Category Archives: Design Challenge

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. Your design challenge is to take a published card game and adapt it to use only a traditional deck of cards. If you ever end up stuck somewhere with only a regular deck of cards to play with, you’ll be able to use that deck to play the game you invented! Example: Rummy Duel Rules Premise Rummy Duel is a fast-playing version of Rummy for just two players. It is adapted from the game Schotten-Totten, by Reiner Knizia, in […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. Here’s another card-game design challenge and a case study for you: Design a game that can be played with a regular deck of cards. You don’t need to use all the cards in the deck. You can use each suit as a separate type of card, if you want to limit yourself to four types of cards. For instance, you could use the numbers to differentiate levels, so if hearts represent health, you can have 1 (Ace) through […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. If you’ve never designed a card game before, it can be easier to start by adding house rules to an existing game. Here are the top 10 card games that Americans played in 2016 (excluding gambling and adult games): Uno Rummy Spades Solitaire Go Fish Euchre Hearts Pitch Cribbage Phase 10 Take a card game you like and make it better. It can be a game played with a standard deck of cards, or a game played with […]