Cuttle – a MTG like game using a standard 52 card deck
pagat.com373 points by 7thaccount 3 days ago
373 points by 7thaccount 3 days ago
I'm a huge fan of card games that can be played with a regular deck of cards, and I play Cuttle with my kids somewhat regularly. It's a fast-paced game, but you do have to get over the initial learning curve of the effects. I find just printing out a piece of paper with a quick reference on it helps.
As others have alluded to in the thread, teaching people the rules is a barrier. As I looked around for a professionally printed game, I found a game that was very much like Magic the Gathering, but also just a single box of cards called Mindbug.
Turns out it was designed by some folks that brought Richard Garfield in near the end of its design and he ended up having some say in the final product. I've played it a couple of times and each game is only played with a random subset of the cards, so the combinatorics create a lot of replay value.
+1 for mindbug and its extensions. The games are quick and nervous, players only have 3 pv.
The card effects are interesting, the illustrations illarious and the interractions a lot of fun.
The twist of the game, the mindbug itself, is a blast of bluffing and gambling that garanties some smiles.
Limited to 2 players but a great small box to have on all occasion of you are into that kind of stuff.
The rules are simple so ir's easy to get in.
Epic Card Game is another cheaper/fast MTG alternative. The base set costs $10 and comes with 120 unique cards, enough for 4 players, constructing decks, or drafting. No lands like in MTG, no weak cards, I found it to be really fun.
The name is stupid though, impossible to search on the web or YouTube (everybody had an "epic" round of some card game), a shame.
https://www.epiccardgame.com/learn
I second Mindbug too. Also Radlands.
They're not doing themselves any favors with <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epiccardga...> and I'm guessing it being so ancient is why it doesn't show up in the Play Store searches
Yeah the game has been dropped by its authors at this point, but there are a lot of cards available (I ended up buying the entire collection of all packs and expansions for $100 on Amazon... though I never pull it all out) and the mobile app works (including multiplayer, simultaneous or not, and bots).
Then why in the world would they continue to link to Play from their site? Is their website abandonware, too?
Maybe I misunderstood, does the link (the one you posted) not work for you?
> This app is not available for any of your devices
and the Install button is "grayed out". That explains why https://play.google.com/store/search?q=Epic%20Card%20Game&c=... from my device only came back with sponsored ads and Hearthstone because they have effectively be delisted from Play -- still available if you have the actual link, but not showing up in search results from the device
I see. Well the button works for my wife and I, and we've been playing it (on Pixel and Samsung phones). I wonder why it doesn't work on yours.
There is also the game "Scuttle ", which is Cuttle on a deck of cards printed with the different abilities.
You may as well go for the OG deckbuilder: Dominion. It's my favorite board game and has lots of expansions.
Here are the notes I wrote for myself as a magic player, to translate it into purely MTG terms. (These probably aren't enough to explain on their own, but they'll probably help MTG players who want to get the gist.)
Your opponent has 21 life and you win when your creatures have at least that much power. You can’t attack.
Setup: dealer goes second and starts with 6 cards, opponent starts with 5 cards. Hand limit of 7.
On your turn: Either play 1 card or draw 1 card
Point cards (ace - 10; ace is 1) are creatures with power equal to their point number. Face cards (and sideways 8) are enchantments. No lands or mana costs. "Playing" a card refers to casting that card or channeling that card.
Every point card has “channel - discard this card: Choose a creature with lesser value. Destroy it.” (suit matters, spades > hearts > diamonds > clubs, e.g., 8 of hearts is greater value than 8 of diamonds or any 7 but less than 8 of spades or any 9.) Note that this doesn't target.
Most point cards can be played as sorceries for an alternate effect:
Ace: wrath of God
2: disenchant OR muddle the mixture (this is the only instant and does not count toward your 1 card per turn limit. Everything else is sorcery speed)
3: regrowth
4: mind rot
5: divination
6: tranquility / back to nature
7: mind’s desire
8: sideways as enchantment - glasses of Urza
9: aura extraction*
10: none
Face cards are exclusively enchantments:
Jack: control magic**
Queen: Privileged position***
King: reduce your opponent’s life total based on the number of kings you control for as long as they remain on the battlefield: 0: 21; 1: 14; 2: 10; 3: 7; 4: 5.
