Pencil to Paper, Let's Make a Card Game

01 Aug, 2025

This Sheet of Notepaper was Dated 7/28/2025

I had a design review in-office this past week, which meant I had a lot of time to myself with a pen and paper to chew on basic ideas for the game. Last post we talked about some ideas for intrinsic character stats, but I am leaving that as a placeholder for now because of a core first-order thought:

• If we are trying to compose poker hands, an inherently luck-based activity, as a core part of the combat procedure, it feels unfun to make that any harder or easier by things out of the player's control like randomized stats.

This is the point where I turned from my beloved tabletop games to my beloved skinner box, Balatro. Balatro provides a couple of degrees of freedom that allow play to become progressively more predictable or controllable as a run goes on. I think some of these mechanics are directly translatable to our game concept and some less so, but let's chew on a few and see what we spit out. As a starting assumption, let's say that we are still going with:

The value of the poker hand that your character can play directly correlates to something like amount of damage dealt

This heuristic will guide how we are assessing these degrees of freedom.

1. Number of hands in a "Stake". In Balatro, each Stake has a minimum point value you are attempting to achieve within a number of hands. This doesn't quite fit into my mental model, where players and the GM exchange competing hands each round, so we will put this on the backburner. This is a multiplayer game in theory, so number of hands = number of rounds where, presumably, an adversary is dealing damage back to you. This timer is probably based on whatever model we use for PC and NPC health.
2. Hand size per draw. This is a juicy one. In HMTW combat, I think of the hand that you draw as the scope of opportunities that your character sees for that round because of the relationship of those cards to your action economy. So let's follow that line of thought here - the more cards you have in your hand, the better odds you have of composing a play. This feels like it implies a sort of strength or finesse? Hand size is a stat that we want to track and modulate.
3. Number of Discards. There's some definite juice here too. In Balatro, you can discard up to 5 cards at a time, redrawing the number of cards you discarded. This allows you to drop cards that provide you limited value in an attempt to compose a stronger hand. If we view that through our assumed base concept, this represents a character changing the state of their opportunities; this feels like it implies a form of combat cleverness or situational awareness. Each round, a character should have some number of discard/redraws and we will track and modulate that.
4. Jokers. This is the core novelty of Balatro. Over the course of a run, you build a set of Jokers that change the rules of the game in some way and improve your ability to consistently score points against a Stake. This feels to me like a great way to implement something along the lines of character features, talents, class abilities, all of the fun progression elements that we know and love in tabletop games.
5. Planets. Planets are strictly numerical improvements to specific types of hands. I've got an idea percolating in the back of my head about riders on types of hands, but I haven't written it yet so it doesn't exist. We'll track this.
6. Tarot Cards. Tarot cards in Balatro are consumables that modify your deck in some way or provide you money. As a known Cypher enjoyer, I do love a good consumable item but we can backburner this as well.
7. General Deckbuilding Mechanics. I'll start this with an unstated assumption of mine; I want this to be playable with an unmodified deck of playing cards. Balatro is a deckbuilder game; modifying the cards and adding or destroying cards is a core part of that. In a multiplayer game, that only makes sense if everyone is playing from their own decks, which strikes me as a little boring and misses a great part of cards as a gameable tool - developing an intuition for what is in someone else's hand based on what is not in your hand. If this is an analog game we are probably not doing CRUD to our deck of cards, lmao

So What Now?

Let's start with a generic Fighting Man fantasy RPG character. Pick your setting. I think I like the Oddlike system of stats, but I also like that in HMTW the stat modifiers are named after the card suits. This Fighting Man has randomly drawn stats in:

• Spades: a temporary HP buffer
• Hearts: physical endurance and toughness
• Diamonds: brains and quickness
• Clubs: force of will

These are all good measures of a character, but IF they are randomly drawn, THEN I would like to see a way of player choice being used to drive Hand Size (HS) and Discard/Redraw (RD). The obvious way to do this, in my current view, is via gear that the player can select and accrue/modify. Earlier we said that Hand Size represents some level of brute strength or finesse; some maximal capacity to assess a situation and capitalize on opportunities. My gut feeling is that someone with a Big Ass Hammer On A Stick is going to, more frequently than not, find something to hit with it, so for now let's say that hand size scales with weapon size. In contrast, RD represents some ability to modify circumstances, maybe it's some element of quickness. Someone with a dagger or shortsword can maybe create an opportunity that didn't exist by getting inside the reach of a bulky opponent and we represent that by trashing cards we don't care about.

This leaves sort of two fruitful questions; what are we dealing damage against and what is our damage basis? These are probably strictly gear questions and not card mechanics. For now I'm calling these Base Damage (BD) and Armor (A_x). BD feels like an intrinsic property of the weapon you're holding and A_x feels directly usable from an Oddlike game, flat damage reduction. I have an idle idea that I've bounced off Josh at Rise Up Comus that Armor still requires some active decision making, like maybe you need to discard cards from your hand to "charge" your armor and that represents playing defensively and reducing the scope of your attack, but I need to test that concept. Really I need to test all of these ideas. I can imagine a weapon and armor table that looks something like:

The challenge here is working out how fungible things like a redraw are relative to having a larger hand, and then obviously we will need to do some fiddling with how damage scales relative to hand quality. What about ranged weapons? What about guns? How do we keep things from feeling too same-y? Not my business as of today. The next post will probably look at what a turn might look like, I'll start looking into some simulators, and we'll talk about a model for how hand quality might relate to base damage, armor, and meat points. Thanks for reading and let me know either on Bluesky or the Prismatic Wasteland Discord if you think this is the stupidest thing you've seen today. (It doesn't count if it's the first thing you've seen today!)