I. Love. A tabletop game with a small footprint. It’s just so cozy and nice and fun. If it’s one small deck you can fit in your pocket, all the better.

Stumbling into the realm of games utilizing only a deck of standard cards led me straight to Scoundrel; a free rule set that lets you simulate a dungeon dive using just some regular old playing cards.

The novelty struck harder because I realized, after a quick gander, that this directly inspired the game Card Crawl, which I’ve admired for a while.

The novelty didn’t last for very long because, as much as I love a small, solitaire game, standard cards are just fucking boring. That very day I made up some cards featuring my favorite Age of Sigmar art. The wheels kept spinning, the dopamine kept mining, and my travails led me to good ol’ Blood Bowl (not only because the new edition has just dropped but probably mostly).

I adore starting with a solid base for game design. It’s why HMTM and Broken Cask worked so well for me: those brilliant designers behind Fate and 4AD gave me the canvas and I could slap some paint on it. The same applies here. With pilates-esque core, I can iterate and iterate and iterate. So that’s what I did.

Getting permission from the great Knute Rock-Knee to use their amazing line art made the layout choices even simpler, as a (frankly) boring card layout just made the wonderful illustrations pop.

I don’t think it’s necessary to belabor the design process here – it was a pretty simple loop: Come up with a cool rule to give each team some kind of identity by mashing the buttons and knobs of the pre-existing ruleset.

What’s important is this seems to have shaken me out of game development hibernation and I hope to capitalize on the momentum by developing a Broken Cask minigame based on Scoundrel. Keep an eye out, sports fans!

Download here.