(there’s a download link at the bottom. some reflection on my experience making this game first.)
for the last six months of my life, i’ve been working on and off on a game called Perpetual Motion. the impetus for this was simple: i’d been playing magic: the gathering, and i wanted something like magic’s limited experience that worked at lower player counts and without investing in an expensive “cube” for drafting. i’ve since built a cube anyway, but i didn’t want to at the time. also i thought it would be cool if the win condition for a game was “make an infinite combo”.
almost every part of this game has changed time and time again. the main spreadsheet i work in is called “cards v6”, and that’s because i outgrew (or iterated away from) five previous spreadsheets. the only thing that has stayed the same is that concept: what if you could win by making an infinite combo. what if that was the way to win. and, from very early on in development, the name has been the same: Perpetual Motion.
right now, drafting has been deemphasized in favor of constructed play. i’ve adopted a factional system similar to some other tcgs, notably One Piece TCG, in which a single “leader” card determines the types of cards the rest of your deck can play. there’s also an innovative (i know of nothing like it in a tcg) card draw system called “the supply” in which the top several cards of each player’s deck are faceup at all times, and both players compete to draw the ones they want.
from very early on in development i’ve known this game will be complicated, and i’ve leaned into it a little. i’m not making a game that’s particularly mass-marketable. i doubt i’ll ever sell it, honestly—the audience for this thing is too niche, i like to say “it’s for people who play magic: the gathering and think ‘i wish there was more going on here”.
(oh, speaking of, a tidbit about this game that might make longtime magic players appreciate it: there’s no such thing as mana screw, because every card is functionally an MDFC)
anyway, my college has a ‘january term’ type of program where students don’t have regular classes in january and instead can spend the month working on kind of whatever, along with a professor sponsoring them. i was able to convince a TCG fan in the math department that this was a project worth doing, and so this game was my january term.
january’s a weird month to do something like this. seasonal depression and the relative absence of people in person made it hard to be quite as productive as i’d have liked, though i still managed to get a lot done. i mean, hey—there’s a rules document, which is far from perfect but i think usable. there’s seven different decks that are prebuilt for people to play, though i’m sure they’ll all go through significant iteration. and there are nearly 300 unique cards—though, of course, there’s no chance in the world they’re remotely balanced.
the hardest part about working on something like this is having people to play the game. the amount of testing something like perpetual motion wants is immense, and that’s the next step (the next hundred steps, really) in turning this from “an unbalanced mess” to “something with some amount of balance”.
that’s part of why i’m letting people download it now, though—because if what i’m saying here sounds interesting to you, if you are one of those people who sees magic and wants to explore the most complicated corners of it, i hope that, even in the messy state it exists in now, you’ll see my vision of what this game could be, and you’ll join me on this journey.
in addition to all the files for the game (for print-and-play, tabletop simulator, or cockatrice!), we have a public discord server, where you can find people to play the game with, ask rules questions, give suggestions, or anything else.
so what are you waiting for? come build a perpetual motion machine.
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