Can This Actually Work?
This multi-purpose deck idea had been in my head for a while. Every once in a while I'd do a look around and not see anything that really checked all the boxes for me. That wasn't to say they weren't good, but at the expense of sounding egotistical, they weren't what I thought I could do.
Of course I don't have infinite time to put into this, so it sank to the back of my mind until I stumbled on three things at about the same time.
- The EverDeck showed how much you could do by combining words, imagery, and standard cards (seriously, check it out).
- nanDECK made it possible to generate a large, structured deck.
- A site like MakePlayingCards meant I could actually get the deck printed.
(And I’ll add a fourth. I found Inkscape, which is awesome open-source software for vector graphics.)
Many of you out there might be rolling your eyes because this stuff has been out there for a while. But for a time-constrained amateur, I hadn't had the chance to connect all these dots. So, maybe this helps others out there.
I played with these tools just enough to see the possibilities. Add some AI help and a few Excel spreadsheets, and I could see a way to make this happen. I have a job. A family. Limited time. This wasn’t going to be a quick project. So it needed to clear a pretty high bar:
it had to be interesting to build, and the end result had to be interesting to use
The pieces were coming together.
Two Big Problems (From the Start)
Even early on, it was clear this wasn’t one problem.
It was two. And they were tightly related.
On one side, I had to come up with systems that were actually worth having. Not just more symbols or more categories layered on top, but things that felt new, or at least useful in a way that existing decks weren’t. Something that opened up different gameplay, or gave a designer something to work with.
On the other side, all of those ideas had to live on a card.
That sounds obvious, but it’s a brutal constraint. There’s limited space, limited attention, and a very real expectation that the thing should still behave like a normal deck when you want it to. A system that works in theory but can’t be expressed cleanly on a card is basically dead on arrival.
Those two pressures don’t really cooperate. The more interesting something is, the more it tends to want space and complexity. The cleaner and simpler something is, the less room there is for novelty.
So from the start, whether I realized it fully or not, the challenge was balancing those two forces. Trying to come up with ideas that were both interesting enough to justify their existence, and constrained enough to survive being put on a playing card.
And I’ll admit, this part was kind of addictive. It hit both sides of my brain. The analytical side was busy slicing things up, looking for patterns, trying to invent systems that didn’t already exist. The creative side — what there is of it — was worrying about how any of that would actually look. Color, layout, glyphs, all of it. It was a bit obsessive for a while.
Starting with Words and Icons
Given all that, I needed a place to start that wasn’t completely abstract.
EverDeck pointed in a pretty clear direction. One of the things it does well is give cards identity through words, while still behaving like a deck.
So the obvious first step was:
give each card a word, and represent it visually
That gives you something to hold onto. A word is flexible — it can mean different things in different contexts — and a visual gives it a concrete anchor.
At least in theory.
Early Iteration
In practice, this phase was a lot of trying things and seeing what stuck.
I generated lists of words. Too many, honestly. Then started cutting them down. Some were too similar. Some felt awkward. Some just didn’t seem useful. What should these have in common? What was the theme?
At the same time, I was thinking about visuals. Not drawing them yet, but asking basic questions. Is this something I can represent cleanly? Would it be recognizable? Would it scale down to something small on a card? EverDeck solved both of these cleanly with animals and fun archetypical words; I needed to go my own way here.
So it became this back and forth. Words influencing visuals, visuals pushing back on words.
And iteration. And more. And AI help. And dead ends.
Nothing was completely broken. But it also didn’t feel like anything yet.
The “Why Bother?” Moment
At some point I stepped back and had to ask a more basic question.
even if I get this working… why does it exist?
A deck with words and icons is fine. There are already examples of that.
But without something tying it together, it’s mostly surface-level. It looks different, but doesn’t really behave differently.
The analogy that kept coming to mind was a deck of poker cards with dogs on them. Maybe they’re nicely illustrated. Maybe they’re fun. But at the end of the day, they don’t change what you can do with the deck.
That was a problem.
Because this whole thing was supposed to be about expanding what a deck can do, not just decorating it.
Decoration Isn’t Enough
That realization ended up being more important than anything I had tried up to that point.
There’s a real difference between adding content and adding structure.
Content gives you variety. Different words, different images, different flavors.
Structure gives you something to work with.
Without structure, everything feels a bit random. You can draw cards, but there’s no reason one combination matters more than another. There’s nothing to latch onto, nothing to build from.
And from a design standpoint, that’s a dead end. If someone wanted to build a game on top of this, there wouldn’t be anything solid to rely on. Just a pile of interesting pieces.
That fails one of the core goals right away.
A Direction Forward
That didn’t immediately tell me what to do, but it did change how I was thinking.
Up to that point I had been focused on the pieces themselves. Are these good words? Are these good visuals?
Now the question shifted to something else.
what makes this set of cards actually useful?
Which is a different kind of problem.
It points toward relationships. Groupings. Ordering. Ways that cards can connect to each other in a way that isn’t arbitrary.
Not all at once, and not cleanly, but enough to start moving away from “this looks interesting” toward “this does something.”