Chapter 14: Card-Driven Games

I do not design card-driven games as a rule. Personal preference, no considered judgment about the format behind it. I have never been drawn to cards as a platform for mechanics, and I cannot point to a specific reason for that. Some designers gravitate toward certain tools and away from others. Cards have never been the tool I reach for first. I have designed two card-based games, studied a number of others, and I recognize that card-driven design represents one of the more significant innovations in wargaming over the past thirty years. I respect the format, I have worked in it, and I think more designers should understand what it offers even if it is not their default approach.

Cards are a viable and often elegant platform for wargame mechanics. My avoidance of them says more about my habits than about the format. I should experiment with cards more often than I do. I am doing so now with a current design on the Siege of Anabaptist Münster, though that project is more of a state-of-siege and euro hybrid than a traditional wargame. If you are a hex-and-counter designer who has never considered cards, you are leaving design space unexplored.

The Dual-Use Card

Every card in your hand can be played for its event, a specific historical occurrence or capability, or for its operations value, a number that determines how many units you can activate or how far they can move. You cannot do both. Play the card for the event and you lose the operations. Play it for operations and the event does not happen. That forced choice drives the format.

Mark Herman formalized this mechanic with We the People in 1993 and refined it through For the People, Empire of the Sun, and subsequent designs. Herman has written about his design philosophy in several places, most notably in his article “My Philosophy Behind Card Driven Games” published in C3i Magazine. His core argument is worth understanding because it explains why the dual-use card works as a simulation tool and not just a game mechanic.

Herman’s position is that the most important variable in a wargame is uncertainty. His study of warfare convinced him that real combat is chaos because senior decision-makers operate with imperfect information. The more successful commanders could function in an environment where they could not plan with confidence. The hand of operations cards, in Herman’s framing, is his attempt to simulate that uncertainty at the decision-maker level. You can look at the map and see where enemy forces are. You cannot know what your opponent intends to do with those forces, and you cannot guarantee that you will have the resources to execute your own plans. Your hand constrains you. You might need to reinforce the south, but you do not have the right cards for it this turn. That frustration is the simulation working.

Herman has reported receiving letters from players of For the People who said they loved the game but had to stop playing for a while because they could not handle the stress. Every decision carries weight. You never have enough cards to do everything you want, and every card played for operations is an event that did not happen. That pressure is the experience Herman designs for, and it maps to the resource constraints real commanders face. You are managing scarcity, priorities, and the constant awareness that doing one thing means not doing another.

The dual-use card also brings what Herman calls “soft factors” into the simulation without heavy rules overhead. Politics, logistics, guerrilla warfare, diplomatic crises. Modeling these through traditional hex-and-counter subsystems buries the player in additional rules. An event card handles them in a sentence or two of card text. The political complexity of the American Civil War fits on a card in your hand instead of filling a twelve-page political subsystem in the rulebook.

Cards and Activation Structure

In Chapter 10, I discussed IGO-UGO, impulse activation, and chit pull as the fundamental structures for organizing a game turn, and I noted that card-driven games are sometimes misunderstood as a separate category of activation. They are not. The card is the resource that fuels whatever activation system the designer chose.

Paths of Glory, one of the landmark CDGs, uses an alternating card play structure that resembles impulse activation. Each player plays one card, resolves its effects, and then the other player plays a card. Twilight Struggle works similarly, with players alternating card plays within a round. For the People layers card play onto a more traditional operational framework. The card system sits on top of the turn structure. It does not replace it.

Cards are compatible with any activation framework. You can build a CDG with IGO-UGO underneath. You can build one with chit pull, where the cards determine what you do once your formation is activated but not when it activates. You can build one with simultaneous play, where both players commit cards face-down and reveal them together. You are adding resource management, uncertainty, and narrative on top of whatever structural foundation you have already chosen.

Deck Construction as Design

Building a card deck is designing the narrative arc of your game. The deck becomes a second design space alongside the map, and that is where CDG design separates most from traditional hex-and-counter work.

