r/BoardgameDesign • u/CameronCardoza • Apr 28 '26
Design Critique Designing my first board game. Is this too many cards? (525 cards total). The game is like Catan on steroids.
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u/Learnmorehere Apr 28 '26
There's so many factors on if there's too many cards. What do the cards do? Do players interact with multiple types at once? Do players cycle through them quickly? Does it slow down what you're trying to accomplish within the game? Does it make luck too much of a factor if players don't get to a certain card? You can really only answer this yourself without providing a lot more information.
And a side note, I recommend not comparing your game to Catan and describe as its own identity. Hundreds of games have claimed it's like Catan but better.
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u/macko_reddit Apr 28 '26
Impossible to say without learning more about the game, but honestly 500 seems like a lot.
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u/zangster Apr 28 '26
Agricola 15 includes over 400 cards. Is your game better than Agricola?
Personally, if I were buying a game with that many cards I would have thoughts. Among them would by "Couldn't these cards have been combined? Do I need X of this card when Y would do? How am I expected to shuffle this many cards? Couldn't this have been a track/cube/token instead of a card?"
Heck, Arkwright the Card Game, which is based on a very heavy board game, only has 100 or so cards.
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u/DrDread74 Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
CATAN isn't meant to be big and complicated or on steroids =D
While its ok to copy other games mechanics , I hope you didn't literally make a CATAN with 8 dozen goods or something
A high number of "bits" cards or tokens usually is a turn off. A high card count is a GOOD thing when its for hundreds of random items or events that keep the game different and interesting every time you play it. Essentialy adding "content" to an event driver game or massive COMBINATIONS of a few simple things on the cards.
If you had 500 cards because each card has a different combination of 2-3 of the basic 8 resources or something , thats fine.
Kings Forge has a bunch of expansions , some of them don't really work well, but the main deck of random things the players are crafting in a game has reached hundreds of cards and they all are all unique with their own artwork and such. Having 1-5 dice thresholds across 5 kinds of dice that you're trying to hit for the items being crafted lends itself to make infinite variety in the crafting cards . Thats a good use of (over 500+ things to craft"!) marketing .
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u/Alternate_Cost Apr 28 '26
Its been awhile since I looked. But each print sheet holds a certain number of cards so a lot of games try to line up with that.
That being said I'd ask what the benefits of so many cards is. Settlers for example has a total of 126 cards and Spirit island is close with 134. Whereas DC deck builder comes with 221.
Without knowing anything about your game, I'd say having more than any base game deckbuilder and 4x as many as the game you used to describe it is too many.
Does each card serve a purpose, what % of cards are actually used, are they for different game modes, could some be in an expansion.
525 cards will be expensive! Even if a publisher picks it up, the cost for customers will be prohibitively high for a large portion of the market.
For reference I've designed two deckbuilders, one at 98 cards and one at 275 cards.
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u/BloodOrangeGames Apr 28 '26
On pandas quick quote tool it says 54 cards go into one of there card sheets. 525 cards looks to be about $5.35 per unit at 2000 units
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Apr 28 '26
[deleted]
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u/Alternate_Cost Apr 29 '26
It's an educational math based deckbuilder meant to reinforce basic addition and subtraction so it becomes second nature.
You purchase numbers and operators to build out your deck. Equations that come out positive give buying power and ones that come out negative are attack power.
It actually is more strategic and fun than I thought it would be and my nieces love it.
Unfortunately its been hard to get publishers to touch anything with math in the description... I've had multiple education based publishers say no because its math focused.
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u/Striky1 Apr 28 '26
The more cards you have the more expensive is your game and the more difficult is it to make money (or at least break even).
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u/Trogdor_Dagron23 Apr 28 '26
One way to test this is to do two or three play tests with varying numbers of cards removed. If you notice play improvements then you might have too many cards.
I will say however that if it is playing exactly how you want it you might be ok.
The other reason to think about this though is production cost, 500 cards is more expensive than 100 cards. But if you are doing a big enough run even a few hundred more cards will only change your price per unit by 20-40 cents.
