Could you design a brand-new game using only a deck of classic
playing cards? It’s a cool idea – repurposing familiar components in an
original context. But the design for the game that would become Donsol was born out of necessity, the mother of invention. A pack of cards was all the creators had on hand.
Devine Lu Linvega developed the iOS version of Donsol,
a game that sees heart suits re-cast as “health potions,” clubs and
spades as “monsters”. Starting with four cards, the player gathers
health and fights enemies, making their way through an imagined dungeon
space making combat calculations – the health cards versus the
monsters. It’s a fascinating idea.
The only problem is that completely unbeknownst to Linvega, someone had already made it.
Donsol is almost exactly like Zach Gage’s Scoundrel. Was malicious copying afoot, or is it just that there’s only so much you can do with a deck of cards after all?
Linvega met John Eternal, who works for Sony, on the Train Jam
earlier this year. Game developers buy tickets to buy the cross-country
train to San Francisco, with the annual Game Developers Conference as
the final destination. On the trip, they form tiny teams and make small
games – in game development, the “jam” environment posits that with
unique settings and specific constraints, collaborative new ideas and
relationships can form.
According to Linvega, Eternal turned up for the jam, but left his
power supply behind. “Stuck on a train for 52 hours, he had to…
improvise,” Linvega tells me. “He had a deck of cards, and he made this
game.”
Linvega and his colleague enjoyed the result so much that Linvega volunteered to make a score-keeping app for Donsol on iOS. He ended up helping iterate on the design and contributing his stark, distinctive art style to the cards.
When Zach Gage found out about Donsol, it was an unsettling experience: The game was “basically identical” to Scoundrel,
a game the prolific designer had created in 2011 along with Kurt Bieg.
The similarities were so strong Gage found it hard to believe neither
Linvega, whom he knew, and Eternal, whom he didn’t, had seen Scoundrel before.
