Galactic Empires

During high school, I met with friends every week to play board games. One day I realized: This was the perfect audience to develop a custom card game for! We had already played semi-custom versions of "Bang!" and a few other games. With that, I was inspired to create the best game ever - a combination of "Bang!" and "YuGiOh!" - with fully custom cards.

Imagine, if you could create any cards for YuGiOh!, which would it be? For me, these were characters from my favorite movies, series, and real things from my life. But it could be anything, like a teacher of yours, or a literal hamburger.

I asked my friends for topics and wishes that I'd create their custom card decks from. For each of them, I made ~ 40 fully unique cards each. Here's what people wanted:

• Historical figures & teachers

• Shadow Hunters (fantasy series)

• Random stuff & Youtube poop

• Dark Souls

• Doctor Who & Marvel

• Stranger Things, Transformers, select a few things (me)

Later, there were also "Booster Packs" for even more fun! 😄 At this point, you may be questioning how custom these cards were. Well, a picture probably says it all:

Even if you don't speak german, you'll see that every card is unique. I even made legendary special cards with full-card artwork!

At this point, it's time to drop two huge disclaimers here. One, this whole thing was never meant for sale. And I couldn't because it'd be the biggest copyright infringement on earth! But that's fine; I was thrilled with keeping this private. 😄

The second thing is, how do you balance such a monstrosity of randomness? Well, you don't.🤷🏻‍♂️I obviously had my rules of thumb, but I ultimately knew that I couldn't really make it fair. So instead, I opted for high randomness so that different people would be overpowered each round. But somebody was almost definitely overpowered.

But wait - There's more.

As you can see here, similar to YuGiOh, every person had their own playing mat. Mine has Doctor Strange and Smaug on it.

And there are role cards. Well, of course, there are! 😂 But it actually makes sense, trust me. Because, if you know YuGiOh!, then you know that it only works with 2 players. I wanted to work with 3 to 7 players! That's where "Bang!" comes in, which solves this problem using two concepts. Namely, secret player roles and attack ranges between the players. Let me go through each:

• Each character card has a "range", they can only attack players within that range. My direct table neighbors would need a range of 1, the ones behind that are at 2, and so on. This simple rule is awesome because it limits the game in a very interesting way.

• Each player has a secret role, which determines their victory conditions. Similar to Bang, there's the good and the bad guys. Good being called the "Alliance" and bad being called "Rebels". On top, there are the "Separatists", which have unique independent victory conditions.

If your mind wasn't smoking before, now it probably is. 🤯 Let me just tell you that these rules weren't perfect, but they were extremely fun at times.

But.. was it fun? 🤭

Hell yeah! But sometimes not. The main issue was that rounds could be very long, sometimes up to 3 hours. You also couldn't play this while being drunk, or while people are not concentrated. Sure, people can talk while playing, but each person needs to pay attention to the game. Otherwise, 5 out of 6 players would wait for that 6th person to make a turn, every time.

But that's about it, the actual game was awesome. Sure, it wasn't balanced (and therefore sometimes frustrating for some), but that was also a good thing. Also, don't underestimate how awesome this "custom cards" thing actually is. Imagine your history teacher being killed by a tank from world war two. Or your favorite inside-joke appearing as a trap card inside the game. We've had plenty of those.

And I haven't even told you about the best thing yet. For me, it was extremely satisfying to see how people would open these booster packs and go through each card. After working on these cards for months, being creative, and thinking through these rules, it was the best thing ever to see your happy friends who receive these cards.

If I learned anything, then that this hard work can definitely pay off. It's the greatest thing ever to watch people enjoy your work. This is my passion and I will keep taking on these creative projects.