2017 Two-Player Print and Play Game Design Contest

Recently, I’ve been working on board/tabletop games much more than video games. I do have a couple of ideas that I’ve been fumbling around a bit with (featuring that PhaserJS boilerplate + simple UI I posted about a while ago), but I’ve definitely been much more focused on the physical world of games than the digital now that I code full time.

Anyway, I’ve posted about my Trade Winds board game (which I’ll need to post about again soon because a lot is changing about the game, including the whole theme!), but I also started working on a much lighter game that I’m calling Card Clash. Soon after I started putting it together, I discovered the Two-Player Print and Play Game Design Contest on BoardGameGeek and realized that it would be a perfect fit for the contest! So I’ve entered that contest and am excited to see what people think about my simple game.

Card Clash is a quick game that sees 2 players attacking and counterattacking with cards whose type preference beats the previously played card. If your opponent can’t counter your attack with any of the 4 cards in their hand, you win the round! But each successive round adds a new set of stronger cards into both players’ decks, so you’ll want to try to get the first attack in to knock out your opponent before they get a chance to play a devastating attack! The first to win 2 rounds wins the game.

I’ll post about my progress and a picture below the cut:

I need to playtest it a couple more times, but the rules are solid. The first time I playtested it, the hand of cards available to players was too big, making it nearly impossible to not be able to counter your opponent’s attacks. That meant that you’d have to be lucky to end the round rather than to last very long in the round the way I wanted. So I cut the card hand down to just 4 cards instead of 5. Haven’t tested it, but I imagine it will help the pace significantly. I want Card Clash to be something you can play either 5 times in quick succession to settle an argument or for 10 minutes powered by luck and perfect card draws for an exciting rally.

I’m currently designing the cards, but since they are all SVGs with custom fonts, I can’t post a screenshot of them while I’m away from my main computer. But here’s what my prototype looks like:

The SVGs have the same format, but they look much nicer. The Rigid style (top) has full black images while the Fluid style (bottom) has white with outlines and is mirrored so the Round icon and Power icon are on the same side and overlap each other when played. I want to add some kind of grungy “FIGHT” heavy paintbrush effect to the cards to make them look cool, but I’ll need to learn how to do that in GiMP first. Most of the actual images (punch, kick, etc.) are from this amazing website, and I’m using Inkscape to format and put together the cards.

Other than that, there’s not much else to say. It’s a very simple game (all the details are in the link above at BoardGameGeek), and I’m expecting to be done with it pretty soon. I think it’s a fun idea and a fun game to play (especially if you make your own sound effects when you play your cards), so I hope you’ll check it out once I’ve got all the print & play components online! (I’ll post again when that happens.) And if you’re on BoardGameGeek at all, I’d appreciate a playtest and some feedback if you’re able! I don’t expect to win anything, but it would be awesome if I could manage to win some attention and have people enjoy a game I made. :)