Introduction

When making this card game I thought about my 2 favorite card games, Sushi Go and Star Realms. I really like the set collecting aspect that both Sushi Go and Star Realms have, especially the high risk high reward set collecting present in Sushi Go. My favorite thing about Star Realms is the deckbuilding aspect where you have weak cards initially and use those to purchase cards and make your personal deck better and better to eventually defeat your opponent. That deckbuilding mechanic really reminds me of the trading card games I played when I was younger except without the pay to win aspect that I hated so much when I was younger. I also decided to theme my game around the idea of art collecting and art museums, for one because I really enjoy art museums and also because it would make sense in the context of the mechanics I wanted to have in my game, namely art often being seperated into categories and art collecting working well with the idea of getting new cards in a deckbuilding game. In terms of the theme the way I thought of it is that you play as dueling art collectors trying to put on galleries to gain prestige and fame where the deck each player has represents the total resources they have while the hand represents the resources they have at the moment.

While my game may seem very similar to Star Realms on the surface that is due to it being built on the same deck building core mechanics of buying new cards for your deck and cycling through that deck as the deck gets stronger and stronger. My game differs from Star Realms the most in one of the most fundamental aspects of card games in general: how cards are played (which I will get to more in the rules section). My game is also a lot less complex than a lot of other deckbuilding games that have additional elements that increase the complexity of the game, I tried to keep my game as simple as a deck building game could be and really designed very close to the core mechanics of a deck building game.

The Deck

The deck is a 74 card deck with 14 starter funding cards, 10 action cards, 10 investment cards, and 40 art cards. The art cards are further subdivided into 4 distinct categories (Renissance, Baroque, Impressionism, and Contemporary) with 10 cards being in each set. Starter funding cards and investment cards provide value which is used to purchase cards in the game. Action cards allow the player to take special actions like drawing extra cards or forcing their opponent to have less cards in their hand their next turn. Art cards must be played together in at least a set of 2 where all cards in the set belong to the same category (ex. two Renissance cards can be played together but one Baroque and one Impressionism card cannot be played together). When played art cards give prestige which is like victory points in this game as the first person to 20 prestige wins. My personal deck I used while prototyping was just made up of index cards written on with pencil so I could easily change things on the fly. To see a detailed list of all the cards click here.

Rules

This game is only for two players. Please refer to the diagram below for some terms that I will refer to in this section:

Set-up

1. Both players decks will initally contain 7 funding cards. These are starter cards that are worth 1 value when played. Funding cards are not in the resources deck and count as investment cards. These initial player decks will be placed on each player's side of the play space as laid out in the diagram.
2. The resources deck will be shuffled and then 5 cards will be drawn and then placed face up in a row in the middle of the play space as laid out in the diagram. The resources deck will also be placed next to this row as laid out in the diagram.
3. Decide who will go first (rock paper scissors is a great method). The player who will go first will have only 3 cards for their first turn instead of 5.

Gameplay

1. At the beginning of a player's turn they draw cards from their deck so that they have 5 cards in their hand unless otherwise stated. If the player's deck runs out of cards the player will shuffle their discard pile and place it face down and that will become their deck.
2. On their turn the player can choose to play cards from their hand. There are 3 distinct types of cards and the rules around playing them are unique to the type of card. The player does not have to play all of their cards but there is also no limit to the number of cards the player can play.
• When an action card is played execute the action written on the text of the card (ex. if the action card says to draw a card the player should draw a card). Once an action card is played it goes to the player's discard pile unless otherwise stated.
• When an investment card is played it gives the amount of value listed in the bottom right hand side of the card to the player. This value can be used to buy cards from the auction row (see rule 3 for more information on buying cards). When an investment card is played it goes to the player's discard pile.
• Art cards can only be played in groups of 2 or greater with the cards in the group being from the same category of art (ex. 2 Renissance art cards can be played but 1 Baroque and 1 Impressionism card cannot be played). Once a group of art cards is played add up the prestige points each card played gives and the player earns that amount. If a player plays a group of matching cards greater than 2 bonus prestige is awarded (a group of 3 gives 2 bonus prestige, a group of 4 gives 3 bonus prestige, and a group of 5 gives 4 bonus prestige). Note down the prestige gained by the player to keep track of each player's score/amount of prestige. Once played art cards go to the old news pile.
3. On their turn the player can buy cards from the auction row. To buy a card the player must have played enough cards to accumulate a value greater than the cost of card(s) the player wishes to buy (ex. the player can play a card worth value 1 and a card worth value 2 to buy a card with a cost of 3). The player can buy multiple cards in one turn if they have enough value to afford it. Note that exact change is not needed but value does not carry over turns (ex. the player can play 4 value worth of cards to buy cards that cost a total of 3 but that 1 value left over will be gone in the player's next turn). Only cards face up in the auction row can be purchased. Once a card is purchased it goes to the player's discard pile.
4. If a card is removed from the auction row for any reason immediately draw a card from the resources deck to replace it.
5. Once the player whose turn it is does not wish to play any more cards they end their turn and it becomes their opponent's turn.
6. The game ends once a player gains at least 20 prestige. The player to get at least 20 prestige first wins.

