Trickster: Fantasy - Playtest Results

It was a fast, productive playtest period for Trickster: Fantasy the past few weeks. It was nice to get back into that rapidly iterative process again for a new game. What began as a paper-thin activity is now becoming a very easy-to-learn but surprisingly deep strategy card game that works for groups as big as seven players.

Biggest Challenge: Needing More Choices
As usual, I began playtesting this concept ASAP. That meant the bare minimum of a functioning system that I knew wouldn't completely break down. Essentially, I had a core loop and not much else. At that point, it was only the second-player who really made a critical push-your-luck decision. Everyone else was sort of on autopilot. To be a truly interesting game, I needed each player to make a decision on their turn.

Solution: Hero Powers
I always planned for the "Trickster" franchise to be a series of games with uniquely themed artwork, which naturally implied different characters in each deck. That got me thinking that when each of these characters comes into play, they should really do something that feels unique to them. It should feel different when you play a bard than a knight. So, powers.

I whipped up a quick set of effects that I thought would be appropriately thematic but also strategically interesting. Surprisingly, these required very few changes from the initial release. Only the Sorcerer's ability really needed some tweaks to prevent odd game-states.

So what's in store for the future of Trickster? I'm talking to a few friends about possibly licensing their IP for new themed decks, but for now I'm going to try to prove the franchise's potential with a series of genre decks. After that? Honestly, my pie-in-the-sky dream would be to license a bunch of different cool geek properties and release decks inspired by those characters.

Licensing IPs is expensive though, so I need to pace those ambitions. Gotta prove the game is a seller first! But who knows...

There's a lot of places this game can go!

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Heir to Europa Rules Preview

It's almost here! After months of playtests, editing, more playtests, and more editing, Heir to Europa by +Nick Ferris will finally be coming to DriveThruCards very soon. But first, we need your eyes to do one last typo-hunt and grammar check on the rules document. All those months of editing can really give a team tunnel-vision, so we need a fresh crowd of brains to take one more look and spot anything we missed.


Download the rules PDF here.

Heir to Europa is a sci-fantasy card game about a world undergoing a succession crisis. The various factions of Europa engage each other in psychic contests to literally win the minds of the people. Players take on the role of shadowy conspirators trying to predict who will eventually win the throne, thereby becoming the power behind that throne.

The gameplay is based on classic trick-taking card games, heightened with very clever twists that open up subtle new strategies and surprising tactics. Certain cards have special abilities, but those abilities will only be usable as long as the faction remains loyal. Each card played from a faction reduces its loyalty in the subsequent contest, so you have an inherent time limit to play those powers. This nicely balances out the novelty of modern mechanics with the familiarity of traditional card play.

It's a great medium-weight game that I'm eager for you to see. Download that rules PDF and tell me what you think!

Background Sketch

Instead of a boring screenshot, here's the original sketch of one of the project's backgrounds. You will probably notice that some of the elements mentioned in the sketch (first frame) are not visible in the background (last frame), like the seat or the light bulbs hanging from wires... Well some stuff get cancelled along the way and others may appear as well. Anyway the last frame is not the final edit of the room. It still needs polishing and adding a few elements here and there.

5 Pitching Lessons from Tabletop Deathmatch (so far)

I've been watching season two of Tabletop Deathmatch with avid interest. The production values, presentation, and overall organization is light-years past season one. (And season one was pretty good!) To recap: Tabletop Deathmatch is a reality show competition held by Cards Against Humanity and its business partners to find the next great tabletop game.

The first eight episodes this season focused on introducing and teaching each game in the contest. No judging, just tutorial. This bit was fun to watch for general interest, but I was much more eager to see the subsequent evaluation by a team of top industry judges. So far only four of these judging episodes have been released, but each has offered extremely useful advice for any beginning designer.

Here are five lessons I've pulled out so far, in no particular order.


Present the game you have on the table right now. 
Not the game it could be or the game it used to be. If you've worked on a game a while, it's no doubt gone through dozens of iterations and you've considered a hundreds more future revisions. Regardless, mentioning all of those while teaching, let alone pitching, just muddies the presentation.

Know your game's weight and set accurate expectations.
 Despite easy rules, there may still be emergent analysis paralysis. I run into this problem too frequently. Because I avoid violent or horror themes in my games, I tend to use nature or cute animals, which in turn seems to imply far lighter games than I typically design. Don't pitch "a light social casual game" when you really have a quiet, contemplative strategy game.

Listen, learn, but remember you know your game better than they do. 
It's easy to get intimidated pitching to a veteran games-person, especially if they start calling out mechanics they recognize from other games. That intimidation can turn into defensiveness and perhaps even combativeness. That's no fun for anybody involved. Just remember a 2-minute pitch isn't an ideal presentation scenario for many great games, and even industry vets struggle to explain their games succinctly and accurately.

Public information slows down decisions. Decisions slow down a pitch. 
This is more of a general rule of thumb when you're trying to present a game very quickly. Everyone has their own cognitive horizon past which they won't bother analyzing. However, visible information tempts many competitive players to push against their horizon so they can make the "right" decision. Even in a demo! Try framing your pitch so you minimize the decision-time. Spend that time actually explaining the game, rather than waiting for a newcomer to make an informed choice.