When you build an OOB for a hex game, you are defining what forces are present and what they can do. When you build a card deck, you are defining what can happen and when. Event distribution across the deck determines pacing. A deck front-loaded with powerful events creates an explosive early game. A deck where the strongest events are buried deep creates a slow build toward a climax. The number of cards, the hand size, and the draw rate all interact to control how much of the narrative a player sees in any given game and how quickly the situation evolves.

The practical process of building a deck resembles building an OOB. Open a spreadsheet. Number your cards. Start naming events based on your research. You will want a mix of historical events, things that happened during the conflict, and historically plausible events that represent capabilities or situations that could have occurred. The plausible ones tend to be more tactical in nature: a surprise ambush, a forced march, a retreat in good order, a supply crisis. The historical ones anchor the game to its subject and give the deck its identity. A Paths of Glory deck feels like World War I because the events reference specific campaigns, offensives, and political developments from that war.

You will iterate on the deck multiple times. The first version will have balance problems, pacing problems, and events that seemed interesting in concept but do not produce good gameplay. This is normal. Deck construction is a development process, not a one-pass exercise. Playtest, adjust card values, add events, remove events, change when cards enter the game. The deck is as much a designed artifact as the map or the CRT, and it requires the same iterative refinement.

A CRT and OOB alone cannot tell the story of a conflict the way a deck can. A player who draws the “Brusilov Offensive” card in Paths of Glory is experiencing a narrative moment that hex-and-counter chrome cannot replicate. The event is a historical reference point that connects the player to the subject. CDGs draw in players who might never engage with wargames through any other format, and the narrative quality of the deck is a large part of why.

The Ops-Event Economy and Hand Management

The central tension in most CDGs is hand management. Your hand is your set of options for the turn, and managing it well is the difference between competent play and flailing.

Hand size is a critical design parameter. A large hand gives players more choices but reduces the pressure of any individual card play. A small hand forces harder decisions because each card represents a larger fraction of your available resources. Most CDGs settle on hand sizes between five and nine cards, which is large enough to provide meaningful choice but small enough that every card matters.

Discard mechanics interact with hand management in ways designers often overlook. If players discard unused cards at the end of a round, the hand refreshes completely and long-term planning is limited to the current round. If players retain cards across rounds, they can save powerful events for the right moment, but holding cards means not playing them, which has its own cost. Mandatory events, cards that must be played when drawn regardless of whether the player wants to, add another layer. They force players to deal with situations they did not choose, which is realistic but can feel punishing if the mandatory events are too powerful or too frequent.

The balance between events and operations values across the deck shapes the overall feel of the game. If most cards have strong events, players face agonizing choices every turn. If most cards are operationally useful but have weak events, the event system becomes a background feature rather than the driving force. The best CDGs create a distribution where a handful of cards in each hand present genuine dilemmas: the event is powerful and historically important, but the operations value is exactly what you need to execute your plan. Neither choice is wrong. Both cost you something.

What CDGs Do Well

CDGs excel at several things that traditional hex-and-counter games struggle with.

Narrative. The card deck creates a story that unfolds differently each game. Players remember specific card plays the way they remember specific dice rolls in other games, but card plays carry historical context that dice do not. Drawing the right event at the right moment creates stories that feel earned rather than random.

Asymmetry. Each side can have its own set of events, its own operations values, its own card distribution. The deck itself can be asymmetric, with one side’s cards weighted toward events and the other’s toward operations. Hex-and-counter games achieve asymmetry through the OOB and the map. CDGs can build it into the core mechanics.

Replayability is built into the format. Because the deck is shuffled, every game presents a different subset of events in a different order. A strategy that works when you draw your best events early may fail when those events are buried at the bottom of the deck. This variability extends the life of a CDG well beyond what most hex-and-counter games achieve with fixed setups.

