I spoke with Rob Eames, the creator of Disc Cards- here are his answers to my questions!
Q: Please describe your trading card game!
A: I have always thought of it as a child of Magic: the Gathering and Yahtzee lineage, with Disc Golf serving as the Midwife. That’s the glib answer, the serious one is this: Disc Cards is a Trading Card Game, to be sold in Specialty Game Shops and especially Disc Golf Pro Shops. Players have a Deck of 60 cards, with no more than 3 of the same Disc Side allowed, and no more than 3 of the same Location Side allowed. Each player has three 6-sided dice, and they use their dice rolls and Disc Cards to match the obstacles along their chosen Route (players can choose to go for a Par, a Birdie, or an Ace: a hole in one).
You can play Disc Cards with a Group or Solo, you can decide to play high risk/reward or low-riskconservative, you can choose to help your opponents or you can choose to hinder your opponents: there are a lot of options with Gameplay.
Q: What inspired you to create your own TCG?
A: I have been a Disc Golf fanatic for the better part of the last 20 years, and had developed these index cards I would use that had the picture of each hole on a course I would be playing, it’s stats, and notes I would keep to avoid making similar mistakes, what worked well yadda yadda, real nerdstuff with regards to disc golf. SOMEhow, I had the inspiration to take those cards and make some sort of card game out of them: I don’t know why, honestly. I had thought it would be cool to have a collection of these cards, kind of like trading cards for disc golf courses, but that’s like an internet/app thing really nowadays, so then it was like “How could I make it so you could play through these holes from different courses at home” and once that question hits, it’s on lol
Q: What TCGs did you grow up playing as a kid?
A: I’ve played card games for years and years, loved Magic, Pokemon, Star Trek, LOTR, Star Wars, all sorts of TCG’s going back a long time. But really for me it’s been MTG, and especially the last few years, oh since 2018 or so, that I had really gotten back into it with Commander, after having not played for 10 or so years. Adulthood: what a drag.
Q: What sets Disc Cards apart from other TCGs?
A: The cards are double-sided, and randomly matched front to back: you won’t be memorizing as a strategy, because that’s over 125000 possible unique cards. I print the cards myself, using my Oki Production printer, on opaque-core triple-layer cardstock. My printer friend does a beautiful UV coating and then I cut and round the cards. If the Kickstarter scales up things beyond my ability, I have made arrangements with the same friend to assist. If things go crazy I have overseas printers who can take over.
So, double sided cards: the Fronts, what you use to play the game, are called Disc Sides. The Backs, what would normally be a logo on most card games, is the Course the players play, made up of what we call the Location Sides. The Disc Sides have abilities you use to help your dice rolls (representingthrowing your disc in disc golf) match and subsequently pass the obstacles presented on eachLocation (easier or harder to pass depending on if you go for Ace, Birdie or Par).
Trading is going to be huge with Disc Cards. Imagine 222 possible Disc Sides in the Game, each of varying Rarity. On the back of each of those Discs could be any one of 555 possible Location Sides, each of exactly equal Rarity. Some Location Sides are going to work better for different Deck strategies, some will be inherently easier/more difficult just in general, etc. So for the person doing Deck Construction, you’re really trying to get the perfect blend of Fronts and Backs, and I don’t think that’s going to be easy to do on the Secondary Market: which I LIKE. I would prefer old fashioned trading of cards, like we all used to do, and I think Disc Cards leans into to that real effectively.
Finally, Disc Cards uses the rolling of Dice as a central game mechanic, which I LIKE: it’s always fun to roll dice, I don’t know many people who think different about that. And anyone who has played Disc Golf knows, you never really know exactly what’s going to happen when you throw your Disc, so that pairs well with rolling dice in the game. The rolling of dice gives your throw a Starting Point, and you then use your Discs to massage the numbers to where they need to be to pass the Route.
Q: How did you come up with the name Disc Cards?
