> back()

Design Diary: The Very Beginning

{ "published": "2026-10-03T00:00:00Z", "author": "@hollis" }

Hello hackers!

As CTF heads toward its unlimited release next year, I wanted to talk a little bit about its origins. Today, I’ll show off some prototye cards from an earlier unnamed game that would eventually lend some of its mechanics to CTF and discuss how it evolved over several years. Next month, I’ll talk about the design and playtesting of CTF once it became CTF, and in December I’ll talk about the production process.

Eighteen Cards

Back in 2018—feels like a lifetime ago!—I learned about Button Shy Games and fell in love with their wallet games. It was revelatory to me how much game could be contained in just 18 cards. Around the same time, I was starting to join some Seattle board game design networks through weekly playtesting events (shout out to the pre-pandemic Via6 folks!). I’ve been designing games my whole life, but for the first time I was making prototypes and putting them in front of other people.

These two separate threads came together in 2019, while trying to work out how to represent a Pokémon battle in the style of the video games, but in a board game. Moves would be selected simultaneously, then revealed and resolved. Each player would have a very limited set of moves to choose from, but you can’t necessarily just pick the same move over and over again. Suppose those moves were cards in a player’s hand, selected face down and then flipped up together? Cards could be discarded after use, forcing players to “rest”—to take a turn where they don’t do anything else—to recover their options, a mechanic inspired by Century: Spice Road. And could I get the number of cards in a 2-player game down to that magical number 18?

A Rough Prototype

I turned this over in my mind for a few weeks, landing on what I felt was a unique TCG-like distribution model: packs would contain two fully-playable 9-card preconstructed decks, but you wouldn’t know which two decks were in the pack. More common cards would appear in more decks, rarer cards in fewer. Once a player had a few decks, they could swap cards between the decks or build their own from scratch.

Each deck had a champion that determined which colors (“houses”) of cards could be included in the deck, the colorless card rest, and seven more cards. Champions began the game with 30 life points, and a player would win by reducing their opponent’s champion to 0. Attack cards dealt damage to champions, charms stuck to champions and applied continuous effects, and skill cards did other things.

But games like this are only fun when they allow player interaction, and with simultaneous reveals it wanted to have some obvious¹ reward for players who successfully predict their opponent’s moves, so I introduced “fast” and “slow” cards that get revealed early or late, respectively. Fast effects could interact with slower ones, and slow effects could refer back to things that happened earlier in the sequence.

A ROUGH Prototype

The first few playtests revealed some clear fundamental issues:

1. With no randomization, it’s challenging to support interesting combo decks, since they always have access to the tools they need to go off. And even without combo, the best decks will generally be linear and play out the same way every time. There needed to be some way to make sure players didn’t have access to their entire decks at the beginning of each game.
2. Fast and slow cards were an inelegant solution to the player interaction problem. Their mere presence means you can no longer just flip the cards over when both players were ready. You had to ask “Any fast cards?”, then “normal cards?”, then “slow cards?”. It spread the game’s best moment of dramatic tension over three points in time, two of which didn’t matter on most turns.

At this point it was clear there was some work to be done, but then a global pandemic happened.

Five Years Later

I spent a little time here and there pondering ways to address the two big problems, but never enough to remake prototypes or actually playtest it until 2025. When I learned of the PNW Tabletop Game Market, I decided to apply, but first I wanted to make sure I had a game that could be developed and produced in only a few months. I tried and discarded² a few concepts before returning to my old 18-card TCG-ish thing. I could pack two 9-card decks in a hookbox and use the unfolded box as a playmat/board.

The wings of the hookbox became a scoring track. Taking two cards out of the starting hand to track the number of times the scoring track had been traversed was a clean solution to problem #1 up above, with the added benefit of being a familiar TCG mechanic (several games have “shields” you must break to win, and Pokémon has prize cards you must earn). It even opened up additional design space via Security Alerts.

Problem #2 was a tougher nut, though. I considered using relative positions of cards to indicate the order of resolution, playing cards in different orientations to get different kinds of effects, forcing “fast” effects to be face-up, among others. Nothing stuck, until one day when I watched a gameplay video of Compile. The idea of cards having multiple abilities that could apply at different times was perfect. [0] subroutines happen before [1] subroutines happen before [2] subroutines. Each kind can refer to the results of earlier ones or preempt later ones, all without diluting the drama of the simultaneous reveal.

The theme came quickly after. I’d been doing some computer-y themes for the other concepts, I wanted something with a air of friendly competition, and the theme needed to admit a victory through bluffing and/or cleverness.

But would it work for the market?

I was excited for the breakthroughs in the design, but it still needed a test. I knocked out some playtest cards, sat down at a bagel shop with a friend, and spent a few hours building and testing decks. It was far from perfect, but it was fun enough to give me the confidence I needed to submit it to the tabletop market. It was light on components and easy to print in the US, and there was a way to build a unique experience around the convention release: by waiting to unveil the full card list, I hoped to create a small version of the classic early 90s TCG experience of discovering cards through playing with others.

I filled out my market application.

*    *    *    *

And that’s where we’ll leave it for now. Tune in next month for a glimpse into the playtesting and development process!

/// @hollis signing off