Category Archives: Card Games

My 14-year old son asked me to teach him to play Solitaire last weekend. This made me question my life choices: how had we never taught him Solitaire?! I can remember playing Simultaneous Solitaire all the time with my maternal grandmother and brother and sister before I was even ten. So we got out three decks and each played traditional Solitaire, my wife and I guiding him along. I even queued up a soundtrack (“Solitaire” by Suzanne Vega).  I explained to my son that when Windows 3.0 came out it was the […]

My nickels and dimes, for the year, were: Boardgame Plays Unpublished Prototype 45 Innovation 25 Secret Hitler 19 One Night Ultimate Werewolf 15 Battle Line 13 Civscape 13 Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn 12 Avignon: A Clash of Popes 11 The Golden Ages 10 Sushi Go Party! 9 Homeworlds 8 Brew Crafters: The Travel Card Game 5 Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger 5 Covalence: A Molecule Building Game 5 Last year, like most years, I played unpublished prototypes (my own and my friends’) more than any single […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. In many game companies, developers are different than designers. They will take a game designer’s working game and adapt it for publication. These changes might be intended to: Improve gameplay To better fit the game company’s customers To meet manufacturing constraints or goals. Developing Gameplay The developer will first continue to refine the game. Dale Yu – the game developer for Dominion, Suburbia, and Castles of Mad King Ludwig – relates how he played Suburbia solitaire hundreds of […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. The secret of prototyping is to do the least amount of work you can to test the next iteration of your card game. If it’s for the first play, simply write on a collection of index cards. Just worry about the broad strokes of the game play, not all the little details. Don’t worry about naming specific cards or accurately simulating the theme. Or getting all the cards you plan to have. Just get a game that is […]

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. The purpose of playtesting is to collect real-world experiences with your game that you can use to help you modify your game so that it better achieves your goals. Early on, you might playtest the game by yourself (solo playtesting or self-testing) to make certain that its basic framework works or to test individual parts of the game. Your friends and family members will want to play a more workable version of the game, though it is best […]

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. Card games typically have different areas in front of the players. These areas have a variety of names, depending on their purpose: Arena – A common area to which players play cards face up to a contest, such as a “battle” or “war” in the game of War. Cascade – A set of face-up cards built on one another, with the value and suit of each card in the cascade visible. (For instance, Solitaire builds 7 cascades, from […]

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 […]

For the 2018 Global Game Jam, I designed a print-and-play 27-card microgame: You are dueling prestidigitators, juggling magical orbs to attack one another. The first to destroy their opponent’s Phylactery wins. You can download the PDF here. I welcome your feedback and questions. Our brainstorming group somehow took the theme of “transmission” and went from sonar (shown in the theme video) to the Battle of the Atlantic (U-boat warfare) to Napoleonic warfare to millipedes with combat boots to juggling wizards. (The theme tie-in involves the transmission of energy from orbs […]