There are 3 easy ways to prototype a card game.
After your initial design of the game, you need to playtest. To playtest you need a prototype. You need cards you can shuffle, move around on a play surface, and visibly recognize.
Here are three ways you can get started testing out your card game idea at home.
- Use Card Blanks and Dry Erase Markers
- Use Cards from Other Games and a Legend
- Use Printed Cutouts and Card Sleeves
Use Card Blanks and Dry Erase Markers
This is a great option.
Easy to change cards around as you discover flaws in your game. It can be fast to get setup and is very flexible.
If this is your first time making a game though, you likely won’t just have card blanks laying around. Add to this that these could smudge as they are being shuffled and handled (card sleeves might help with this).
Use Cards from Other Games and a Legend
Use regular playing or poker cards, Uno cards, MTG commons, whatever works.
Make a paper or digital map of physical card to card from your game. Digital works better for changes as you are iterating and testing. This can be a little clunky as you have to reference back to the guide every so often for each card.
Use Printed Cutouts and Card Sleeves
This is the option I most recently tried out.
Its great because you can create a custom layout to get a feel for how your cards will actually look. The card sleeves let you use standard paper to save on printing cost. I recommend using a laser printer and going with black and white.
It is a little time consuming to set up at first and to cut out all of the templates. But the result is a great prototyping experience.
You can put old playing cards behind your cutouts in the sleeves to make them easier to shuffle. And you can use pencil on the templates to allow for changes as you test.