Self promo for my newest card game, Jewel Thief; but you can play it for free! First, though, let's cover the basics...
TL;DR - Its a 4+ player competetive card-matching game with four rule variants; buy it here or look for the orange text in this post to learn how to play it with a regular deck
"What is Jewel Thief?"
It's a card matching game with a villain; one player tries to match jewels in a 36 card grid while their opponent, the titular Jewel Thief, periodically steals cards from the board. You can check out its page on The Game Crafter for more information, but it'll spoil the rest of this post
"What makes it special?"
The game's turn structure would theorettically allow you, perhaps via some kind of infinite cloning machine, to play a round of Jewel Thief til the heat death of the universe. While I wouldnt recommend that, its lack of a player cap (and ease of set-up; seriously, all you do is put cards on a table) makes it a good party game choice.
But that's not all!
There are three extra rule variants that drastically alter the gameplay while keeping card matching and stealing as main mechanics. I believe the cards are versatile enough to allow for many custom games, too
"Okay, but why should I buy a silly game from some bug nerd?"
First off, ouch. Second off, that's the best part; you dont have to buy it to play it! Jewel Thief can be played with a standard 52 card deck. Here's how:
Step 1. Remove the 10s, Jacks, Queens, Kings and Jokers
Step 2. Download the free rules from the shop page
Step 3. Play the game, matching cards based on their values. You'll need to designate a value as the Diamond jewel for game 4
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That's it for my little self-promo. If you dont buy the game, I hope you'll at least give it a try and consider supporting my future projects.
I also post art and photography, which you can find under the bugbeast art and bugbeast photos tags. I hope you check them out
Thank you for your time <3
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Edit (Mar. 25, 2024) : Thank you to everyone who liked and reblogged this; if you play the game I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments and/or reblogs (even if you hated it). Feel free to share any custom games or house rules you come up with, too. I'd love to try them!
Edit (Aug. 10, 2024) : Final edit most likely; gonna blaze this one more time for good luck then maybe start work on a postmortem for the project, maybe give a little backstory for anyone who cares. Life is a little rough right now, but fate willing, I'll be able to work on/post about my future projects, including the future of Jewel Thief itself
Shout-out to TCGs with such rigorous keywording that even the word "card" has a specific definition and each card is obliged to explicitly tell you whether or not the card you're holding in your hand is a card.
so Pacific Knit Company sells what they call 'doodle' deck, which are full or half decks of cards with knitting patterns on them. Every motif is 24 stitches wide, and a variable amount of stitches tall. The cardstock is comparable to playing cards.
You can shuffle the cards to get a randomized pattern, you can pick out the patterns you think would make a neat hat or scarf (or socks or sweaters, if you're willing to do a bit more work), you can mix-and-match the decks.
And each deck comes with three cards of instructions, including how to make a single-sided cowl and an infinity cowl using the cards.
Hey, friends! I’ve worked on a cozy card game, and it’s out now!
CHECK IT OUT
Self Careless is a relatable game for 1-2 players where you are trying to balance a day in your life.
You have 12 turns (or 12 hours) to organize your day, along the way you can drink FANCY COFFEES which give you POWERS! You also have to watch out for your annoying cat who wants to KNOCK OVER your coffees!
I’ve made a deck for the slavic themed Mafia game — each character is from classic fairytales and epics. Part 2 of ? (Not really supposed to reveal the whole deck)
𖧷 Tugarin Zmeevich (Tugarin the Serpent)
𖧷 Finist the Falcon
𖧷 Tsarevna Nesmeyana (the Unsmiling)
𖧷 Kikimora
Sometimes I think about how I play Magic The Gathering and what my favorite deck that I run is. I think about the fact that I run Dimir Control with a mill combo finisher. I control the board state through removal, I halt my opponent's progress through counter spells, and I can incrementally and also totally deplete my opponents library through mill. The point I'm trying to make is I love the ability to deny my opponent of anything that could bring them any amount of genuine satisfaction or pleasure in the game. In this post, I'm going to explain the eroticism of Magic the Gathering through the concept of denial, and I'll be trying to justify getting horny over fucking cardboard-
This game is a culmination of years of trial and error with making a drinking game to play with not only huge nerd-dorks such as myself, but casual observers as well. I wanted a pick-up-and-play version of King's Cup where you don't need to spend 10 minutes deciding the rules before you start, and that allows great variation and chance between each game. Also, I wanted to get rid of waterfall.
Hey don't mind me but I playtested a really fun game at a local board game convention a little while back and I just found out they finally launched their kickstarter and I'd like to shill for it a little because its mad fun and I backed the kickstarter and I want it to succeed so I'll actually get the game lol.
Its basically a quick-and-light timed cooperative game for up to 4 people thats emulating a movie car chase. Its got a bunch of different "scenarios" for different movies/genres, but the basic premise is each player is in a different seat in the car (driver, shotgun, back-left, back-right) and you have a bunch of items and weapons and a limited amount of time to decide among all the players how and where to use those items, and in what order each round, to beat the Bad Guys(TM) that are chasing you.
Tumblr isn't letting me embed the Kickstarter link but it'll let me hyperlink it lmao
Memes about collectible card games tend to treat Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gu-Oh! as basically interchangeable, but the truth is that each of them is fucked up in completely different ways. In brief:
Magic: The Gathering –
Official rulebook that's about nine hundred pages long
Timing and priority framework with roughly a billion different steps and sub-phases that tries to account for every edge case and technicality like a video game developer trying to stop speedrunners from clipping out of bounds
Authoritative card text resides in a massive centralised database which receives constant updates and errata, such that what's officially printed on a card may bear no particular resemblance to what's physically printed on it
So densely keyworded that a single symbol in a card's text may expand to several paragraphs of rules
Yi-Gi-Oh! TCG –
Judges' rulings in major tournaments create binding precedent which is not subsequently incorporated into the rules, creating situations where fully understanding what a card does may require a knowledge of its complete history of use in tournament play
Multiple mutually incompatible priority, timing and targeting frameworks, such that which framework is used may vary not only from card to card, but among different effects of the same card, determined by differences as small as the placement of one word
Legacy cards may receive permission to resolve their effects according to what the rules were at the time of their printing