Out of all the games I’ve ever had part in developing, Blossom sticks out to me as one of my favorite. Blossom is a 2 player cooperative storytelling game, where players draw a hand of evocative, pictorial cards and take turns placing them on a playmat that includes a timeline. Inspired by the improvisation and idea of important but organic placements in Tarot divination, Blossom aimed to give more structure and cooperation in the creation of a story via cards. What Blossom did fantastically was provide a structured storytelling experience for players who enjoyed narrative games, and it even seemed to function fairly well as an exercise for writers who were looking to generate ideas on world or character building. As someone who loves to play Dungeons & Dragons and be a GM, I found this flow to be really exciting. However, where Blossom fell a little short was it was quite overwhelming for players who struggle to be creative on the spot, and by its nature the game put a lot of responsibility on the players to inform their own experience. This is a big flaw in Blossom’s design, and I hope someday to return to the game and address it.

I felt a new concept brewing in my mind after making Blossom. The problem I wanted to tackle, putting more gameplay elements and rules into a storytelling card game, was something I wanted to address without changing Blossom drastically - this led me to the quick decision to start from scratch and make something adjacent but still quite different, as the jumping off point and end goal was somewhere else. I realized I wanted to try my hand at making a card system that could properly accommodate my lofty goal: to make platform on which both freeform storytelling experiences AND narrative games with clear gameplay goals and strategic decisions could take place. Thus, Analog Dreams was conceived.

As I started prototyping, I thought about the parts of Blossom, and Tarot before Blossom, that I liked. I liked that the cards were simple, but offered a wealth of information. In Tarot this information must be memorized, and is therefore relatively inaccessible, but there is indeed the provision that the reader’s “feeling” about the card and its location in the spread could be more important than the conventional card meaning. This came forth even stronger in Blossom, where there weren’t any words or ranks on the cards at all - just art that was pulled from open source museum collections. Although many can agree pictures can speak to our emotions and inner narrative sometimes better than words can, this can be difficult if you want to do more than just tell stories, or even if you just want some help in doing so. Looking at other fortunetelling devices, I found the Lenormand deck - similar to Tarot, Lenormand uses imagery to imply a deeper meaning, but contrasts Tarot in that this imagery is more accessible. Because the objects on the cards are more basic - a book, a house, a mountain - it is seemingly easier to improvise; the system is not as daunting to learn as it builds its foundation on cultural expectations and views on a worldly object. This is seen even clearer when you discover some of the Lenormand cards have vastly different meanings in different countries. (e.g. the Snake in “French Modern” readings signifies trouble, but in “German Traditional” reads as a neutral woman card.) Still, Lenormand was still a fortunetelling device, a “toy” as Keith Burgun might say, and far from a game. Following the gameplay-itch, I found the Decktet, which is a great, charming card system I became a huge fan of conceptually.

I can’t say I’ve played any AMAZING games on the Decktet, but studying it is what gave me my biggest breakthrough in making Analog Dreams. The cards look like a bit of a mess on first glance: they have an image, multiple suits (none of which are familiar), a name, and a rank (the cards pictured are part of the extended deck, and are “pawns” instead of ranked.) Some cards, the Aces and Crowns, have only one suit; most have two suits but some have three and one card has no suit or rank... it’s hard to wrap your head around with all the information jam-packed into any given card. But there was something so interesting about the intersections that appear in these cards, and the subtle narrative I liked so much from Lenormand. I felt like I at last found an example of a card system that had combined gamey-ness with storytelling and the design challenge quickly evolved: how do I make a card system that does better - one that is clearer and more concise?

Finally...

What you see above is a very rough paper prototype of the major cards in the Analog Dreams deck. After many iterations, there are now 26 cards total (28 counting the Jokers, temporarily called “The Excuse” after the Joker-variant in the Decktet), and they have a similar level of variance without the cognitive overload. The way I combated the parsing difficulty in the Decktet is by making only some of the information apply on the card depending on how you’re looking at it; that is to say, the orientation of the card changes what the card means.

As you might be able to make out from the image, the face cards (the Jack, Queen, and King) have two suits, and two titles (names and art pictured VERY subject to change). Let’s take the first card pictured as an example: the card is always ranked as a King, but depending on how it is viewed, it is either a King of Clubs (the Mouse), or a King of Spades (the Bird). All face cards behave this way; what about the other cards? They too are affected by orientation, but they all share a suit - it’s their rank that changes. Therefore, the 2 of Spades can also be the 9 of Spades, the 3 of Clubs the 8 of Clubs, and so on until they meet in the middle at the 5 and 6. This means the placement of the card in a game, or how you’re holding it in your hand, changes the possibility space of the game.

Having the orientation of the card changeable was influenced by Pipe Dream and other puzzle games like Tsuro. I loved the idea of positioning being part of play, similarly to how the “reversed” definition of a Tarot card is different from its traditional meaning. Not all games currently being prototyped on Analog Dreams have hard rules about the players being able to “choose” which version of the card they will play, but some do, and it feels like there’s a good amount of strategic possibility to be explored there. Now, you might be wondering:

That’s cool, but what’s happening right now?

Currently, I’m iterating on the games I have made for this system and adopting the rules to fit this new positioning rule. Additionally, a very special and talented friend and colleague of mine has agreed to collaborate with me on putting even better art on these cards that is reflective of the universe all the games are narratively set in. All the games I’ve been prototyping take place in a grander sci-fi inspired world that I have so many ideas for, and each game is a narrow “perspective” of a character in that universe. This is the first time I’ve worked with a great artist on bringing a game idea to life, and I’m so thrilled and thankful I could find that in this project.