TCG: FANTASY Card Collection Opens on Steam on 20 October

On 20 October, TCG: FANTASY Card Collection opens on Steam. It is a game from our studio, XPLOIT, and right now it sits in that strange state between "done" and "out": the build is uploaded, the store page is live, the wishlist button works, and the only thing left is the date.

So this is a good moment to explain what we made, and to say thank you to the person who made it happen.

What the game is

Imagine an old private library. Green damask wallpaper, a coffered wooden ceiling, chandeliers, a herringbone parquet floor and a couple of red armchairs by the wall. And all over that room, on the floor, on the shelves and in the corners, there are cards. Thousands of them.

Your job is to collect them.

You pick a card up, bring it close, turn it over and look at the art. Then you find where it belongs: the right cabinet, the right section, by faction and by rarity. Card by card, the mess on the floor turns into a collection. There are no opponents, no timer and no decks to build. Nobody is going to beat you. It is a game about the quiet pleasure of putting things in order.

The numbers

Why a card game with no card battles

Most card games are about the fight. You build a deck, you play it against someone, and the cards are a means to an end.

But anyone who has collected cards as a kid knows there is a second game hidden in there. Opening a pack. Spotting the one you were missing. Laying the whole set out on the table and just looking at it. Sorting a pile by colour, then by rarity, then deciding that was the wrong order and doing it again.

TCG: FANTASY Card Collection is that second game, and only that. Steam files it under casual, simulation and hidden object, and that is about right: it sits somewhere between a hobby sim and a sorting puzzle, and it is meant for an evening when you want to switch your head off without switching the computer off.

What went into it

A game like this looks small from the outside. One room, one loop. The work is in places you do not see at first, and almost all of it was done by one person in one month.

The cards. More than 3,000 of them, spread across many factions and four rarity tiers. Every one is a physical object you can hold, zoom into and rotate to see both sides, so every one needs a front and a back that hold up at close range.

The room. The library is the whole world of the game, and the player spends hours in it. It has to feel warm and lived-in, and it has to stay readable when there are hundreds of cards lying around. The rare and legendary finds get their own display spots, so the room slowly changes as the collection grows.

The feel. Picking a card up, inspecting it and putting it in its place is something the player does thousands of times. If that action is even slightly awkward, the game stops being relaxing.

The reach. The interface is translated into 27 languages, from Japanese and Korean to Polish and Portuguese, and the game runs on a five-year-old mid-range PC. A cozy game should not need a new graphics card.

Dmitry Kolchuganov

This game exists because of Dmitry Kolchuganov.

He came up with the concept: a card game where the cards are the point, not the ammunition. Then, as the lead developer, he built it, and he did it in one month, practically solo. The room, the thousands of cards, picking them up and sorting them into cabinets, the build that is now waiting on Steam: one person, four weeks.

That pace is not normal, and neither is the focus behind it. It is easy to have an idea for a quiet, calm game. It is much harder to keep it quiet and calm when you are building it alone against the clock and every shortcut pulls towards "add a timer" or "add a fight". Dmitry kept the game exactly as calm as he first imagined it.

Dima, thank you. It has been a pleasure to build this with you.

What happens on 20 October

The store page is already up, and the most useful thing you can do before release is add the game to your wishlist. On Steam, wishlists decide how much visibility a new game gets in its first days, and for a small studio that matters more than anything else. When the game opens, Steam will also send you a notification.

Wishlist TCG: FANTASY Card Collection on Steam

You can also read more about the game on our studio site and on its page here on ravy.pro.

If you play it after the 20th, I would really like to hear what you think, and which card you were happiest to find.