I pushed through and wrote a new card game in about a week (ignoring years of pondering the idea and sketching out some earlier builds that are lost to time). Rulebook one day, and then about a third of the cards each over the next few days. It helps that I sit on this stuff for a while, because it means I’ve already sorted out the flow of the game in advance. This one, however, had some help that previous ones did not: It came to me in a dream.
Literally. I hadn’t pondered doing a faux-70s Ocean’s 11 heist card game until I woke up one morning and jotted down some notes from a vivid dream where I was in a friend’s garage and we were playtesting my new game. There was a card table covered in cards and a Twister-style vinyl playmat where we had just finished a getaway driver minigame after one of us completed a heist where other players were the pursuing cops and we had escaped successfully. We debated the merits of the getaway sequence, whether it added to the overall game or brought the pace down, how it interacted with the existing heat mechanic for drawing attention to your crew… It was very specific and my dream friends had a lot of good thoughts on what worked and what didn’t. By the end of the dream I was confirming my hunch that the getaway sequence was either a separate game or better served as an optional expansion or add-on than being integrated with the base experience of managing your criminal network.
I still fight a bit with myself as to where or how this game fits into my existing worlds, which doesn’t exactly feature a Batman: The Animated Series-meets-Archer sort of faux historical look at crime and the international masterminds who commit it. I considered moving it forward to fit with Cabal’s dystopian cyberpunkness, but it got real techy and didn’t fit well enough. I considered shifting it backward to competing steampunk air pirates in Steelheart Skies, but that felt even more forced. Ultimately, it seems to have settled somewhere in the orbit of my Captain Excelsior golden-era comic book setting (created for a murder mystery, complete with professional comic book art) and that works for me. We’ll see next week how it plays and if dream-logic translates to game logic. Who knows, there might even be an Incredibles-influenced supers vs. criminals playset next.