Resource decisions in CDGs are multi-dimensional. You are deciding where to attack, whether to attack at all or play the event instead, whether to hold a powerful card for later or spend its operations value now. Those layered decisions keep experienced players engaged across dozens of plays.

Accessibility. Cards are more approachable than the non-linear freeform format of most hex-and-counter wargames. A new player looking at a hex map covered in cardboard counters faces a steep learning curve to understand the game state. A new player holding a hand of cards with event descriptions and operations values written on them has an easier entry point. The cards tell you what you can do. The map shows you where.

I have a friend who does not play wargames. He has no interest in combat results tables, zone of control rules, or supply line tracing. I could never get him to sit through a hex-and-counter game. Paths of Glory is one of the only wargames I could ever get him to play, and he enjoyed it. I bought him a copy. CDGs bridge the gap for non-wargamers in a way that traditional designs rarely can.

What CDGs Struggle With

CDGs are not without problems, and being honest about those problems is part of understanding when to use the format.

Simulation precision is the primary trade-off. A hex-and-counter game can model a specific engagement at a specific scale with high fidelity. The OOB can reflect the exact units present. The CRT can be calibrated to historical casualty rates. The map can represent terrain at a resolution that captures the tactical nuances of the battlefield. CDGs, by their nature, abstract many of these details into card effects and operations values. The simulation is broader but less precise. If your design goal is to model the exact tactical dynamics of a specific battle, a CDG may not be the right tool.

Consistency across plays is another concern. The variable card draw that makes CDGs replayable also means that individual games can produce outcomes that diverge from history in ways that feel wrong. A one-sided card draw can give one player a dominant position with no historical basis. The same mechanic that creates interesting variability can also create outlier games. Designers mitigate this through card distribution, mandatory events, and deck structure, but the tension between replayability and historical plausibility is baked into the format.

Card counting is a subtler problem. In any game with a fixed deck, a player who memorizes the card distribution gains an advantage. If you know what cards have been played, you can deduce what remains in the deck and calculate the probability that your opponent holds specific events. In a game like Paths of Glory with a large deck, this advantage is modest. In a game with a smaller deck, card counting can become a dominant strategy that undermines the uncertainty the format exists to create. If a player can predict what is in their opponent’s hand based on what has been played, the fog of war Herman designed into the system evaporates. Deck size and card turnover rate are your primary tools for managing this. Larger decks with partial draws make counting impractical. Smaller decks where both players see the full contents each game are more vulnerable.

Beyond Ops and Events: Other Card Frameworks

The dual-use ops-and-events model dominates the CDG landscape, but other designers have explored card frameworks that serve different purposes.

Dan Verssen Games has built entire game series around card-based systems that bear little resemblance to the Herman model. A CDG like Paths of Glory asks “what do I do with this card?” The tension sits in the dual-use choice on each individual card. DVG’s designs ask “how do I manage all of these systems?” The tension sits in the interaction between multiple single-purpose card subsystems.

The Leader series, Hornet Leader, Phantom Leader, and their successors, uses cards to build a campaign management system. Pilot cards function like character sheets, tracking experience, stress levels, and individual combat capabilities across multiple missions. Target cards present objectives with specific defensive layouts. Weapon cards have realistic characteristics: weight, range, altitude restrictions that constrain loadout decisions. Three separate event decks trigger at different phases of each mission. You manage pilot fatigue against target urgency against declining resources over the course of a campaign. No single card presents a dual-use dilemma. The dilemmas come from the interactions between card systems.

Warfighter, another DVG series, goes further. Location cards replace the hex map, forming a linear path from mission start to objective that you build from your hand. Action cards represent tactical options, and your hand size is tied to your soldiers’ health. Take casualties and you lose tactical flexibility, an elegant abstraction of combat degradation. Hostile cards spawn onto locations based on terrain type, creating encounters that vary with every play. The central resource is the body count economy: bank kills toward your victory condition or spend them to activate abilities. The game simulates squad-level combat through interlocking subsystems, and the ops-event economy is nowhere in sight.