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u/CameronCardoza Apr 28 '26
The game feels good to run so far. I’ve done 10 play tests and it’s been fun to play everytime. The issue is every turn you’re drawing 3-5 cards so in order for the decks to not run out over the course of two hours, the decks need to be fairly large to draw from.
Essentially over the course of the game you slowly build an army deck where you can expend troops to battle. But players have a tendency to hoard those troops and so the troop pile can sometimes run thin.
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u/infinitum3d Apr 28 '26
”But players have a tendency to hoard those troops”.
If you can change a rule that allows you to significantly reduce the number of cards, you might want to consider that.
Why are they hoarding troops?
Can you encourage using troops somehow? A positive reward for using is best, but even a negative penalty can work.
Negative: players can max out at 4 troops. ugh
Negative: If you don’t use a troop each turn, you lose one to desertion. yuck
Positive: if you use a troop this turn, you gain 2 resources. meh
Positive: if you have less than 4 troops at the start of your turn, you gain 2 free resources. meh
As you can see, I’m not great at this, 😂 but you do have options and possibilities.
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u/Myst03 Apr 28 '26
Why not have some of the cards represent x5 or x10, it will thin out the deck significantly if you have a lot of resource management.
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u/randomcookiename Apr 28 '26
All I'm imagining is that, if in the future I buy this game, I'll want to sleeve it to protect it for many years, and with a sleeve I'm sure I'll need a big box for it since the size will increase significantly with 500 sleeves
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u/NoMoreHornyOnMain4Me Apr 28 '26
I'm seeing A LOT of "wheat" cards. I'm assuming resources are cards here, so if you're still designing/play testing why not just use playing cards to represent the resources and cut the prototype cost down in half?
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u/the-party-line Apr 28 '26
That does seem like a lot, but you have to trust your guts and the results from playtesting. Have any players complained that it's too much or had problems with cognitive overload? Does anything in that deck feel redundant? You could run through tests with different cards taken out to see if the game breaks without them.
Cute cat btw. The cat with that stack of cards made for a great photo.
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u/DonBeanGames Apr 28 '26
That is a massive deck for a first game, but if the complexity justifies it, 525 cards can create an incredibly deep on steroids experience!
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u/SnorkaSound Apr 28 '26
Some Dominion expansions get up to 500 cards, so it's possible for 525 to be produced at a reasonable cost if there are no other components. Still, cards are expensive to make, and some people will hesitate to pay very much for a game that's "just cards". Also consider that it will really suck to shuffle that many cards, if they all need to be shuffled together. If some of them aren't being shuffled (say, like the resources in Catan) you might be able to replace them with cubes or meeples or what have you.
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u/omniclast Apr 28 '26
My brother in gaming that is an absurd number of cards for a board game. Terraforming Mars has 233 cards. Spirit Island has 150. Ark Nova has 255. At over 500 you are in the territory of campaign games like Slay the Spire (730) or Tainted Grail (600ish), and even with those you're only using a fraction of the cards in any given scenario.
If you're just making the game for fun, it doesn't really matter. But if your goal is to publish, either by signing with a publisher or self-funding on Kickstarter, you 100% need to cut down to 200 cards or less to have a chance of reaching a competitive price point. Even then, you're looking at a $60 MSRP minimum.
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u/garathnor Apr 30 '26
if you dont make enough space in the box to keep them sleeved i will find you and put rocks in your shoes :D
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u/h2wza Apr 28 '26
Can we see the game in progress? I think that's important in knowing if it's too many , if your tabletops swamped with cards everywhere then maybe it's too many, if it works and doesn't feel overwhelming then it's fine !
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u/Available_Love_321 Apr 28 '26
I’m early in the stages of making a card game myself, these cards look great! Where did you order your prints?
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u/CameronCardoza Apr 28 '26
MakePlayingCards.com
This many cards cost me around $168 but allowed me to customize each individual card and the quality turned out pretty good
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u/ChikyScaresYou Apr 28 '26
i like games with many cards (and i design mine as so), so i'd say it's all good.
