed the feeling of someone reading my mind and knowing what I’m thinking just as I began doing it. And being stuck in quarantine, it got me thinking–was there a way that you could express that psychic-feeling in a game?

Sort of.

The Mind – A Psychic-Feeling Game

The closest thing to psychic communication that I knew of in a game was and still is The Mind. An example of play can be found in countless places on YouTube. Here is ProZD and his friends trying their best to solve it.

In The Mind, you and up to 3 other players are dealt cards from a deck numbered from 1-100. The goal of the game, without saying or explicitly signing out anything, is to pile cards in sequential order, 1 to 100, from your hands to the pile.

It is the closest feeling to a psychic connection that I’ve ever had in a game, and I took that as inspiration for what could be used for a game about dancing, but which I ultimately did not follow through with because…well, I don’t know enough about dance to honor that in a game! However, I thought that the bones of this would-be game could be used for something else.

Let’s talk about those bones. And no, there’s no dice here.

The Bones of a Game: Rock Paper Scissors

What is a game? In one definition of a game, the simplest premises and systems are not a game until you set the second part of an “if statement”. In this case, an “if statement” is in reference to a common function found in programming languages. An if statement gives purpose to whatever arbitrary rules or parameters you’re looking for. Until you set proper conditional if statements for the rules of rock paper scissors, you’re just gesturing at one another with your hands.

In any game, you have to establish how you can interact with the system. What are your controls? In a video game, it might be a standard controller for the game system. It might be a keyboard and mouse. For analog games like board games and tabletop RPGs…well, it can really be whatever you want. It doesn’t just have to be dice. Let’s take a look at rock paper scissors.

In rock paper scissors, you have to define how someone can interact with the game. You can interact with the game of rock paper scissors by making hand gestures that depict the objects: a closed fist, an open palm, and two fingers extended and splayed apart.

Two players use these interactions against one another at the same time. If they play the same hand, nothing happens. But, if you play a different move, one person may enter a win state, as determined by a few if statements that we can define:

If rock is played against scissors, the rock player wins.

If scissors is played against paper, the scissors player wins.

If paper is played against rock, the paper player wins.

And for rock paper scissors, that’s the entire game. There are variations that add to this base system. (See Ish or Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock for some ideas of how rock paper scissors can change).

How about Fight Card’s bones? There are rock paper scissors like interactions, but there are another set of bones that help support the game. Those bones are called Dancing With Cards.

The Bones of a Game: Dancing With Cards

So, how do you interact with Fight Card? By using a standard deck of 52 playing cards! The core of Fight Card is centered around its combat system, which has players drawing from a deck of cards to form a hand. From the hand, the players who are fighting can interact with the combat system by playing a single card from their hand.

When you play a card from your hand, there’s a few questions about how you can play it. For Fight Card, the most important question is “when do you play a card from your hand?” The answer is: “at the same time as your opponent.”

That psychic feeling of being connected to your dance partner occurs in a very swift call and response that nearly feels psychic. There’s a lot of things that contribute to this in dance: reacting to physical or visual communication, anticipating possible moves according to musical phrasing, recalling the typical moves according to your style of dance, and knowing the artistry of your dance partner. For Fight Card, we start to build the foundation of that psychic feeling by having fighters play their cards simultaneously.

To continue to build on that feeling, we have to define an if statement.

If you play the same move as your opponent, you gain benefits.

The idea is to encourage that feeling of togetherness, despite fighting one another. It is a great feeling to read your opponent’s mind and to best them, like in rock paper scissors, but there is a different feeling when you are moving together with a partner and both sharing the same idea at the same time. The closest feeling to that is something psychic!

However, like dance, it can be difficult to predict your opponent’s moves if there isn’t some form of pattern to them. You can’t be in step with your dance partner if you don’t have anything to base your moves off of. To reward being predictable, and thus facilitate being in sync with your opponent, there are a few ways that Fight Card encourages players to be predictable.

Fight Card’s combo system works off of building a sequence of moves. Each fighting style has a few combo building blocks to work with. The combo building blocks is information that is available to both players when they fight. In addition to the combo system, there are a good number of considerations to encourage just enough predictability that people can try to read one another.

Each unique fighting style is incentivized to prefer one move from 3 available moves through systems that reward the use of that move.

Being in sync with your opponent rewards you uniquely for syncing at specific times in a combo, or against specific moves.

Engaging with the combo system enables you to do incredible damage, and also generate the valuable resource to fuel your super moves.

With the systems to enable and encourage predictability from the start of a match, players have the means and information to more easily predict their opponent. And when predictions can be easily made, you can sync up! We’re reading minds!

A System in Summary

And thus, we have one of the bones of Fight Card–Dancing With Cards! Dancing With Cards uses playing cards to encourage players to sync up with one another. It does this by playing cards at the same time, and providing some sort of system to encourage predictability. If two players have different patterns, or building blocks of patterns they want to build, they can move in expected ways!

The question that the Dancing With Cards system asks is: what happens when you sync up with someone else? In a dance, you read one another’s mind to continue to tell the story of a song in a give and take of expression. In a fight, you read one another’s mind to exploit openings, and find how alike you really are.

Are there other stories and games that exist with the Dancing With Cards system? Maybe! I would love to see people create with it, and hopefully it jostles your brains in a fun way.

In the mean time, you can check out my game Fight Card TTRPG! It is currently the only game that Dances With Cards, and hopefully the first of many.