Summon & Sacrifice
In this casual card game, you’re a wizard using sorcery to summon creatures more powerful than those of your opponents. But to create life, you must take life - you’ll need to make sacrifices in order to earn enough gems to summon the most magical beasts. In the end, the wizard with the highest score wins!
How I Got Here
Baking sourdough bread, binging Tiger King and The Queen’s Gambit, installing Zoom for virtual birthday gatherings — these are some of the things that defined the beginning of the Covid era for many people. For myself, I decided to pursue a tabletop game idea that was bouncing around in my head: what if I merged the games Magic: The Gathering and Sushi Go?
Fair warning to non-gamers: you are entering the Nerd Zone. The Geekdom. The mind of an adult man who still enjoys toy stores.
Building Around a Core Interaction
One of the first thoughts I had surrounding this game idea was, “What if you had to sacrifice creatures to get more powerful ones? And what if sacrificing those creatures was as simple as rotating the card upside-down?” It wasn’t a groundbreaking idea, but it was a foundation to build on.
Playtesting During a Pandemic
Just as user testing is crucial to a successful digital product, playtesting is essential for the success of a physical game. But of course at the start of the Covid outbreak, nobody was going to gather in a room to play the mediocre first iterations of a card game.
Luckily, there’s an incredibly helpful game called Tabletop Simulator that makes it fairly easy to playtest a “physical” game with online friends.
My Archnemesis: Illustration
We all have one or two skills that we never fully feel comfortable with, that give us an even more acute sense of imposter syndrome. For me that skill is illustration. But hey, what better opportunity to conquer my fears than a card game that requires around 23 unique illustrations?
My aspiration was to capture the aesthetic of Catherine Unger’s work. While my drawings certainly aren’t at that level, I’ve been pretty pleased with how they turned out. You can see most of the illustrations on the cards below.
What Now?
The game is available for purchase here: Summon & Sacrifice (thegamecrafter.com), and a handful of copies were sold to friends, familes, and a couple strangers around the world. I learned so much from this first tabletop game design experience, and I’m actively applying those lessons to several new tabletop game projects.