Bring Your Own Cards Game

I made a new card game for you to play! This is ALL-CARDS, a competitive storytelling deckbuilder for two players where you can use any cards you want. There are no official cards, no booster packs, no starter sets. ALL-CARDS is compatible with all trading cards, sports cards, tarot cards, even postcards, as long as the cards are all the same size and can form a deck. In ALL-CARDS, you build a deck of cards, then take turns placing those cards to make a story over the course of six rounds of scenes. You develop the story collaboratively, but play your cards strategically, because the player with the most Triumph points at the end of the game determines how the story ends!

💾 The ALL-CARDS beta is free to download! (PDF Format)

📝 If you’d like to leave me player feedback (or reader feedback, if you don’t have a chance to play), I’d love to hear from you!

📕 If you’re at Gen Con next week, reply to this email and I’ll hook you up with a print copy. I made a short run of 50 to give away at the show. And I sprang for a matte cover, because I’m (Steve Martin voice:) a mildly classy guy!

I was going to put the beta on Itch, but after they just indiscriminately delisted NSFW and LGBTQ+ content due to pressure from right wing activists and their credit card processor, now I’m not so sure. Itch is an important pillar of the indie game ecosystem. They’ve been good stewards in the past, but maybe this is their heel turn, especially given that they’re withholding funds owed to the creators they delisted.

ALL-CARDS was born from a problem I have, which is my love of trading cards. I love buying packs of retro non-sports trading cards, from ALF to U.S. of ALF to non-ALF cards. It started when I was a kid with baseball and basketball cards, then in middle school it became Magic the Gathering and Overpower. By late high school, I grew out of trading cards, and they became room clutter. My mom gave away most of my collection, but I did hold onto a box of cards from those days, and not just for sentimental value. More on this in a moment.

Trading cards is an awkward hobby. You buy the packs, open them, get a momentary jolt of serotonin from seeing what’s inside, and then… what do you do with them? You can put them in a box or a binder with plastic sleeves, which I have. But it’s rare I ever open that binder and say to myself, “Wow, my worthless Beverly Crusher trading card sure is well-preserved!” Trading cards have very little utility as objects. If you collect comic books, you can read them. If you collect sneakers, you can wear them. If you collect America Online CD-ROMs, you can become a superhero and fling them at criminals like Batarangs.

Trading cards don’t really have a purpose outside of owning them. I tried to give them a purpose in my life by starting a podcast where I opened trading cards with comedians. The show lasted a year. It was fun, but it was a lot of work and I didn’t become Marc Maron for Topps-heads. However, even after the podcast ended, I would buy packs of trading cards when I saw them at indie bookstores or comic conventions. At one point, I had a stack of unopened packs near my desk. Why wasn’t I opening them? Why would I buy them if I wasn’t planning to open them? What would I do with the cards after I opened them? I didn’t know what to do.

Then I had this idea. What if my trading cards were part of a game?

Card games and board games live on my shelf forever. As my artist and game designer friend Shing Yin Khor brilliantly observed, people buy games for the option of playing them. How many gamers have titles in their vast Steam library they’ll never play? Or board games on the shelf they’ve never cracked open? I’m definitely guilty of both, but possible utility is still utility. When cards are components of a game I might play someday, then I keep them for a long time with no second thought. Case in point, the box of cards I kept from my childhood are old decks of Magic, Overpower, and a few scattered cards from Illuminati (a game about conspiracy theories from the 90s that either predicted the future, aged very poorly, or borth). Someone might come over to play Overpower someday. Someone, besides myself, might remember what Overpower was someday!

So I began developing what would eventually become ALL-CARDS, as a way to justify purchasing old trading cards to myself. But I also realized the concept was nicely anti-capitalist, too. Players could use cards they already owned, that were gathering dust in a shoebox under the bed. The game would give new life to old objects, rather than insist the player purchase new stuff as a gateway to entry. Granted, I enjoy playing TCGs, particularly how new cards can change the strategy of a game radically. But I’ve seen people get addicted to the collecting and buy more packs than they can afford or store in their apartment, so offering an alternative felt like it could be a lifeline to some players.

When a friend asked me how ALL-CARDS would make money without custom cards, I laughed. Not derisively. More like, “Oh yeah, money, lol.” ALL-CARDS was never going to make me rich or well-known. That was my ambition for the games I spent years pitching to publishers. This was a different sort of project. Though I’m entertaining the idea of doing a micro crowdfunding campaign for Zine Quest next year to fund a healthy print run and nice artwork, but that’s the extent of my ambition for ALL-CARDS. I’m also considering a Creative Commons / OGL license, so people can create and publish their own custom versions of ALL-CARDS.

The game evolved considerably through playtesting. In my first pass, the game was called Pack Attack. I tried to turn all trading cards into a traditional strategy combat TCG, like Magic or Pokemon, where cards have unique effects when played. I played around with a card’s color and/or the first letter on the card being tied to an ability on a chart. The card’s effects would also change depending on where they were placed on the table. So, I could play Rizzo the Rat, which would have the ability “Revive” to revive a fallen hero, and if Rizzo was in a central position, the card had +3 energy, meaning it could repeat its ability three times in a turn. As you can imagine, this design got confusing fast! In practice, play required looking at a chart every single turn to remember what the cards actually did.

Amanda made a great point about a third of the way through our playtest of Pack Attack. She noted that in a deck where you had Batman villains, Muppets, and Simpsons characters all together, maybe I was driving past the fireworks factory with this design. She wanted to know the story of why these disparate characters were all together. In a normal TCG, this wouldn’t be a question. All the Pokemon are from Pokemon. Problem solved. But my game had a narrative dissonance that I immediately recognized was its greatest strength.

My next pass was called Legends of the Pack. Instead of a combat strategy game, Legends of the Pack would be a two player storytelling strategy game. Players would start by creating a deck of any cards. Those cards would be sorted into one of five main categories: Characters, Settings, MacGuffins, Actions, and Twists. The five card types each had their own distinct effect, which was a lot easier to remember for playtesters than 26 abilities on a chart. Every player’s deck would have characters – from Spawn to Darryl Strawberry – one of whom would be the Main Character of their story. The two players declare opposing story goals, making one character the protagonist and the other an antagonist. Every turn, players got to play cards to either help their main character or provide obstacles for their opponent’s main character, to create a story with conflict in every scene. The winner controlled the ending!

This new game went over great with playtesters. I brought it to the IndieCade Symposium and players had so much fun creating stories together at the table, while at the same time enjoying the competitive thrill of trying to win the story. The aspect of the game I struggled with the most after that was the name. Legends of the Pack felt too much like a fantasy game about wolves. This is a game that can incorporate any character in any genre, so I needed a name to reflect how expansive the concept was. I think the name came to me when I was remembering those old basketball cards I had, particularly a series I owned from a 90s all-star game. All-Stars. ALL-CARDS. All cards are now playing cards. It must’ve been my sixteenth name, but it was the one that stuck.

In order to playtest the game, I finally opened the stacks of wrapped pro wrestling and Wacky Packages cards on my desk. If nothing else, that alone makes me feel like ALL-CARDS is a success.

🎲 Your Turn: Do you agree with my super hot take that trading cards is a weird hobby? What are your hobbies? Do you care whether your hobbies have any utility? I love hearing from you! Reply directly to this email or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below.

✈️ I’ll be at Gen Con next week, so I’m taking a week off from the newsletter. See you in your inbox in two weeks!