My family plays gin rummy every chance we get. It’s the game we know. It’s also flat, and I think they could handle more.

I love Magic. What I love about it isn’t the fantasy, it’s the interaction. The stack, the pattern recognition, the way a turn is a series of decisions responding to someone else’s decisions. But every time I’ve brought Magic to my family or my friends, they bounce. Not off the rules exactly. Off the fantasy, the vocabulary, and how complicated it all looks from the outside. They go nerd-averse before they ever get to the part I want them to see.

So I started designing a game to get them there. Magic’s guts, in a deck they already know how to hold.

The brief I gave myself was to keep what makes Magic fun and drop everything that makes it look hard.

What stays: a resource economy you tap, a full reaction stack, and cards that are worth more together than apart.

What goes: fantasy theming, creatures, combat, deckbuilding. You win by collecting sets and runs, which is Monopoly Deal’s win condition and also my family’s entire vocabulary.

The melding rules are deliberately folk mechanics. Runs and groups are centuries old and everyone already knows them. I looked at borrowing something more distinctive and decided a mechanic players already speak was worth more than one that felt novel. The whole point was lowering the cost of sitting down.

Before a single card got written, I spent weeks on the system.

I wrote a full rules document and kept versioning it. All thirty action cards got a name, exact rules text, and a cost. I worked out the economy underneath them: what you start with, what you bank each turn, the hand cap, how the reaction stack resolves, what happens when two reactions collide.

Then I built simulations and ran the game against itself. That settled three things I couldn’t reason my way to from a document: how many cards to open with, whether resources needed a cap, and how to tune draw so players always had something in hand. Running dry is the fastest way to make a game feel bad, and the simulations found the shape of that before anyone had to sit through it.

What they couldn’t tell me is how any of it felt.

130 cards, handwritten in Sharpie.

I took it on a boys trip and we played several times over a few days, same group, back to back. Nothing about that deck was pretty and it didn’t need to be. I wasn’t testing whether the cards looked good. A nicer prototype would have cost me the days I needed to find out the game was broken.

Before anyone played, I wrote down what I expected to go wrong. Action density was about a third of the deck and I thought games might feel like nonstop interference with no room to build. Two cards looked overtuned, both denying an opponent and advancing me for a low cost. One card looked too weak beside its own sibling.

I was wrong about all three. None of them came up.

The win condition didn’t survive contact. I’d given players one turn to respond after someone completed their third set, which felt fair on paper. But the resource economy makes late turns enormous, so whoever went next could usually just win. Getting there first was close to meaningless. We were patching it at the table mid-game.

And the core mechanic wasn’t a choice. Every card can be set down as a resource or fired as an action, and that decision was supposed to be the heart of the game, the thing you agonize over every turn. Watching people play, there was a right answer almost every time. Hands would hover, then do the obvious thing.

A decision with a correct answer isn’t a decision. It’s a lookup.

That one stung. It’s the mechanic the whole game is built on, and it’s the thing I never thought to question. The simulations couldn’t have caught it either, because a simulator picking the best available play looks like good play. It has no way to report that the best play was obvious.

The simulations could tell me the game ran. They couldn’t tell me whether it did the thing I built it for. That was never a balance question. It was whether people who don’t play Magic would enjoy the kind of decisions Magic gives you, once the fantasy and the vocabulary are gone. You find that out by handing someone a deck and watching their face.

Nobody on that trip plays Magic.

We played several times over a few days, which is more than a handwritten Sharpie prototype has any right to get.

That’s the result I actually needed. The game is broken in the ways above and the core mechanic is getting rebuilt. But the premise held: people who’d never played anything like this took to the decisions inside it right away. The good part travels.

I’m testing a version where cards carry a when-played ability instead of the either/or. You set the card down as a resource and it does something on the way down. The question stops being which mode and becomes when and in what order, which I don’t think has a single right answer.

I’m rewriting the proxies and rebalancing costs now. It hasn’t been in front of anyone yet, so I don’t know whether that works either.