Notes: The card types are pretty explicit - muddle the mixture can only counter sorceries or instants, not creatures, enchantments, or channeling. Wrath of god only kills creatures, tranquility only kills enchantments.
Rules can differ, depending on the source:
* sometimes as "reflector mage for enchantments", sometimes as "unsummon for enchantments". **sometimes as "exchange control of target creature". ***sometimes as "all permanents you control have hexproof", I.e., including itself.
Thanks buddy, this made it a lot easier to grasp without any reading on Cuttle.
For anyone who wants a more complex game proximate to this design, there's a small production called Reinforcements (https://reinforcementscg.myshopify.com/). Non-collectible, single box.
You play a hand of up to 5 cards each turn: Adding cards to (concealed) stacked ranks of defending troops, attacking an opponent's ranks, using a card's ability. The suits have different defensive properties when arranged in a rank, and combine in interesting ways; there are also "ultimate" powers players can grab from the center by forming their ranks with particular arrangements of suits, which act as turtle-busters.
Highly recommended, quite fun, probably plays best 1v1. Definitely a lot of small rules to absorb, so it's a more complex beast. But nowhere close to the complexity of Magic.
If co-op games are more your speed, check out Regicide.
Awesome, tried it solo and it seems great, will try 2-player later.
Link to rules: https://www.regicidegame.com/how-to-play/
+1 Regicide is a great game, difficult to master, but when playing with the same people often you learn how to play and work off each other in subtle ways.
I'd never heard of reinforcements, but it looks awesome. Definitely will purchase.
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Sorry. I just reread the comment I made and yeah that looks like some product placement or fake Amazon review.
I can assure you it's coincidental. I posted about a game I recently discovered and then have been super stoked by people leaving their knowledge of similar games that I'm now also excited to give a go. I've recently got into card games and domino games with the kid (a few board games too) and it's all a blast. One of my favorite aspects of HN (have been on here for about a decade, but occasionally lose my account password and have to start over) is the collective knowledge of curious people who know deep stuff about nearly every topic.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing...If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
They have 300 times and 1000 times the reputation you have. Maybe dail down the paranoia.
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This is for a simple card game man. Recommending board games is part of the culture of the hobby. It ain’t that deep
7thaccount is a great HN user. I don't believe they're astroturfing. I do believe you meant this sincerely though.
Would you say you would definitely recommend 7thaccount to other HN users?
Not sure I'm interpreting your question correctly.
(i think they're jokingly implying you're continuing with the astro-turfing thing, i.e. "Ten out of ten HN mods recommend 7thaccount!" :D )
*I recently stumbled upon this, but haven't had the time to play yet. It seems like it would be fun.
I've recently started learning card games that use a standard deck of playing cards and have been pleased with many of them. The advantage over trading card games is that it is MUCH cheaper and takes up a lot less space and it doesn't feel like I'm chasing an impossible goal.
A number of years ago I was at a friend's house and he wanted to play Uno but he couldn't be cause his dog got into the deck and many of the cards were damaged.
I noticed he had a couple of packs of playing cards on his coffee table and upon closer inspection, I realized that each card in Uno maps to a card in 52 card deck. A standard Uno deck has 108 cards, which is a standard 52-card deck plus the jokers.
So we played Uno with his two decks of playing cards.
My friend, you just rediscovered Crazy Eights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eights
In fact, Uno exists because one family liked playing Crazy Eights but got tired arguing about the rules, so they started writing the rules on the cards and eventually made new cards: https://www.museumofplay.org/toys/uno/
That's interesting. I always assumed that UNO was a branded version of a very similar game we used to play as kids with a regular deck of cards (e.g. 7 is draw 2, Jack allows you to pick a color). The game is called Tschau Sepp and very commonly played in Switzerland. I just assumed other countries had their own version of it, and that UNO derived from it.