Pavlov’s House, designed by David Thompson, uses cards in yet another way. Soviet action cards function as menus: draw four, pick three, and each card offers two options of which you choose one. The Wehrmacht side is card-driven as an AI opponent. You draw a card and execute what it says, no decisions required. Fog of war cards, dead draws, accumulate as the game progresses, modeling escalating chaos through a mechanical deterioration of the Soviet player’s action economy. Three different card systems run at the same time, each serving a distinct purpose.

Cards can replace maps, generate enemies, manage campaigns, simulate AI opponents, and model resource degradation without ever presenting the player with a “play for the event or play for operations” choice. If you are considering cards for your design, study these alternatives alongside the Herman model. The right card framework depends on what you are trying to simulate.

The COIN Series: Seeded Decks and Shared Cards

Volko Ruhnke’s COIN series, published by GMT Games starting with Andean Abyss in 2012, represents the most radical rethinking of the card-driven format since Herman’s original We the People. Ruhnke, a retired CIA national security analyst, built a system that keeps cards at the center of gameplay but throws out hand management and private decks. The result is a framework that handles four or more factions in asymmetric conflict, a problem that traditional CDGs were never built to solve.

Ruhnke’s key insight came from his experience with both Wilderness War, his own traditional CDG, and Labyrinth, his two-player CDG on the War on Terror. He recognized that hand management “distracted from player focus on the situation on the map.” In a game like Paths of Glory, a significant portion of your mental energy goes into optimizing your hand: which cards to save, which to play for ops versus events, how to time your big plays. Ruhnke wanted players focused on the board state, the political situation, the factional dynamics. He replaced private hands with a single shared deck, revealed one card at a time. Nobody holds cards. Nobody chooses which card comes next.

Seeded Deck Construction

The COIN deck is built through a process that guarantees structural pacing without dictating exact card order. In Andean Abyss, the deck contains 72 event cards and 4 Propaganda Cards. You deal 15 event cards face-down on top of each of the first 3 Propaganda Cards, creating three stacks of 16 cards. The fourth Propaganda Card gets the remaining event cards. You shuffle each stack separately, then stack them on top of each other to form a single draw deck.

The result: Propaganda Cards appear at roughly regular intervals. You know one is coming within each period of 15 or so cards, but you do not know if it is the next card or several cards away. As more event cards are played within a period, the probability that the next card is a Propaganda Card increases. That escalating tension is itself a mechanic. Players grow more cautious or more desperate as a period wears on, depending on whether they are ahead or behind.

Propaganda rounds are the only time victory is checked, the only time factions collect income, and the only time the eligibility system resets. They function as scoring phases, payroll, and hard resets rolled into one. The seeded construction means you cannot predict exactly when these pivotal moments arrive, but you know the window. Later volumes refined the approach further, with some sorting the Propaganda Card into the lower third of each period pile to guarantee a minimum number of events play out before the reset.

Compare this to Paths of Glory, which uses epoch-gated sub-decks. Each player’s 55-card deck is divided into Mobilization, Limited War, and Total War subsets. Cards enter the game as the war escalates. Twilight Struggle does something similar with Early, Mid, and Late War decks shuffled in at fixed points. Both approaches gate which cards can appear based on game progression. COIN’s seeded deck gates when structural events happen within a period of otherwise random card play. The distinction matters for designers: epoch-gating controls the narrative by controlling available content; seeded construction controls the narrative by controlling pacing.

The Eligibility System

The mechanical core of COIN is the eligibility system, which replaces hand management as the primary source of strategic tension.

All factions start the game eligible. A card is revealed from the deck. Faction symbols across the top show the turn order for that specific card. Only eligible factions can act. The first eligible faction in the card’s order chooses what to do: execute an operation from their faction-specific menu, execute an operation plus a special activity, play the card’s event, or pass. The second eligible faction then acts, but their options depend on what the first eligible faction chose. If the first faction took an operation plus a special activity, the second faction can only take a limited operation or the event. If the first faction took the event, the second faction gets full operational freedom.

