Welcome! I hope you found it okay.
I would like to introduce you to Bricks & Cantrips, a blog dedicated to game design within card games. Popular topics will run the gamut from stalwarts of the genre like Magic the Gathering and Slay the Spire to the classics like Poker and Uno. If it has cards and is a game, we can take a look.
What is it about card games that makes them so fun to play? That is what we’d like to find out.
Playing cards have existed in some form since the Tang Dynasty in the 9th century. The French-suited playing cards of Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades have been around since the 15th century. Magic the Gathering made its debut in 1993, and Slay the Spire in 2017. The hit poker roguelike game Balatro released in February 2024 and sold over a million copies in a month.
Barring some cosmic event, like a solar flare comes around and somehow rewires everyone’s brain overnight, it seems like card games will be around for the foreseeable future.
Who is this blog for? Anyone who has played a card game and has wondered what’s going on under the hood. Specifically, we want to look at card games that have many different cards and game mechanics – Magic the Gathering and Slay the Spire are the two most influential, but as we’ve seen from the success of Balatro, there is still plenty of game design area left with traditional card games. Who knows? Maybe someone reading this is dreaming of making an Uno RPG. If you do end up making that game, 1. Please invite me to your playtesting sessions! and 2. I hope you find something here that helps you make a better game.
If you want to invite me to your Uno RPG playtesting sessions, or ask me any other questions, please feel free to reach out to me at chasestevenspersonal+bricks@gmail.com. Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you find a post or two that helps you enjoy card games more than you did before.