Called mau mau in germany
A similar game called "Pesten" is played in the netherlands
Would not be surprised if there is a version of this game everywhere decks of cards are available
As with other commenters, we used to play a game similar to what is now Uno with a standard deck, we call it "pesten" (bullying), but the wiki page says it's similar to the US Crazy Eights, and internationally it's known as Mau-Mau [0].
A bit of a shameless plug, but maybe it could be of interest. Having been through a similar journey some years ago I spent some time back then to design a variation of Knizia’s Battle Line/Schotten Totten for a standard deck:
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/191552/vassal
It is not the first such variant, but one that I felt a bit more pleased with than the other variants I found.
I tried to embark on this a few years ago, thinking particularly for cases where space is at a premium (airports) or I don't want to worry about wrecking/losing game components (camping, the beach).
Overall I didn't find a lot that I liked, particularly in the two-player space. Everything seemed to be either Rummy-family games around set collecting, or trick-taking games that might as well have been Hearts or Euchre.
All that to say, if you've got a few favourites, please recommend!
Solitaire based games have been big with my family recently. We sometimes do them cooperatively. If you go on YouTube, people have all kinds of newly invented ones or ones that are slight variations of another. Joker jailbreak is an example. Also Dungeon Crawl or Clear the Dungeon or something like that. I think I also watched a video for Osmosis. None of these are like Warhammer 40k exciting, but they are surprisingly fun at killing 10-15 minutes when you're waiting on your food. Even though they are 1 player games, my family and I frequently do it as a family activity or take turns. We keep a pack of playing cards in the glove compartment of the car so we never forget. I feel dumb for not learning more than a few card games as a kid.
Packogame [0] makes a variety of games like that; I haven't played most of them but I can recommend Nut as well as Bus.
This actually also looks right up my alley. The recommendations on this thread are awesome. It looks like they have like 24 different small card games that fit into a tiny package. It's always hard for me to tell if I'll like it or not before playing though. I'm a lot more forgiving of short games though
Two player games that can be played with a standard deck of cards:
Haggis, Greasy Spoon, Crisps, Dickory, Vidrasso, Cupid: Tricks and Tactics, Tuhao.
Just a note for people who are fascinated by the idea of sometimes skipping proprietary games that require specialized, expensive, and often irreplaceable equipment: Other than pagat, and David Parlett's page (https://www.parlettgames.uk/), we can observe that the master has already given us two gifts.
New Tactical Games with Dice and Cards and Dice Games Properly Explained by Reiner Knizia
Two of the books I'd take to prison.
For those that are interested, there's an online version available: https://www.cuttle.cards/signup
There's also a bot you can play against: https://human-ai-interaction.github.io/cuttle-bot/
(Supposedly linked from that site somewhere, but I got it from the reddit thread linked elsewhere here.)
There’s a local pub by my old house that has a considerable collection of board games so we got to sample a lot that we or friends didn’t already own. It always amuses me when I figure out that a board or card game was obviously prototyped on a standard card deck. It didn’t happen a lot but it did happen a few times.
Four kinds of cards in 1-2 stacks? 10-13 cards of each kind? 2-4 special cards that are identical? Hmm, I wonder how this game was invented…
I do wish we would get back to games that were just played with a deck of cards though. More options for bored people at small gatherings.
There are tons of them, mostly thanks to a renaissance in Japan starting maybe a decade ago but spreading elsewhere.
Taylor's Trick Taking Table is a YouTube channel dedicated to them. The Portland Game Collective's Discord channel is the de facto English language home to the movement.
Most of them are very small scale and artisanal but a few bigger publishers have also started doing more of them in the past year.
The Tokyo Game Market has literally hundreds of new ones released every year but most don't have English and can only be bought in Japan.
A few smaller companies like Tricky Imports and Newmill Games are importing them, though.