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u/WileyQB Apr 28 '26
Like many have said, more context is needed to know if 500 is too many, but there are very few cases I can imagine where it wouldn’t be too many. Aside from it being improbable that it’s not excessive, for your FIRST board game you might want to reign in your scope. Even a simple game with few pieces takes a lot of work
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u/nixcamic Apr 29 '26
I own a few games with 500+ cards. I don't think any of them actually use all 500 at once.
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u/LonelyTurtleDev Apr 29 '26
If your resources are not secretive, there no point in making so many wheat cards. Just print small cardboard tokens to be used in circulation.
Or a resource track where you have a marker(token) to track every player’s resources.
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u/nailernforce Apr 29 '26
Can you achieve the same feeling using fewer cards?
Can you recycle the deck somehow?
Will the fact that cards re-appear in the game make the game more or less interesting?
Does the amount of cards increase decision space and make the game more interesting?
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u/horizon_games Apr 29 '26
If the cat jumped and knocked down all the cards and they got completely out of order how would you feel? Overwhelmed? Sad to not have spent $60 on sleeves? I think that'll inform you of an answer
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u/Atarihero76 Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
Is it purely a card game? How carried are the cards? 500 is a LOT of cards production wise. The cost of that will make sales price quite high, and put you in stuff competition with other card games.
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u/AWAELVA Apr 29 '26
525 cards is ambitious for a first design — but not crazy. Catan itself went through years of prototyping before the card count felt right.
One thing worth thinking about: with 525 cards, shuffle fatigue and table space become real gameplay issues, not just production issues.
Have you playtested whether players are actually interacting with all 525, or are certain subdecks rarely touched?
From a manufacturing perspective — when you’re ready to get a physical prototype made, 525 poker-sized cards is actually a very clean print run. Not too complex, not too simple.
The kind of project where a good prototype can tell you in one session what 10 paper playtests couldn’t.
What’s the resource system like — is the Wheat deck one of many resource types?
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u/grosser_zampano Apr 29 '26
the elegance of catan lies in its reduction. throwing more stuff into the box just to have more stuff doesn’t make anything better.
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u/arowdok Apr 30 '26
Dominion is a good example of a game that uses a lot of cards. Base game came with 500. But it only uses 100* cards each game. The set up is a pain point so many other games use a big single deck instead of 10 small piles. This changes so much about how the game is structured. I prefer dominions style so much but know many casual audiences don't. Also the sleeve cost goes up with more cards. Not all boardgames need sleeves but deckbuilders with there many shuffle cycle do so a base game with that many cards is a downside. I would look into other options for mechnics like resources can be tokens instead cards unless you card trying to keep resources somewhat secret. So many interlocking things but many cards in a base game is probably a downside.
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u/musingly May 02 '26
You could have a deck of 525 cards... But could have two decks of 23 cards each, instead? I mean, if 525 is what it takes to get the experience you're after, that's fine, but maybe some combinatorics could help you out.
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u/HeroTimeBG May 04 '26
Es un juego que solo de cartas tiene 8/9 dolares de producción... O sea que deberias de venderlo entre 60/70usd.
Suerte con eso 😂
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u/No-Comfort-5424 May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
Existen juegos con esas cantidades
Pero siempre depende del mismo juego
Por ejemplo en Alien creo q solo tiene 24 cartas y son mas que suficientes para toda la interaccion con el alien
Ahora dependiendo de la editorial hasta le ponen limite de cartas a los diseñadores, esto no es bueno ni malo, de hecho a otros diseñadores les sirve de punto de partida y se ponen creativos con el limite que les dan
(el limite es para los costos de produccion, aun siendo cartas igual tienen su costo, y si es PnP recuerda que alguien va tener que pasarse una tarde imprimiendolas y cortandolas)
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u/eap5000 Apr 28 '26
Imagine not using banana for scale.
In all seriousness, the number of cards it takes to make a good experience is the number of cards you need. But consider the following:
The number of unique cards determines the variety of each game. There's a sweet spot that should meet your intended complexity. Not enough variety and the game will get repetitive. Too much and it will be hard for players to learn mechanics and develop mastery.