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Button Shy Design Challenge: 18 Identical Cards!


Hey, it’s September! Sanity twinkles on the horizon; is it a mirage of false hope, or the faint honest shine of a distant true beacon? Time will tell.  Things have at least temporarily slowed down enough, and I am for the next ten minutes inspired enough, for me to eke out a chunk of game design thinking.  Since it’s not a Monday, I don’t feel beholden to my usual traditions (lol) and so today will be unabashedly about the arrow of inspiration that has lodged itself in my spongey grey matter.  A new game design contest from Button Shy! Billed by them as a seemingly impossible challenge: An 18-card game with 18 identical cards, and no other components.  They seem to think this is impossible; I think that it’s certainly a limiting constraint, but all the more fun for it.  So this is just going to be a free-for-all of thoughts on some concepts and/or gameplay that could be done with 18 identical cards.
Orientation: If you use the sides (4) and corners (4) of a card, and double it for the faces (2), it can represent 16 different pieces of information depending on what it’s pointing at (you; an opponent; other cards).  I can envision a tableau/mandala-building game (what a surprise) with dark-sided and light-sided cards, where each player links cards to one another by edge and by corner to… what? To build an action engine? To satisfy certain arrangement scoring conditions? To create a history?
18 cards also creates two 3x3 grids for each face.
Or cards could have a “rank” equal to the number of cards in their row, and a “suit” equal to the number of cards in their column.
Two faces also could serve as a two-player game focused on flipping cards over to your face, or a solitaire based on Game of Life mechanics (death vs alive mechanics).  Orientation of adjacent cards used to trigger the rotation or flipping of a card.
How about hidden information? Well, again, orientation could represent information, and cards could be covered up by other cards (essentially using them as cardbacks) to conceal that information (simultaneous action selection; traitor mechanic allegiance; vote) until it’s time to be revealed.
Now, how to take identical components and randomize them.  It’s like that old dumb game design riddle, how do you shuffle a deck containing only one card? Only once again this is easier than it first appears, as you could flip half, shuffle, rotate half, shuffle, etc, thereby creating a randomized pile containing at least 4 different orientations (thanks again Todd Sanders, for Do Not Forsake Me [Oh My Darling]).  On top of that, you could “sum” pieces of information to create outputs.  The objective of a tile-laying game could be to maximize (intersection of FaceATopRightCorner and FaceALeftEdge) and (intersection of FaceABottomEdge and FaceBBottomRightCorner).  Finally, if you want randomness, introduce dexterity; you could place a card on a surface (not included in the components! But probably implied to be allowed) and spin it for a random orientation.
And finally, harkening back to my most recent Mechanic Monday for TABLET, maybe every card contains a massive number of symbols and information, and the game is about laying cards gridlessly atop one another to create certain shapes or to maximize your majority or minority for certain symbols.
I think this constraint is terrific, and the challenge will be taking these workarounds and honing in on a combination of ideas that feels open and choice-based enough to flesh out a full design.  I’ve got almost four weeks; should be doable!

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