There are quite a few made in niche communities but often not very discoverable, as they aren't commercially viable and marketed. One notable exception is The Emissary[1] which had a successful retail release as For Northwood![2]. Kni54ts[3] is often held up as another very good example of the genre, making very creative use of the deck, but you can find many more browsing through the links.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DB2YF46s0oVFUSIpR9vxoGIbhpT... [2] https://www.sideroomgames.com/product/for-northwood/ [3] https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2946002/wip-kni54ts-a-solo-...
Couldn't you just translate the rules to a standard playing deck? Seems like a PITA, but if you dont want to go through that effort, the ruleset inventor should get compensated for their effort...
Back in the day, me and a buddy wanted to play Magic -- mainly to troll our friends -- but didn't have cards to hand.
We took a pair of normal card decks, mapped some basic decks to the cards, and we did play. Good times.
I find that it gets really tedious when the mapping is complicated enough. Cuttle is already a little random, and you'll spend time looking up what your cards are (at least in your first games).
Unless you're willing to write on the cards of course.
We did it with paper reference, and were playing _a lot_ of Magic at the time.
Not something we ever did on the regular, but it was fun.
This reminds me of Duel [0], which also intended to be an MTG-like with a 52 card deck.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100107192618/http://airship.ho...
This is fascinating. It seems obvious that this game was the direct inspiration for MtG, as Richard Garfield was a huge card game fanatic, and the number of unique effects it has in common (wraths, bounce, etc.) that are so iconic in MtG.
Richard Garfield had never heard of Cuttle until fairly recently
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/17cb47k/cuttle_...
Magic's direct inspiration was Cosmic Encounter.
Interesting, there must be some cross overs going on back in the 70s. The mechanics are so similar to mtg.
I thought the same thing! I had the incredible privilege to chat with Richard and even play some Cuttle with him on the site and the way he explained it was that there must have been shared influences between himself and whoever created Cuttle
So so cool to see Cuttle on Hacker News! Cuttle is my favorite game; I’ve been playing it for about 12 years and it never gets old.
Back around 2015 I was shocked that there wasn’t a place to play online. It’s the kind of game where the appeal is immediate if you’re into this sort of thing. I was like, where the hell has this game been all my life? How had I grown up playing card games and never known about this gem?
So I did what anyone would do: I learned web development to create a site for playing Cuttle online: https://cuttle.cards
I’ve made it my mission to make it so anyone can play Cuttle anytime they want. We still have some growing to do in order to reach that point, but we have a vibrant community with weekly play sessions, a ranked leaderboard, and 5 invitational championship tournaments every year. Check it out!
Some resources for anyone who’d like to learn more: We have open play sessions on the site every Wednesday at 8:30pm EST and every Thursday at 12pm EST. Beginners are always welcome and it’s the best time to find games.
We have an active discord (https://discord.gg/tPWm6kpbmb) where you can chat with other players, find games, and dive into strategy.
Here is a printable cheat sheet you can use to make learning (and teaching) the rules easier: https://www.cuttle.cards/img/cuttle_rules.pdf
We also live stream the Cuttle tournaments on twitch: https://twitch.tv/cuttle_cards
And then upload the VODs to YouTube: https://youtube.com/@cuttle-cards2245?si=lHbXNsQX54KjLtxk
Lastly as someone else mentioned, the whole project is open source, so if you’re interested in the technical side of things, you can check out the repo here: https://github.com/cuttle-cards/cuttle
It’s very much under active development and we’re always happy to work with new contributors, so if you’re interested in contributing to a full stack pvp card game, I’ve got just the thing for you. The app is a nodejs backend built with the sailsjs backend framework and a Vue 3 SPA frontend. We use cypress for e2e testing and vitest for unit testing. The test setup is something I’m particularly proud of and I’ve found the card game context to be an enormously fruitful one for testing automation since it saves so much time developing for multi user flows.
All that is to say that Cuttle is a blast and that if playing the game or contributing to the open source application interests you, I’d be happy to answer any questions about either. I hope y’all enjoy!