The critical consequence: factions that acted become ineligible for the next card. Factions that passed remain eligible. Act now and you sit out next turn. Pass and you keep your options open for whatever comes next. Players can see the next card on top of the deck at all times, which means they know what is coming and have to weigh the current opportunity against the next one.

This creates a rhythm that traditional CDGs do not have. In Paths of Glory, you play a card every turn and draw a new hand each round. The decision is always about which card to play. In COIN, the decision is about whether to act at all. Passing is a real strategic choice, not a concession. You receive resources for passing, you remain eligible for the next card, and you might position yourself to be first eligible on a card whose event is exactly what you need.

Dual Events and Multi-Faction Design

Every COIN event card carries two events: one unshaded, which tends to favor counterinsurgent factions, and one shaded, which tends to favor insurgents. Whichever faction chooses to execute the event selects which text to activate. A government player can grab a card and use the insurgent-favoring event to deny it to the insurgent, executing it at a less damaging time or in a less damaging way. An insurgent can grab a government-friendly event to prevent its effect. The dual-event system means every card is both an opportunity and a threat, and grabbing the event means giving up your operation for that card.

This solves a problem that has limited CDGs since their inception: scaling beyond two players. Most CDGs are two-player games because hand management with four players creates enormous downtime. COIN handles four factions through the combination of shared deck, eligibility limiter, and faction-specific operation menus. Only two factions act per card, keeping turns fast. The other two factions watch, but they are watching because they are positioning for the next card, not because they have nothing to do.

Each faction has its own menu of operations and special activities, and these menus are where COIN expresses its asymmetry. In Andean Abyss, the Government trains troops, patrols, sweeps, and assaults. FARC rallies guerrillas, marches, attacks, and spreads terror. The Cartels cultivate coca, process drugs, and bribe officials. The card tells you whether you can act. What you do comes from your faction’s unique capabilities.

What COIN Teaches a Designer

The COIN series has expanded well beyond Ruhnke’s original vision of modern insurgency games. Fifteen volumes and counting cover subjects from the Gallic Wars to the American Revolution to Indian independence to a fictional Mars colonization conflict. Fifteen volumes across wildly different subjects demonstrate that if you express asymmetry through faction-specific capabilities rather than through the core engine, the same structural framework can model conflicts across centuries and continents.

The Irregular Conflicts Series, a GMT spin-off, has taken COIN-inspired mechanics even further from traditional wargaming, into medieval England with A Gest of Robin Hood and urban development conflict with Cross Bronx Expressway. Ruhnke’s observation that the system “succeeded beyond my ambitions, particularly because my original vision for the series was way off” is a useful reminder that a well-designed framework can outgrow the designer’s initial concept.

For your own work, the COIN series demonstrates several principles worth internalizing. A shared deck can produce deeper decisions than private hands when paired with the right activation system. Seeded deck construction creates narrative arc without scripting. Two factions acting per card keeps multi-player games moving without killing the experience through downtime. And combat can be stripped down to near-deterministic resolution when the real conflict is about positioning, initiative, and political control. The early COIN games like Andean Abyss use fixed removal rates with no dice at all. Later volumes like Liberty or Death reintroduced dice in specific contexts where uncertainty served the simulation. The design question is where the interesting decisions in your conflict live, and whether randomized combat adds to those decisions or distracts from them.

Deck-Building and Euro Influences

Deck-building originated in the euro game space and has made its way into wargaming. Players start with a basic deck and acquire new cards during play, adding capabilities and shaping their deck’s composition through purchasing decisions. Dominion popularized the mechanic, and designers in every genre have since adapted it.

