Chapter 4. Card and Board Games
Do you ponder the fact that many modern video games (and even some forms of human activities) can be represented as board or card games? Of course, the rules usually are very complex and there are a lot of game pieces and conditions; nonetheless, some similarities can be noticed. Let's take, for example, the famous game Plants vs. Zombies created by PopCap. If you try to look at the gameplay from a different angle, you can easily imagine that all plants in the game are virtual cards placed at the game table by a player. The zombies in turn are some form of cards too; they have special rules for moving and an invisible dice determines the conditions of random collisions. Some game pieces portray shots fired by plants; sunflowers generate tokens in the form of cartoonish suns. So yes, this is a board game, but very complex and highly automated, so it can work in real time. No wonder that many game developers use custom board games to prototype...