There's so many games that can be played with a 52 card deck, many years ago I tried to do a sort of battle game but I ended up giving up. It had to do with formations of cards but it's very difficult to create a card game that is balanced and fun!
This game seems super interesting so I'll be adding it to my ever growing collection of standard card deck games.
Thank you!
What other games do you like?
I am in Latin America so we play a lot of variants of games here.
I like canasta, 26, Escoba, 500, carioca.
TIL combat card games exist. This is so cool.
My poor partner will have these inflicted upon her.
tap your opponents web server, they cannot untap it during their untap step
I am having some friends over next week for dinner and we'll probably play some games afterwards. There are a ton of other games listed on the site and I am sure there are some fun ones here!
I always wonder about the math in these more complex card games, and whether it would be possible to calculate like it is in poker. Specifically, is the game fair for all players starting from a random set of cards? For example in Cuttle, if you get two Kings in your hand, do the chances of winning shift slightly, or skyrocket?
I guess this is why play testing when creating new games can take a long time - both for enjoyment and fairness.
If I have two Queens in play am I untargetable? (each Queen protects the other?)
EDIT: ah, was confused by the cheat sheet on cuttle.cards (https://www.cuttle.cards/img/cuttle_rules.pdf). The main page mentions the mutual-Queen-protection as a variant, which I guess cuttle.cards has adopted.
Another MTG-like game played with standard cards is Superjack: https://www.superjackthegame.com/ Uses two decks, 40 cards per player.
The comparison to MTG seems rather strange to me. There's a superficial relationship that both are dueling games, but the fundamentals aren't the same.
MTG strategy relies on mana advantage, card advantage, card selection advantage, card efficiency advantage (aka pay WotC more), and tempo advantage.
Cuttle doesn't have casting resources to manage. It has little card efficiency advantage. Tempo advantage is mostly linked to the mana curve and mostly doesn't exist. Card selection doesn't exist outside of getting a card from the graveyard or seeing an extra card. Card advantage exists, but mostly doesn't matter because you can't capitalize on the cards you draw. Even worse, the terribly unfun card disadvantage exists in the form of a discard effect.
It looks interesting, but I always struggle to explain (and conversely when on the other side, to understand) the rules of card games to new players. Has anyone had success in bringing a game more complicated than Cards Against Humanity to their friend group? What did you find helpful?
If you're playing with a friend group that has zero experience with card/board games, you need to ease them into the hobby with a game that's quick to explain and get into. If anything takes more than 10 minutes to explain then people generally give up.
I had success getting friends to play games like Codenames, Fauna, Mountains of Madness, and Mysterium. There's a website called BoardGameGeek that gives each game a "weight" rating signifying how complex it is. Anything under 2/5 complexity should be easy enough for anybody.
I've had really good success with Monopoly Deal. Even if you hate regular monopoly (like me), I highly recommend.
Rules are very simple, yet the strategy is deeper. You essentially want to get 3 property sets, but there are all kinds of action cards that allow you to steal properties or sets, negate actions, charge people rent money...etc. Nobody gets upset either as a typical game takes like 10-20 minutes. You can play like 2-6 players iirc.
One of my favourite categories of game is the ones that can be taught in one minute, yet has interesting gameplay. Santorini, Quaridor and Orbito are all this category.
I've taught dozens of people to play Magic, although not in the past 10 years.
First, if at all possible, teach only one person at a time. Teaching multiple people a new game all at once is incredibly difficult for everyone.
Second, they need to understand the basic turn structure or play pattern if the game has one. If you can, print it out and use it as a play-aid.
Third, play several games open-handed with pre-constructed decks. Do not introduce the deckbuilding aspects of the game right away. Make the decks simple and basic. Ideally, create one deck for each "faction" in the game.