Mark McLaughlin’s Hitler’s Reich, co-designed with Fred Schachter, uses a card-based system where players buy event cards from a common market and integrate them into their hands. The game abstracts World War II at the strategic level into a series of contested conflicts resolved through card play, with the acquired events providing advantages in future contests. Hitler’s Reich was one of the inspirations for my own Great Northern War design. I borrowed the concept of hand size as a player resource from McLaughlin and Schachter, treating it as an abstraction of national morale and manpower rather than a mechanical limit on card draw.

Deck-building introduces management mechanics that traditional CDGs do not have. Choosing which cards to add to your deck is a strategic decision layered on top of the operational decisions about how to play the cards you hold. It opens up questions about deck efficiency, card synergy, and long-term planning that create a different kind of engagement than pure hand-management. The risk is overhead. Every deck-building mechanic adds decisions to the game, and if those decisions do not connect to the simulation, they become administrative weight. The deck-building choices need to feel like strategic decisions about the war, not an optimization puzzle detached from the subject matter.

Cards Allow for Granular Subsystems

Cards provide a clean framework for subsystems that would be clunky to implement through traditional rules. Hand size, replacements, holding cards across turns, discard costs, mandatory plays. These mechanics emerge from the card format without needing dedicated rules sections. A hex-and-counter game would require specific overhead for each one.

Hand size as a variable can model national morale, industrial capacity, or command efficiency depending on how you frame it. In The Great Northern War, hand size represents the combined morale and manpower of each coalition. Losing control of objectives reduces your hand size, which means you have fewer options each turn, which means you are less capable of recovering those objectives. The feedback loop is intuitive and does not require any rules beyond “adjust hand size when objectives change hands.” A hex-and-counter game modeling the same dynamic would need a separate morale track, rules for how morale affects unit performance, and probably a table to resolve the interaction. The card format handles it without additional rules.

Replacements and reinforcements can work through card acquisition. Drawing new cards or gaining access to previously unavailable cards mirrors the arrival of fresh forces or new capabilities. Holding cards across turns models reserves and strategic patience. Discarding cards as a cost models attrition and resource expenditure. These mechanics feel natural within a card game and would feel bolted-on in a traditional design.

The key, as with any subsystem, is restraint. Cards allow for experimentation with granular mechanics, but the designer’s job is to use that flexibility without creating excess overhead for the players. Every additional card interaction is a rule the player must track. If your card game requires players to manage hand size, discard costs, mandatory events, card purchasing, deck reshuffling, and three types of special card abilities, you have probably overbuilt the system. The elegance of cards is that they package complexity into a familiar, manageable format. Do not squander that elegance by stacking too many subsystems on top of each other.

Case Study: The Great Northern War

The Great Northern War is the most developed card-based game I have designed.

The inspiration was Fred Serval’s A Very Civil Whist, a game that struck me because it used trick-taking, a mechanic with centuries of history in card games, as the foundation for a conflict simulation. After studying that design, I built a print-and-play game on the Thirty Years War called Pike and Piquet as practice, a learning exercise to test whether trick-taking could support wargame decisions. Pike and Piquet is available on the Conflict Simulations website, but its primary purpose was preparation for the Great Northern War design.

I wanted to figure out whether trick-taking, with all the deception built into the mechanic, could work for a wargame format. Trick-taking is about information asymmetry. You know your hand. You do not know your opponent’s hand. When you lead a card, you are making a bet about what your opponent can respond with. When you respond, you are revealing information about your hand that your opponent will use against you in future tricks. The bluffing, the card reading, the calculated risks. These are the same cognitive processes that military deception involves, in a different context.

My approach was to treat each trick interaction as a contest that determines which player gets to act. The trick mechanic drives the action economy: win a trick and you activate a leader, attempt a mobilization, or gain a decision card. Lose and your opponent draws from the deck instead. The trick is the currency of the game, not a separate minigame bolted onto a wargame. Every action in the game flows through the trick-taking system.

