Cuttle – a MTG like game using a standard 52 card deck

I'm a huge fan of card games that can be played with a regular deck of cards, and I play Cuttle with my kids somewhat regularly. It's a fast-paced game, but you do have to get over the initial learning curve of the effects. I find just printing out a piece of paper with a quick reference on it helps.

As others have alluded to in the thread, teaching people the rules is a barrier. As I looked around for a professionally printed game, I found a game that was very much like Magic the Gathering, but also just a single box of cards called Mindbug.

https://mindbug.me/

Turns out it was designed by some folks that brought Richard Garfield in near the end of its design and he ended up having some say in the final product. I've played it a couple of times and each game is only played with a random subset of the cards, so the combinatorics create a lot of replay value.

For anyone who wants a more complex game proximate to this design, there's a small production called Reinforcements (https://reinforcementscg.myshopify.com/). Non-collectible, single box.

You play a hand of up to 5 cards each turn: Adding cards to (concealed) stacked ranks of defending troops, attacking an opponent's ranks, using a card's ability. The suits have different defensive properties when arranged in a rank, and combine in interesting ways; there are also "ultimate" powers players can grab from the center by forming their ranks with particular arrangements of suits, which act as turtle-busters.

Highly recommended, quite fun, probably plays best 1v1. Definitely a lot of small rules to absorb, so it's a more complex beast. But nowhere close to the complexity of Magic.

Here are the notes I wrote for myself as a magic player, to translate it into purely MTG terms. (These probably aren't enough to explain on their own, but they'll probably help MTG players who want to get the gist.)

Your opponent has 21 life and you win when your creatures have at least that much power. You can’t attack.

Setup: dealer goes second and starts with 6 cards, opponent starts with 5 cards. Hand limit of 7.

On your turn: Either play 1 card or draw 1 card

Point cards (ace - 10; ace is 1) are creatures with power equal to their point number. Face cards (and sideways 8) are enchantments. No lands or mana costs. "Playing" a card refers to casting that card or channeling that card.

Every point card has “channel - discard this card: Choose a creature with lesser value. Destroy it.” (suit matters, spades > hearts > diamonds > clubs, e.g., 8 of hearts is greater value than 8 of diamonds or any 7 but less than 8 of spades or any 9.) Note that this doesn't target.

Most point cards can be played as sorceries for an alternate effect:

Ace: wrath of God

2: disenchant OR muddle the mixture (this is the only instant and does not count toward your 1 card per turn limit. Everything else is sorcery speed)

3: regrowth

4: mind rot

5: divination

6: tranquility / back to nature

7: mind’s desire

8: sideways as enchantment - glasses of Urza

9: aura extraction*

10: none

Face cards are exclusively enchantments:

Jack: control magic**

Queen: Privileged position***

King: reduce your opponent’s life total based on the number of kings you control for as long as they remain on the battlefield: 0: 21; 1: 14; 2: 10; 3: 7; 4: 5.

Notes: The card types are pretty explicit - muddle the mixture can only counter sorceries or instants, not creatures, enchantments, or channeling. Wrath of god only kills creatures, tranquility only kills enchantments.

Rules can differ, depending on the source:

* sometimes as "reflector mage for enchantments", sometimes as "unsummon for enchantments". **sometimes as "exchange control of target creature". ***sometimes as "all permanents you control have hexproof", I.e., including itself.

*I recently stumbled upon this, but haven't had the time to play yet. It seems like it would be fun.

I've recently started learning card games that use a standard deck of playing cards and have been pleased with many of them. The advantage over trading card games is that it is MUCH cheaper and takes up a lot less space and it doesn't feel like I'm chasing an impossible goal.

Just a note for people who are fascinated by the idea of sometimes skipping proprietary games that require specialized, expensive, and often irreplaceable equipment: Other than pagat, and David Parlett's page (https://www.parlettgames.uk/), we can observe that the master has already given us two gifts.

New Tactical Games with Dice and Cards and Dice Games Properly Explained by Reiner Knizia

Two of the books I'd take to prison.

There’s a local pub by my old house that has a considerable collection of board games so we got to sample a lot that we or friends didn’t already own. It always amuses me when I figure out that a board or card game was obviously prototyped on a standard card deck. It didn’t happen a lot but it did happen a few times.

Four kinds of cards in 1-2 stacks? 10-13 cards of each kind? 2-4 special cards that are identical? Hmm, I wonder how this game was invented…

I do wish we would get back to games that were just played with a deck of cards though. More options for bored people at small gatherings.

For those that are interested, there's an online version available: https://www.cuttle.cards/signup

This reminds me of Duel [0], which also intended to be an MTG-like with a 52 card deck.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100107192618/http://airship.ho...

Back in the day, me and a buddy wanted to play Magic -- mainly to troll our friends -- but didn't have cards to hand.

We took a pair of normal card decks, mapped some basic decks to the cards, and we did play. Good times.

This is fascinating. It seems obvious that this game was the direct inspiration for MtG, as Richard Garfield was a huge card game fanatic, and the number of unique effects it has in common (wraths, bounce, etc.) that are so iconic in MtG.

So so cool to see Cuttle on Hacker News! Cuttle is my favorite game; I’ve been playing it for about 12 years and it never gets old.

Back around 2015 I was shocked that there wasn’t a place to play online. It’s the kind of game where the appeal is immediate if you’re into this sort of thing. I was like, where the hell has this game been all my life? How had I grown up playing card games and never known about this gem?