In Magic, Wizards made 30-card beginning decks in each of the five colors that were meant for teaching the game. This was 15 years ago or more; I doubt they still do it since Arena exists. They were all common, so nothing complicated. They were like... $10 a set or something. So you'd do the above and play a couple of games with different colors and let the new player find one they like. Then, once they feel experienced and played a game close-handed or with only one of us playing close-handed, I'd ask them which two decks they liked the best, and I'd pick two others. Then we'd each shuffle the two chosen decks together and play again. And watching a person's mind expand into what the game really was during that game was incredibly satisfying. Ideally, at the end, I'd just give them all five decks to keep.
> First, if at all possible, teach only one person at a time. Teaching multiple people a new game all at once is incredibly difficult for everyone.
Interesting observation! I haven't had this experience at all. I've taught lots of board games to people, usually to multiple at once. The thing I find tricky is when you have some people who have played before and they keep interjecting with details that either aren't relevant yet, or I was planning to mention at a better time in the explanation.
A group of all newbs is much easier.
I think trading card games are different because everyone is kinda playing a different game. Their hands are all going to vary a lot, so they each get their questions and sticking points in a different order. Games like Magic are harder because you can play on other people's turns, and the game is very very exception-based (cards often break general rules).
Otherwise, yeah I think teaching board games to a group is not that much harder. Or playing card games for that matter.
Card Kingdom makes Rookie Decks in each color that I’ve found make great teaching decks!
I think it is a function of building up the concepts.
You might teach someone how to play Hearts which is pretty rules light. But once they understand that, other trick taking games already have a head start.
Another approach is to start with something where the rules are things on the cards so you learn them as you go. Sushi Go would be a good example of something like this and pretty approachable to start out.
Another good suggestion is something like No Thanks! Over time, people start to see that a new game doesn't have to be onerous. Slowly learning concepts like drafting and discards and tricks and whatever, makes it easy to introduce further games because it becomes "This is just like Game X but with new rule Y."
I wish I knew more interesting games that could be played with a standard deck. My wife and I travel a lot and there's something I find deeply appealing about being able to walk into any gas station, corner shop, or airport store anywhere in the world and come out with a dependency-free way of entertaining yourself (or even making friends!), and I feel like I don't know enough games that take advantage of that.
That being said, I do have a few standbys:
Bullshit's a favorite for semi-large groups: https://www.pagat.com/beating/cheat.html
Egyptian Ratscrew is my pick for 3-5 players (although I'd caution it against playing it in quiet public spaces): https://waste.org/~oliviax/cards/ratscrew.html
Lastly, Duel 52 is a recent favorite for just my wife and I to play, and very much in the vein of Cuttle: http://juddmadden.com/duel52/
My Ukrainian roommate taught me Durak, it's a good complement to ERS if the people you're with aren't as slap-happy as that game require.
Looks fun, but all the special effects seem like they'd be hard to remember. I wonder if there's a simpler variation that requires fewer rules to remember.
Doesn't seem that hard for me, but maybe because I play a lot of collectible card games and most effects in Cuttle are easily mapped to TCG mechanics.
You could also use mnemonics to remember effects, I've come up with these:
2 - Two blue (counterspell cost in Magic)
3 - Three Wishes (wish for a card from stockpile)
4 - _ (possible connection: 4 is "Death" number in China and Japan)
5 - Dig for more cards (with your 5-finger hand)
6 - Six sweeps the tricks (thanks to ChatGPT for this one)
7 - Lucky Draw
8 - Pair of Glasses
9 - Lasso (you bind opponents card for a turn)
10 - Highest points (no effect, should be easy to remember)
J - jump (sudden assault)
Q - Mom steps forward to protect her kids
K - One king's on scene, you need fourteen. If two kings defend, make it ten. With three kings on the rise, try seven to prize. When all kings alive, you just need five. (thanks to Claude for 1, 2 and 4 kings)
Ace - Ace clears the spacewhat a great website.
I was recently taught a card game, and when I searched for it I could not find it anywhere. Now I can probably find it.
There’s also the unrelated Cuttle by Toby
For creating SVG files for CNC cutting.
I dabbled with it when it was posted here some time ago, definitely much easier to use for its intended purpose than a fully featured app like Inkscape etc.
I believe he frequents these parts.