"Failure" in a game should make you excited to play again. 
At no point should a "fail" state mean that someone doesn't get to actually play the game. "Lose a turn" is basically a cardinal sin in game design. Look at "success" and "failure" as forks in a road, not a traffic light. Either outcome should push the game forward.


Those are just a few little tidbits I've pulled from the show so far. What have you learned?

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Kigi will be published in Japan!

Big news! Kigi will be officially translated and published in Japan by Gamefield! In Kigi, players "paint" a tree by placing cards along branching organic paths. It's a very easy game to learn, but presents interesting spatial puzzles and lots of replay value. This game has been a huge hit with families with varying play experience. Get the English edition here!

Here's a video tutorial:


Here are some photos of the original edition.

The release date and final packaging isn't determined yet, but I'll keep you posted!

Brainstorming a Legacy-Style Trick-Taking Card Game

I've long felt that the persistence mechanics from Risk: Legacy would translate well to a card game and be a natural fit for the print-on-demand market. (Check out this old post from 2012 breaking down my early thoughts on what it takes to "legacy" an existing game.) I just couldn't figure out a good theme for the game.

Well, this morning I had a quick brainstorm over twitter with Quinn Murphy, and he really unlocked a juicy premise: The theme is a generational family drama, like Downton Abbey. The fallout from each game represents the shifting fortunes and relationships between each of the characters.

Let's assume you could add legacy mechanics to a trick-taking game. Each card has potential relationships with any other card in the deck, waiting to be filled in after several games. In time, you'd have a complex web of relationships between any two cards. For example:

Indebted to...
This card cannot win a trick if ____ is also in play.

Married to...
If ____ is also in play and either wins the trick, split it evenly between both players. (Discard any remainder.)

Secretly loves...
If ___ is also in play and you win a trick, give your winnings to that player.

Rival to...
If ___ is also in play, neither card may win the trick.

Business partners with...
If you possess this card and ___ at the end of the round, earn (insert bonus points of some kind here).

Employed by...
If you possess ____ and play this card, choose a card already played during this trick and return it to the player's hand.

Best friends with...
If ____ is in play or possessed by another player, add it to your collected cards.

That's all just a very fast brainstorm. Any relationship mechanics come to mind for you?

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The Inquisitive Meeple just posted a very long interview with me over here. We cover a LOT of territory there, including graphic design, getting started in the game design craft, and the false binary choice of print-on-demand vs. traditional publishing. Here's a snippet:

When you talk about elegant games or game design – what do you mean?

Daniel: Smarter people than me have talked about this at length, but these days I prefer the term “eloquent” over “elegant.” The past few years, “elegant” has become synonymous with “minimalist,” but that is not always the case.

Elegance is simply a ratio of the complexity at the start of the game to its complexity in the middle-to-late game. A game can have a relatively high learning curve, but if it opens up into a constellation of even more interesting choices, then it’s still elegant. A game can have a very shallow learning curve, but not open up at all, so it’s not elegant.

Meanwhile, I like “eloquence” because it implies you’re choosing a game mechanism not because you fetishize a particular design aesthetic, but because it is the right mechanism for the job.

On your blog, you talk a lot about layout. Could you share some tips on how to properly layout prototype (or final version) cards to? What should we be keeping in mind?

Daniel: This is a big question! I’m actually covering a lot of this subject in a presentation for Unpub 5, which I hope will be recorded on video. Generally, for a prototype, your goal is feedback on the game. But people are visual creatures and you’ll get just as many comments on presentation as you will the actual gameplay. The three things to keep in mind for a prototype are clarity for the player, ease of iteration, and an accurate sense of completeness.

On the first point, clarity for the player means having clear text that is easy to read at the expected distance. It also means using visual cues like icons, placeholder art, or colors to make learning and playing the game as easy as possible. Finally, it means using components that fit your gameplay well. With all these things, hopefully players will slide easily down your learning curve and give you constructive feedback on the game itself.

On the second point, I iterate my games very rapidly so I’ve learned some techniques to make that process as simple as possible. Using black and white graphics with minimal ink coverage makes a prototype much more affordable for playtesters to print or re-print. The DataMerge feature in InDesign lets me take a spreadsheet and rapidly export a fully designed deck of cards in minutes.

Third, you never want your prototype to look more finished than your game. My years in graphic design business really urge me to make a game look 100% polished, but I learned that this leads to unfair expectations. The feedback I get for a good-looking but unfinished game is less constructive because playtesters assume the process is too far-gone for fundamental changes to the game. That is not the impression you want to give if your game is going to improve.

Boy, I sure do ramble. Go read the rest!

Seeking Playtesters for Trickster Fantasy

Howdy folks! I'm happy to announce an open playtest period for Trickster: Fantasy, the first in a series of light card games, featuring new art and mechanical twists in each deck theme. You saw an early draft of this game last week, but after some rapid iteration it's ready for public playtests!

This game is suitable for big group gatherings where you want an "icebreaker" that gets everyone to the table for a few minutes. I want to make sure the core game is 100% solid before adding the "fantasy" twists, which is where you come in! Check out the link below and share your thoughts!

--> Download the PDF here

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Dexter Morning Routine is a free point and click game that I created with Adventure Game Studio. The idea is to complete Dexter's morning routine in the correct order before the music ends. There are three difficulty levels missing around with music duration, objects placements, and wait period events.

Please visit the AGS Archives page to get the game for free.