Last year at Gary Con IX, I had an idea for a couple of card games. I’m not a big card game player, mostly because I don’t have a regular in-person gaming group. I have some rough outlines for those, but I need to polish them a lot so they are coherent and explainable to another person. Towards the end of this post, I mentioned I had a card game idea.

Creative lightning strikes come unexpected and this happened to me last night. A much simpler variation of one of the ideas from the last Gary Con came to me. It was one of those, clear and almost fully formed ideas.

I hurriedly typed up the basics that came to mind. This morning, I was filled with the ideas to round out the game, and typed out most of the rest of the rules. I think it’s a playable game, and there are some twists and turns in it so it will be different each time.

My level of excitement and inspiration may not translate to others, but I think I can polish what I have for clarity, and mock up a deck in time to take it to Gary Con X. There are so many creative gamers there, and the low-key atmosphere is a great place to hone game ideas. If my game has merit, it will be evident from how others receive it. A good elevator pitch will help.

I ordered 500 blank playing cards from Amazon [Affiliate Link ]last year, and started trying to mock up my original idea, but it bogged down. Scribbling out the card faces and leaving the backs blank will work for a rough play test, but it would be cool to have a mockup with a printed back and public domain art to take with me. I am very torn right now.

I REALLY want to work on this NOW, but I still have game prep to go for some of my games I’m running at Gary Con. This sort of thing happens to me all the time. I am in the groove with something, and some new idea/thing comes to my attention, and I have to be all about that new thing. I may not be overly ambitious/optimistic about this, and I might actually be able to do a decent job for a professionally printed play test deck in time to have it for Gary Con. The voice saying, “Do Eeet!” is very loud at the moment. It’s almost as loud as it was last night. I’d hoped typing this up to share my excitement, while I alternated with tweaking my rough rules, would dampen that desire. I’m sure it would cost a lot to rush a print job, but part of me doesn’t care.

If I totally suck at manipulating art to make a single card image, that would greatly reduce my enthusiasm. I’m going to have to try to make some cards, and if I’m lousy at it, then I can set this aside. However, I know there are tools that make it fairly easy (I’ve done a lot of research.), and I printed a deck I bought online that I had to manipulate to work with the printer I chose. So I may have something worthy of a rough deck that looks decent by this evening.