“We do talk about that”, says Inflexion’s Aaryn Flynn
Among the things I like bestest about Inflexion’s alt-Victorian fantasysurvival gameNightingaleis its Realm cards mechanic, whereby you generate and modify worlds by playing Major and Minor cards. Major cards are used at portals to conjure up a particular biome or world type and set the difficulty, including an approximate choice of resident NPC factions, local fauna and resources. Minor cards are played within worlds to mess with their workings. You can lower the gravity for optimal umbrella gliding conditions, alter the weather or summon a Blood Moon (sorry, Zelda) that reduces your max health.
It’s a nifty concept, and my first thoughton dabbling with the cardswas that I’d love them to form the basis for a full-blown collectiblecard game, where players vie for possession of rarer cards that open the way to especially legendary Realms that house more eldritch Fae wildlife and perhaps, the most intriguing quests. I put the idea to Inflexion’s CEO Aaryn Flynn during an interview last week, followingour chaotic group hands-on, and much to my delight, he seemed enthused.
“I love that idea,” Flynn said. “Yeah, we do talk about that. You know, cards where there’s only one or 10 cards that have to be passed around, and they’re completely unique. Yeah, I think the card system can be extended nearly infinitely, and I think we’ve just scratched the surface of it. We’re fortunate that a lot of the time we’ve spent in the underlying systems do enable things like that. Yeah, I think that’s a super cool idea.”
This isn’t confirmation that Inflexion will one day turn the Realms card system into its own Fae spin on Magic: The Gathering - more immediate priorities include improving the game’s UI, which is probablythe thing we like least about Nightingaleat the time of writing. But it doesn’t sound like an absolute pipedream project, either.
“You can imagine, you know, if we ever introduced PvP, you could say like, it’s the ‘war of the cards’,” Flynn went on. “Everybody’s fighting over this stuff, and who’s going to take the card and what’s in that amazing realm you get to go to, which Fae god do you get to meet, and whose favour could you earn by having that card? It really starts to become a story engine that we love, and we just want to keep working on.”
