#259 Diving Into Cards as Components

Skye joins Dirk and David to draw the starting hand for a deep dive into card games! With some card game experts on deck for future interviews, the trio take this episode as a chance to explore the various reasons why card games work so well as a game component. Discussions cover the various card games all three designers have worked on, and also bleed into popular games from Dominion to Magic the Gathering and digital games like Slay the Spire and Griftlands. A good amount of time is also spent discussing information density and graphical layout for cards.

Episode Outline

1:25 Talking about cards as a game component—why are they so ubiquitous?

9:10 A back-and-forth on cards as randomizers, when it works and when it doesn’t

18:04 How cards add hidden information to games

20:21 Information density on cards—how do you know if you push that density too far?

35:33 Discussing cards in the digital space

39:44 A keyword design misstep from David’s work in CCGs

56:14 Talking about the versatility of cards to wrap up the episode

In this Episode

David V. Heron - @davidvheron
Dirk Knemeyer - @DKnemeyer