You may or may not remember, two weeks ago, I mentioned that I created a card game called A Match Made in Austen, and that my publishers, Renaissance, was using the game as a gateway to expend the business into game production. Card games, as it turns out, are a pretty good starting point for printing games, because they are relatively easy to make. So today, fellow Renaissance author Caroline Fréchette and I had planned a day of testing various kinds of card games. I brought mine and she brought hers, and we were going to try out as many as possible. The goal was to try out different systems, and get some ideas about adapting her book series Family by Choice into a card game.

Those are my card games, photographed from my apartment.

Those are her card games, photographed from her home. To be fair, she owns many – MANY – more board games then I do. I barely can fill a bookshelf with my board games. She has a wall full in her basement. I also included a regular deck of cards in my games, and I’m sure she owns one of those, too.

Turns out that between the making of the plans and the actual day, she and her partner had already figured out a system, which is the bunch of papers you see in the pictures of her games. So we tried out that version (still some details to iron out, but already a lot of fun) and played Gloom and Fluxx, because I had never played Gloom and she had never played Fluxx.

I think I may have been the overall winner of this game of discovery. I found Gloom to be so much fun. However, while Caroline agreed that the collectible Fluxx versions might be fun to have, for fannish purposes, the game itself is too random for her taste. Of course, randomness is the point of Fluxx, but if you like to be able to plan three moves ahead, it’s not the game for you.

In any case, today was a good day, and there are a lot of potential goodies in the future. One of those future goodies being my own game, A Match Made in Austen, which you can now support on Kickstarter.