Playtesting and Modification

I played the game 3 times in total with my dad. I won all three times which wasn't suprising considering the fact that I made this game and the fact that he's historically bad at games, but he did put up a really good fight in the first two games.

1. I won the first game 21 to 15 with a massive come back in the end scoring 10 points with a set of 3 cards. What this game mainly revealed was that action cards were way too expensive and way too useless to worth purchasing over an art card or investment card. It also revealed that often times you could get stuck turn after turn not being able to do anything because there were too many art cards of different types that were stuck in your hand as you couldn't play them and all of the cards were too expensive to purchase with the investment cards you would get as most of your hand was just art cards you couldn't play. This lead to a long stretch of turns where all either of us could do is play investment cards and waste the value just to get the cards out of the hand in hopes you would draw an art card that would give you a set to play. In this game the strategy that both of us were using did not seem that efficient as it seemed like we would just only buy art cards, not caring about what category they were and just hoped that we'd draw a set.
2. In the second game I changed some things in response to the things I found from the first game. I redid all the action cards to make the actions more geared around the cycling of cards from your deck to your hand and also made them a lot cheaper. I also added a rule that you could send art from your hand to the discard pile for no benefit, simply as just a mechanic to prevent the player's hand from being "stuck." I won this game 21 to 17. My dad kept the same strategy as before expect he actually bought action cards this time which he found to be useful this time around. I tried to use the new art discarding rule to discard art of sets I knew I didn't have a lot of to try and get sets of 3 to play for the bonus points.
3. In the third game I got rid of the art discarding rule as in the second game I tried to use it a lot and it wasn't fun as while it did help me cycle through cards faster it was much more frustrating as I would just sit there and waste tons of turns doing nothing but discarding cards to try and get one specific card that I wanted in my deck. It turns out that the retooling I did to the action cards before game 2 was itself enough to prevent to much stagnation of cards and helped cycle cards in a much more engaging way. I won this game 20 to 6 as I had a very focused strategy where I tried really hard to only focus on 2 different categories or art and bought all the action cards dealing with drawing cards to cycle through cards faster and get to buy multiple cards in a row so my dad couldn't buy the cards I wanted. My dad really didn't update his strategy which is probably why he lost so bad this time.

Art

For the actual look of the cards I wanted to stay true to the museum theme of the game so that's what inspired the marble background of the cards. I felt like it would be boring and plain for the background of the card to just be a plain color so I went with a marble pattern which I felt added enough texture to the card to not be boring as well as not being a pattern that's super in your face and distracts from the actual important content on the card. For the card text portion I decided to model it after the plaques you often see in art museums that will have information about the art. For the icons that denote, cost, value, and prestige depending on the card I wanted to keep it relatively simple as I didn't know how to do complicated things in Photoshop but also because giving each value a different shape would make it easier to identify what the card was giving based on a simple glance. Every single deckbuilding game that I've played has used a gold circle icon to denote cost so I decided to keep with that trend. I decided to make the icons for cost and for value different even though you use value to pay off cost because I thought it would be confusing to the player to have 2 of the same icon on a card and not know which one is the cost and which one is the value the card gives so I modeled the icon for value off of money. For prestige I knew I wanted to do something with gold or silver along the lines of getting an award or medal but since I already used a gold circle for cost I decided to do a silver star to contrast in terms of color but because I also associate stars with good work.

As for how the art ties into the mechanics of the games, I tried to make it instantly obvious what type of card each card was based on the color of the border of the card (green for investment, blue for art, and red for action). To differentiate the different sets of art I made two different design choices. In the card text I decided to make what category art the art card belonged to be the first item in the text, as well as the largest and only bold text. I also gave each of the differnet types of art a different frame and the idea was that all of the art that belonged to the same category would have the same frame so you could see if they were the same category through a visual cue.

Summary

Overall I was suprised at how fun this game was. I will have to say I didn't get to test a lot of different strategies or play against a bunch of different strategies as I could only really play against my dad so I will admit the bonus points could potentially be unbalanced for groups aboce 3 cards as I didn't ever have the patience to accumulate a set that high. Even though it is one of the most simple deckbuilding games I've ever played you still have to pay a lot of attention to get good and keep track of your opponent's cards as well as your own which keeps the game engaging even though it's not your turn. More testing with different people would probably be needed to polish the game even further but in it's current state it's a pretty fun game that combines skill, strategy, and luck.