Minion Creator is a card game project that I created in the course Game Design Perspectives at the Savannah College of Art & Design. This game is a reaction or “twitch-based” card game for two players. Rather than take turns, each player scrambles at the same time to complete their goal.

The players use decks of cards to build “minions” to attack their opponent. Both players simultaneously place cards, building minions piece by piece and stopping the other player from progressing. The first player who builds two minions and can land two attacks at the same time wins the game.

A blue deity and a red deity find themselves in an intense rivalry. Instead of fighting directly, both have the amazing ability to build minion soldiers and give them a soul, thereby giving them life.

Using these minions, each deity plans to attack the other in order to rule the entire land. They must act quickly and ruthlessly, defeating the other deity before they are defeated themselves.

1. Once the game begins, both players place cards on the table to create minions.

2. Minions are created with an initial core card, then head and legs, and then finally a soul card. The player who places the soul card owns the minion.

3. Once a minion is complete, the owner can place an attack card on the minion to initiate an attack.

4. The first player to initiate 2 attacks wins simultaneously.

Each player must always have a hand of 5 cards in their hand and hidden from the other player.

Once a player places a card or card(s), they use their free hand to take cards from their deck, replenishing their hand of 5.

If a player cannot make any moves with their current hand, they must wait until they can make a move while their opponent still plays.

If both players can’t make any moves with their current hand, they can agree to place their hand on the bottom of their deck and then drawing 5 new cards from the top. Play resumes after one player counts down and says “Go.”

Various design decisions went into the creation of this game in order to provide a satisfying and balanced game experience. Going into this project, I had no experience designing games or dealing with game mechanics. For this particular game, I was inspired by card game Speed, fighting video games, and mix-and-match monster books for children.

Since this is a game that rewards speed, I wanted a concept that was straight-forward to comprehend. There are several rules to this game, however, the cards relate to each other in an intuitive fashion. Minion cards are composed of head, body, and legs. Secondly, the utility cards are fashioned as natural add-ons like a "Soul" or "Sword." Though the story of this game is unimportant, the mechanics are what led the story rather than the reverse.

Although this game is intended to be fast, I had to make sure that the game didn’t resolve itself too quickly. Therefore, the mix of different cards had to be just right in order for the game to have some counter-play and slowed the tempo. The “Block” and “Convert” cards prevent the opposing player from completing a minion. This counter-play also ensured that the game would cause each player to interact with one another. Rather than merely playing the game individually alongside one another.

This game was designed to have a mix of skill and luck. If given enough experience a person could absolutely get better this game, becoming more proficient with the speed the game demands. However, the element of luck comes with the randomness of each hand. Therefore, a person cannot reliably dominate every single game due to the chance of having a bad hand. In addition, there were several considerations regarding the visual elements of the card game. Since this game is fast-paced with multiple types of cards, the card faces had to be simplistic in form while easily distinguishable from each other. Therefore, I took special attention to ensure the colors and the graphics could allow the player to differentiate each card on the fly. Plus, the cards have to be reversible so they could be read from either side and a minion could be built from different sides.