A friend referred me to a site where you can print a deck of customized cards for $5. They’re meant to be a deck of standard playing cards (54 cards), but you can fully customize both sides, which means I could potentially print Student Wars decks or Cluster card game cards or such.

I’m tempted to make new, nicer Cluster TCG cards and print a nice deck of them to play with. 108 should be enough… 98 unique for the deck and the 10 Objective cards, even though the website currently suggests 3 copies of each of the 67 deck cards (this seems excessive though… and 152 deck cards also seems high).

I guess I could also print one nice copy of each of the cards in the first two Student Wars v2 sets, but I feel weird spending $50 on something that’s just going to sit around in a binder. I would rather print two 54-card decks (or maybe four, one for each of the game’s primary affiliations), but that turns the game into a fixed-card game which seems to go against the entire point of making it a CCG.

Any thoughts/opinions/suggestions?

Edit: How’s this for a card back?

Tim made the comment that it’s really subdued, but that’s kinda the point since the card fronts are OMG COLOR.

The CTCG site has been updated with a new “minimal translation” format.

I realized today, looking over my card games, that most games are already based around some sort of battle system. Therefore, linking games together should be as simple as providing a way for these different combat systems to work together. At least, this should work for games that are primarily battle-based… notsomuch for exploration-based things like Star Trek CCG.

The goal of the minimal translations is to allow you to play your turns normally as your game would define (play Pokemon and Energy and Trainers, power up your DBZ fighter and play Supports, play a storable Monster or hidden card or PC equipment or PC, etc). The only time the rules need to step in is during an attack to define how the attack is handled across game boundaries.

The translations for the three existing games so far seem to make sense in my mind, but perhaps I missed something. As always, feedback is appreciated.

You can download the cards here.

Worked some more on Alliances today. Yearbook got a couple interesting cards that let you basically treat the top card of your discard pile as in-play (attacking it, spotting it, whatever). All the keyword-based sub-factions got a helpful Persist Event that will make building decks based around them easier. Also dealt another blow against attackers with new “characters may not be damaged” powers and cards.

Did some general cleaning up so that cards are slightly less cluttered… mainly eliminated the across-the-board sub-faction abilities and stuck them on one character each instead. Still looking for ways to clean up cards further. Using symbols for some common terms and actions isn’t out of the question, but I have to be sure to not overdo it like my last attempt.

Also generally did some strengthening of GPA. I’m not sure if it’s enough.

If anyone has time and would like to playtest, I would be eternally grateful. The game needs a lot of testing and balancing (the Humanities faction, in particular).