Like half of all the great things in the world, Collective Target's origins have humble beginnings. One lazy day over summer vacation my brothers and I had nothing to do, and we were complaining about it. My mom, the ever-optimist, begins suggesting all manner of things to keep us occupied. Us kids shoot down most suggestions (like chores) until we hear "you guys should make your own card game!" And so we did.

This game was based on the simple premise of "this type of card beats this type!" Wild cards were the only effect cards. The only other rule was that when you played a card you had to describe how it beat the current one in the center. People could object to your explanation and make you take your card back. You couldn't really win, so the only goal was to create a fun story. We called them "Story Cards."

Nearly a decade later, one day, I had nothing to do again. I had been wanting to make a game (I had plenty of experience playing them) and now found myself with an excess of time. My family and I had just stumbled across that old story card game while looking for board games to play over Christmas so a thought occurred to me: "What if I turned those 'Story Cards' into a true, structured game with rules and mechanics?" I cracked open a Google doc and got to work.

The first beta version of Collective Target grew from that early kernel of type advantages. I kept Creatures, Gadgets, and Distractions, but Weapons and Vehicles got folded into a broader Machines category. This made room to separate human-based cards from the Creatures and into their own Human category. These changes were to create the core pentagonal type advantages where each type was good against the next two types. Instead of resulting in absolute victory when typing was in your favor, the cards all got a Power value and the type advantages became a simple +1 to Power.

At this point, wild cards still existed, but I had been playing with the idea of separating their effects into their own thing. This would stop the wild cards from being strictly more valuable than any other card and let players have more freedom to combo different cards together. These would later become the Instant cards that add so much variability to each game. 

My Photoshop skills had demonstrably improved over the course of this project and it was time for a layout refresh. Hard to see type icons were converted into an obvious type banner, the type advantages were reformatted to reflect the defining color differences between types, and Instants finally became their own effect cards. At this point, it was feeling like a real game, and a real game needs a real name. 

But what was this game about? The narrative I imagined was that the players were some sort of mercenaries using these resources while fighting over some sort of bounty, a collective goal, or target perhaps? Collective Target. Works for me! I can always change it later (I didn't). The Target cards were then created to act as the centerpiece to the game and ground a light narrative for the players.

I had a bigger problem than a loose narrative though. The game lacked a definitive conclusion. Family playtests showed that the turns rotated around until the deck ran out and oftentimes the person with the last card won. Not great or fun. But, a-ha! We have a target now. The deck is now empty. Each player is down to their last resources. It's now or never to secure your victory. Play everything. When the deck runs out, all players play their Powered cards and last card standing wins. An all-out attack at the end of a game brought a proper conclusion and I will never get tired of how people suddenly take the game so seriously after this shift in gameplay. 

Playtesting. The most important aspect of creating a balanced and fun game. Feedback is invaluable for effective game design and gathering as much as possible is imperative. I always took as many notes as I could when I played with my family. Problem: I moved across the country a couple years ago for work and the majority of my friends are online. I needed a way to playtest my game regularly. 

Enter Tabletop Simulator. A video game that gives the player the ability to create your own tabletop games and play online with anybody. I watched a single video tutorial, created a custom deck of cards within the game, and all of a sudden, I could play Collective Target with anybody who owned Tabletop Simulator. I immediately assembled a team of friends, and we began doing weekly playtest sessions.

During this time, the game mechanics experienced a huge amount of growth. Weird situations were being created all the time which, in turn, created new rulings, text rewrites, and brand-new Instant cards. This is also when Targets got their game modifiers since it became clear pretty quickly that they were merely ornamental. While all this playtesting pushed forward vast improvements, I discovered something that impacted the future of the game more than anything else. I was having fun and I wanted others to experience it too.

A card game that plays well is all fine and dandy, but it'll need a lot more to get it into the hands of others. The first order of business was to find an artist to actually draw the cards and make them appealing. Well, actually, it was the second order of business because, first, I had to figure out what the heck I wanted them to draw. My cards were a mix of mythological creatures, sci-fi machines, and random household items. I needed an art style, a cohesive design language, and a theme that wasn't pulling from every type of fiction that you could think of.

I spent a lot of time working with different theming ideas, developing underlying narratives, and playing with visual concepts that were way beyond what was necessary. Sci-fi seemed to match up pretty well with the initial mercenary concept that gave Collective Target its name and allowed me to have room to be extra creative with remaking the majority of the current cards' identities. Targets narratively became part of five overarching factions that had their own color schemes and the Powered cards were to be divided amongst those factions. Getting caught up in the minutia of things is pretty normal, but I had to shift my attention back to the card layout.

Some of my friends are colorblind. I made a game that used colors as the primary method to distinguish between the types, but until we dove into playtesting, I had failed to even consider that fact. I sought to make the card frames distinct from each other not only in color, but composition. Card games are historically lackluster in their framing by stuffing text into a couple rectangles around an illustration and I had the opportunity to push my designs further. It was the pursuit of accessibility that drove me to innovate beyond my own imagination and I'm super happy with the result.

I was fully expecting that finding the right artist was going to be a long, painful process so I went to the only place that I knew people would be understanding and helpful, Reddit. I created a post on a subreddit for artists looking for work. You can never really be sure what kind of responses to expect from these kinds of things. However, my reservations quickly dissipated. My post received way more applicants than I anticipated and the only truly, painful part was choosing between such talented people to work with. One of those applicants was Ross (@RossMartinArt) who has the skill, enthusiasm, and patience to keep up with all of the ideas in my head. I couldn't be happier to have him on board with this project!

I've had a couple test decks printed throughout Collective Target's development, but it was an extra special moment when the first one came in that had actual, for real, final artwork. There is this sensation of, dare I say, pride from taking a silly, afternoon idea and turning it into a functional game. It certainly wasn't done at this point and there were still the enormous hurdles of production, marketing, and sales, but this was when it became tangible. I could touch the final product and show people the vision that I had for it. It was exhilarating.