Why every game I write uses a standard deck of 52 playing cards.
People ask me sometimes why I don’t use dice. All four of the solo journaling games I’ve written run on a standard deck of playing cards. So does the new one. There is a small design essay in this that I keep meaning to write.
Cards are objects. When you draw a card, you take a small physical thing out of a stack and turn it. It has a face. It has a suit. It is not just a number rolled and forgotten. That fact of thereness — the card sitting on the table beside your notebook, unclaimed for a moment before you look at it — is the mood of a solo journaling game in a nutshell.
Cards force scarcity. A d20 can roll a 15 fifty times in a row. A deck can only give you a King of Hearts once, until you shuffle. This forces the game to think about what happens when a specific prompt has already come. It forces the deck itself to be a small clock.
Cards carry meaning. Suits have four flavours that anyone can hold in mind. Hearts feel warm. Spades feel heavy. Diamonds feel worked. Clubs feel like labour. Nothing else in tabletop is as available and as ancient — the standard fifty-two-card deck exists everywhere in the world and has for four hundred years.
Cards make the game portable to anyone’s kitchen drawer. This is not a small thing. Every household with a deck of cards has the game.
The Keeper trilogy — The Hearthkeeper, The Lighthouse Keeper, The Forest Keeper — and now The Vanished Atlas all share this. The same shape of the hand. Thirteen turnings of a year (or thirteen commissions). Four prompts per turning, one per suit. A small tally that rises with the darker cards.
The mechanics are simple on purpose. The point of a solo journaling game is not to be clever with numbers. It is to be present at a small quiet table with a pencil.
→ The whole catalogue at comatador.itch.io, if it speaks to you.
Slow games, slow press. Hearth & Quill.
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