Hi there! I've been a part of this community but really haven't posted too much as I really haven't had much to discuss that's relevant to the group. But I now have something to share, and I'm so excited!
For the past two years, I have been working on my own TCG. It started in the thick of the COVID pandemic, when I'm stuck at home. I stumbled upon this series of videos by a youtuber named Kohdok. He brings in examples from a variety of games, shows why they're bad, and explains his reasoning. I was listening to everything he covered, and got to thinking. "If I were to make my own TCG, how would I work around the problems he lists here? What would my solutions be?"
This game is the result.
The working title thus far is The Condemned. The high level description of the game is two death row inmates on a space prison are duking it out gladiator-style for the entertainment of other inmates. The end goal is kind of a decayed sci-fi, almost like the first season of Altered Carbon, the Maelstrom territory in Cyberpunk 2077, or the grimier parts of Blade Runner. It's high tech, but it's outdated and left to rot. That kind of vibe.
I made the prototypes in Magic Set Editor with the help of one of their discord members, a dude by the name of Cajun. Cajun helped guide me in the right direction to make a custom game module for MSE, and I was able to use that to quickly and easily create the base set and print out prototypes.
But why am I talking about all this now? Well, part of it is to more or less document what I've been working on, but also to gush a bit. Today, I dropped by one of the local game stores near my house. I had the day off, hadn't playtested with anyone in a while, and I wanted to get a fresh set of eyes on it.
As luck would have it, I got more than one fresh set of eyes on the game today. Two different people agreed to play along with my shenaningans and joined me for a match. Both of them came back with very, very positive reviews! They liked what I was doing, they thought the overall mechanics meshed well, and they liked the cards I've already made. One person even went so far as to say they'd buy it right now if it were on store shelves. That's the highest praise I've gotten yet! Ermahgerd, I am over the moon!
But I'm still not fully finished yet. Now that I know the base set is more or less in a stable place, I need to finish the first expansion that I started a few months back. It's about halfway completed, and I want to get some playtesting done of that before starting a second expansion. My goal is to have two expansions made, if not playtested, before pitching the game to a company like Fantasy Flight or Wizards of the Coast.
But yeah, that made me all warm and fuzzy inside and I'm really happy that I got the chance to try it out. I don't really have too much else to say about it, but I wanted to share with people who might enjoy this.