Origins of Gameplay

The Theatre strives to play differently than many other TCG's because it does not focus on summoning or moving minions, and there are no static resources that you use to play cards.

In fact, The Theatre is more closely related to classic card games such as Euchre, Spades, and Hearts, evoking trick-taking methods found in many general games. It still has the feel of "combat" where you and your opponent are facing off, but without the tracking needed for life totals or resource management.

The Theatre is intended to be a "low-math" game that can be picked up and played by almost anyone within a few minutes. One of the major sources of inspiration for the game was the children's card game of War, where players simply play a single card from their deck (commonly split into halves from a standard deck). Whoever plays the highest card wins, and anyone who can count can play.

War lacks any strategy though, and the game quickly devolves into "whoever has all the Aces wins". Taking the concept of single played cards, I mixed in elements of other games that rely on the suits, commonly using a form of "trump" to set one suit higher than all the others in a round of cards. Thus, the idea of using the six-sided die came into play to have the random element of letting almost any card win in some situations.

The "CLAWS" system actually comes from RPGs, essentially acting as a stat block for the given character. Every character can boil down to "high Charm, low Will" or some combination of that idea. This gives every character a unique flavor and lets them have multiple cards with strengths and weaknesses. Think of Dungeons and Dragons stats or something like the SPECIAL system from Fallout.

Just like any good game, The Theatre takes many concepts from other games into an interesting mash-up that has its own sense of strategy. The tagline "easy to play, difficult to master" is always at the front of my mind when designing new mechanics and abilities for the game. Hopefully this is apparent when playing.

As always, thanks for reading and your continued support!

-Telsie