A: I actually had come up with Discards as a game name, but (as I came to find out!) there were a couple dudes in Denmark who had made a one-off card game about Disc Golf called Discards the previous year. The copyright rules are totally separate, I COULD have gone forward with mine Stateside as Discards, but decided that #1 better English is better, and #2 how would I want to be treated? It’s funny, but a major Disc Golf company has now released a set of Disc Golf Pro Player Cards called Discards. I wonder if they did that in deference to MY previous work with the far better Disc Cards name? I’d like to think so, I guess, but what about those guys in Denmark?
Q: How long have you been working on the game?
A: It’s been almost 6 years I have been working on it, and the version you see will be v17.
Q: What is the illustration/design process like?
A: In general it’s been a process of going from paper in card sleeves sandwiching old commons for playtesting, to having software made to arrange card images on a 12x18 sheet, to buying the production printer used in the making of the actual cards and color matching/testing and the fine points of printing beautiful cards.
At first, every time I would finish a version for playtesting, that playtesting would cause so many inspirations a new version was needed. We spiraled in on a game mechanic that would make sense but wasn’t too cumbersome (up until version 13 we used to have a Putting Step after the Route was done. That seems like an age ago in retrospect now). Then it’s trying to make it hard but not TOO hard, and what happens when the cards on the table fail, and you keep rolling 6’s over and over again? “Scrambling” came into being late, around v14-15, but really solved huge problems in that regard. The last couple of versions were really more about getting various groups of texts more legible, getting the iconography arranged the way it looks best, some color adjustments on things that looked too close to other things on the card: design issues which contributed to problems in playtesting. It’s been a journey, for sure.
The art was done along the way, had to be: art is expensive. At first I had different versions of the same art showing up in different color versions of cards, by necessity, but now almost all of the 144 Common/Uncommon cards have unique art. Once I had around 100 unique pieces, I had enough to divide the art up into groups or Genres, which I then assigned to the each of the 6 colors in the game.
I think this gave some rhyme and reason to what was and is a VERY eclectic lot of art. Blue is Mythic Creatures, Yellow Realistic Humans, Red is Fantasy/Horror, Green is Animals, Orange is Grab- Bag/Hard to classify art, and Purple is Anime style pieces. I really think when all is said and done we will have the largest collection of Disc Golf Art assembled together for a single purpose.
Q: What are your future plans for Disc Cards?
A: Disc Cards: Road Trip to Scandinavia!!
There are so many beautiful courses in Finland, Denmark, Sweden: it’s a gorgeous source for very high-quality subject matter. Road Trip to Scandinavia will introduce Multi-color Discs, as well as Black and White Discs to the base set. One of the interesting things about the way Disc Cards came together over time is the sheer number of ideas and mechanics discarded (ha) along the way in the name of simplicity and flow. I have material for a dozen expansions saved in previous versions, that got trimmed after playtesting.
Q: Will you be at any upcoming conventions?
A: I do not have any of that planned, it’s just me, and mostly it’s been about game development, getting online followers to the Kickstarter as that process has gone on. Now with the video done I hope to ramp up the number of Kickstarter followers that way.
Q: Do you have any advice for someone looking to make their own TCG?
A: Make sure you have a ton of time, money and passion to spare. It really takes over, as my family will attest to. It’s been fun, no doubt about that, and I have learned many other skills in the realm of marketing, graphic design, game design, video editing, photography, business administration: there’s a lot. Just make sure you don’t get ahead of yourself and try to do too much before your playtesting is done. If I had been a little more efficient with the playtesting early on, I could have segmented the process a little more down the line with the Production and Marketing tasks, as opposed to doing everything simultaneously, as I ended up doing. And ABOVE ALL ELSE make sure you have a supportive family who won’t be too upset when they don’t see you a lot until project completion. That helps a lot.
For more, follow @disccards on Instagram and check out their Kickstarter, live now!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robeames/disc-cards-the-disc-golf-limited-trading-card-game
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