The Joy of Cards

At last, the time has come to post about a project that has been in the works for quite a while now: the Seacat Cards. Provisionally named SEACARDS.

The idea hearkens back to the early SRDcat design meetings where we were figuring out the separation between all the different content bits (the catchall term we settled on was “objects” due to how they’re structured in Javascript), and we came to the conclusion that these objects were just virtual cards. And if the game was made of virtual cards, why not create physical cards as well?

That idea continued to take shape, until at last we have this! Already one full deck of 54 UVG Locations has been assembled and is now being refined.

And now I’m 15 cards deep into the second deck: creatures! This one’s an absolute joy to make. Creatures are so… tactile: they have so many things going on, especially in SEACAT. So many knobs to turn and mechanics to play with. And this deck is going to run the gamut when it comes to the Lukaverse: we’ve got creatures from UVG, SEACAT, ZOA, and lastly some teasers from another upcoming project that has not yet been officially announced.

Each creature, from the smallest and most pathetic:

To the largest and most terrifying:

…has something cool going on. Something weird, something wacky, something that will open up that feeling of wonder and exploration. And believe me, there are a lot of cool things you can do with cards when you have an anticanon mindset…

(On this subject: we’re planning it so that each deck of 54 contains 2 “joker” cards that we’re not gonna spoil… but let me just tell you they will really shake the game up a bit. If they end up being a bit too wild for your table, you can always just take them out!)

One of the core conceits of our design is that if the creator is having fun making the game, some of that will bleed into the experience of play. And let me tell you, I’ve been having a blast making these cards. I hope it shows.

Feed the
card machine
.

it hungers.