Hand size in GNW represents national morale and manpower, not a mechanical limit. The Swedish player starts with a hand size of seven, the Anti-Swedish player with six. Losing control of objectives reduces your hand size, which directly reduces your options each turn. I borrowed the concept from Mark McLaughlin and Fred Schachter’s Hitler’s Reich, which treated hand size as a strategic resource. I reduced the number of dice in combat resolution from three to two compared to Hitler’s Reich because the card values in GNW have a narrower range, and the math needed to stay tight.

Decision cards, set aside from the main deck at the start of the game, function as rule-breaking events. Traitors let you bypass siege procedures. Scorched Earth lets you destroy enemy supply infrastructure. Peter I Modernizes Russia represents the historical transformation of the Russian military, granting the Anti-Swedish player increased hand size at the cost of temporarily freezing all Russian leaders. These events introduce historical elements without requiring additional rules sections. The card does what it says, and the player decides when to use it. Some decision cards are more generic than others. Reconnaissance and Force March are capabilities available to any army of the period, while Stanislaw and the Crimean Revolt are specific to this conflict. That mix of generic and specific events is deliberate. The generic ones provide tactical flexibility. The specific ones anchor the game to its historical subject.

The game encourages historical behavior through incentives rather than scripting. Instead of forcing the Swedish player to attack Warsaw and Cracow, the design rewards doing so by granting access to the high-value 10 cards. The historical path is strategically attractive. Nobody mandates it. I carry this philosophy into all my work, but it fits a card-driven format with particular ease because you can build incentive structures into the card economy itself.

The Ottoman Empire was the hardest design problem in GNW. The Ottomans were a wild card whose intervention could have changed the war’s trajectory. Modeling the specific historical events would have required scripting the Swedish player into suffering massive losses in specific locations, railroading gameplay in ways I do not enjoy as a designer or a player. I treated the Ottomans as a strategic gamble accessed through the Diplomatic Appeal track and a dice-based bribery mechanic. The abstraction captures the uncertainty and potential impact of Ottoman intervention without forcing players down a historical script.

The Great Northern War is more of a game than a simulation, but I designed the abstractions so that the history shows through. The game ends through attrition, with each side attempting to wear the other down in morale and resources, which mirrors the actual outcome of the war. Sweden’s male population was devastated by the conflict, and the resulting exhaustion was a primary reason Sweden sued for peace after Charles XII’s death. Sweden would never again be a major factor in European affairs. That historical arc emerges from the game’s mechanics without scenario rules imposing it.

When to Use Cards

Cards work better for some jobs than for others.

They fit strategic and operational scale, where abstracting individual unit actions into resource allocation decisions makes sense. An army-level commander does not direct each battalion. He allocates resources, sets priorities, and reacts to events beyond his control. The CDG hand maps to that experience. At tactical scale, where individual unit actions are the core of the simulation, cards can still work. Warfighter and the DVG tactical games prove that. But the design challenge is different. You are using cards to generate tactical situations rather than to model strategic resource allocation.

Cards fit subjects that involve competing priorities, resource constraints, and events that disrupt planning. A conflict where both sides had clear plans and executed them without interference does not call for a CDG. A conflict full of political crises, logistical failures, and agonizing trade-offs does.

Cards fit designs where replayability matters. If your design goal is a precise simulation of a specific battle that plays out the same way each time, a fixed-setup hex game will serve you better. If you want a game that tells a different story each play while remaining anchored to its historical subject, cards provide that variability as a structural feature.

And cards fit designs where accessibility matters. If you want a wargame that a non-wargamer might sit down and play, the card format lowers the barrier to entry without sacrificing depth. The decisions in Twilight Struggle are as deep as anything in a hex game, but the entry point is “look at your cards and pick one to play.”

Whatever card framework you choose, ops and events, tableau management, trick-taking, deck-building, or something of your own, the cards have to be good. They need a thoughtful mix of all the mechanics they touch. They need to create interesting decisions, not administrative procedures. They need to serve the simulation, not decorate a game that would work without them. If your cards are not doing real work, you do not need cards. If they are, they will open design space that hexes and counters alone cannot reach.