So I did what anyone would do: I learned web development to create a site for playing Cuttle online: https://cuttle.cards

I’ve made it my mission to make it so anyone can play Cuttle anytime they want. We still have some growing to do in order to reach that point, but we have a vibrant community with weekly play sessions, a ranked leaderboard, and 5 invitational championship tournaments every year. Check it out!

Some resources for anyone who’d like to learn more: We have open play sessions on the site every Wednesday at 8:30pm EST and every Thursday at 12pm EST. Beginners are always welcome and it’s the best time to find games.

We have an active discord (https://discord.gg/tPWm6kpbmb) where you can chat with other players, find games, and dive into strategy.

Here is a printable cheat sheet you can use to make learning (and teaching) the rules easier: https://www.cuttle.cards/img/cuttle_rules.pdf

We also live stream the Cuttle tournaments on twitch: https://twitch.tv/cuttle_cards

And then upload the VODs to YouTube: https://youtube.com/@cuttle-cards2245?si=lHbXNsQX54KjLtxk

Lastly as someone else mentioned, the whole project is open source, so if you’re interested in the technical side of things, you can check out the repo here: https://github.com/cuttle-cards/cuttle

It’s very much under active development and we’re always happy to work with new contributors, so if you’re interested in contributing to a full stack pvp card game, I’ve got just the thing for you. The app is a nodejs backend built with the sailsjs backend framework and a Vue 3 SPA frontend. We use cypress for e2e testing and vitest for unit testing. The test setup is something I’m particularly proud of and I’ve found the card game context to be an enormously fruitful one for testing automation since it saves so much time developing for multi user flows.

All that is to say that Cuttle is a blast and that if playing the game or contributing to the open source application interests you, I’d be happy to answer any questions about either. I hope y’all enjoy!

There's so many games that can be played with a 52 card deck, many years ago I tried to do a sort of battle game but I ended up giving up. It had to do with formations of cards but it's very difficult to create a card game that is balanced and fun!

This game seems super interesting so I'll be adding it to my ever growing collection of standard card deck games.

Thank you!

I discovered this back in 2015 (by the version history) and put together a "one sheet" (two sided) version of the rules. The side with the card effects is especially useful.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rRIiRebARNIadQaMZgimKYvW...

tap your opponents web server, they cannot untap it during their untap step

I am having some friends over next week for dinner and we'll probably play some games afterwards. There are a ton of other games listed on the site and I am sure there are some fun ones here!

I always wonder about the math in these more complex card games, and whether it would be possible to calculate like it is in poker. Specifically, is the game fair for all players starting from a random set of cards? For example in Cuttle, if you get two Kings in your hand, do the chances of winning shift slightly, or skyrocket?

I guess this is why play testing when creating new games can take a long time - both for enjoyment and fairness.

If I have two Queens in play am I untargetable? (each Queen protects the other?)

EDIT: ah, was confused by the cheat sheet on cuttle.cards (https://www.cuttle.cards/img/cuttle_rules.pdf). The main page mentions the mutual-Queen-protection as a variant, which I guess cuttle.cards has adopted.

It looks interesting, but I always struggle to explain (and conversely when on the other side, to understand) the rules of card games to new players. Has anyone had success in bringing a game more complicated than Cards Against Humanity to their friend group? What did you find helpful?

TIL combat card games exist. This is so cool.

My poor partner will have these inflicted upon her.

Another MTG-like game played with standard cards is Superjack: https://www.superjackthegame.com/ Uses two decks, 40 cards per player.

The comparison to MTG seems rather strange to me. There's a superficial relationship that both are dueling games, but the fundamentals aren't the same.

MTG strategy relies on mana advantage, card advantage, card selection advantage, card efficiency advantage (aka pay WotC more), and tempo advantage.

Cuttle doesn't have casting resources to manage. It has little card efficiency advantage. Tempo advantage is mostly linked to the mana curve and mostly doesn't exist. Card selection doesn't exist outside of getting a card from the graveyard or seeing an extra card. Card advantage exists, but mostly doesn't matter because you can't capitalize on the cards you draw. Even worse, the terribly unfun card disadvantage exists in the form of a discard effect.

I wish I knew more interesting games that could be played with a standard deck. My wife and I travel a lot and there's something I find deeply appealing about being able to walk into any gas station, corner shop, or airport store anywhere in the world and come out with a dependency-free way of entertaining yourself (or even making friends!), and I feel like I don't know enough games that take advantage of that.

That being said, I do have a few standbys:

Bullshit's a favorite for semi-large groups: https://www.pagat.com/beating/cheat.html

Egyptian Ratscrew is my pick for 3-5 players (although I'd caution it against playing it in quiet public spaces): https://waste.org/~oliviax/cards/ratscrew.html

Lastly, Duel 52 is a recent favorite for just my wife and I to play, and very much in the vein of Cuttle: http://juddmadden.com/duel52/

Looks fun, but all the special effects seem like they'd be hard to remember. I wonder if there's a simpler variation that requires fewer rules to remember.

what a great website.

I was recently taught a card game, and when I searched for it I could not find it anywhere. Now I can probably find it.

there's an online version: https://www.cuttle.cards/

There’s also the unrelated Cuttle by Toby

https://cuttle.xyz/

For creating SVG files for CNC cutting.

I dabbled with it when it was posted here some time ago, definitely much easier to use for its intended purpose than a fully featured app like Inkscape etc.

I believe he frequents these parts.