Card Creator: Catastrophic Kingdoms app for iPhone and iPad

What is Catastrophic Kingdoms?

Catastrophic Kingdoms is trading card battle game, designed by Ethan. Ethan is a family friend who is less than 10 years old. (As an experiment, I am building a bunch of apps designed by children during the summer. My hypothesis is that children design cooler apps than I do. Check out the support URL to read more about this ongoing project.) The cool thing about the game is that it is entirely open source: anyone can make a Catastrophic Kingdoms card. (The code is relatively open source, in that I explain how to replicate it on my developer blog, though I do not provide the actual source code for free.) The cards are generally either Castle or Cat themed. Ethan might object to that generalization, but it is my observation based off of the majority of the cards I’ve seen that he’s made.

Anyway, the advantage of the open source nature of the game is that it pushes aside socioeconomic status as a barrier of entry for gameplay. Whereas with other card games some kids couldn’t afford to get the good cards you need in order to have a shot at winning, in this game you can just make your own cards.

The way to play fairly, however, is to make sure that all parties in a game are using cards of relatively equal power, even if they are powerful in different ways (which is where the strategy comes in). This is done on a sort of honor principle, and we have not thought up any standardized system for it, but we are pretty sure kids can figure it out.

Rules (Simplified)

1. At the very start of the game, each player draws five cards.
2. Put all cats down you find there.
3. Count all the attacking power of all of your cats. (The attacking power is in the bottom right corner.) The player who has the lowest number goes first.
4. Draw a card every turn.
5. You may play an energy card once per turn. If you do, search your deck for an arena card.
6. Arena cards are used for boosting attacking power and health points.
7. Health points and Attacking power are to show how much health points and attacking power the cats have.
8. Some cards are immediate. You play them immediately and the effect is immediate.

Please note that this is a trading card game, so you need to print up the cards (or email or text or otherwise share them). You can find the cards you make in your Camera Roll by opening the Photos app and clicking Camera Roll, or in the list in the app. Due to the high resolution and particular format of the cards, they look strangely cropped when viewed in the camera roll, but if you email or print them they will look how they should.

For more information, please check out the Marketing URL in the App Description.