Mood Swings: A 28-Year Quest to Build an Accessible, Minimalist TCG

A design-column detailing Mood Swings, the author’s 28-year journey to create an accessible trading-card game. He distills the core TCG idea as “bigger than the box,” using open-ended, combinatorial interactions built from a single shared deck rather than complex deck-building. The basic loop is a five-round contest where players alternately play one card per round, tally scores, and the round winner goes first next round to enable catch-up and deterministic endgames. Cards fall into four categories (vanillas, value-changers, play effects, static effects) and are balanced with dice-like point values [0]–[6], plus costs like discarding or returning cards to hand. A color pie (red, blue, green) maps emotions to mechanics, helping flavor and balance, while early decisions—no post-opening draws, a fixed starter deck, and booster-inspired limited play—kept the game accessible. The article also covers how emotions informed mechanics, the handling of variance, and the ongoing evolution toward print, with Part 2 promised and a June 1, 2026 launch on MagicSecretLair teased.