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Key Art
Game board
The Challenge
Last Stand is the first game I ever created, dating itself (in theory) all the way back to my childhood in late middle school. I had been enjoying "Hearthstone" at the time, but was put off by the extremely high price point of expansions, which were necessary to enjoy the game. To solve this, I began working on a card game of my own.
It wasn't until high school where I finally had something to show for all my hard work throughout the years of trial and error of gameplay tests. The game was titled "Scourge Brawl" and had horror thematics interwoven with its simple gameplay inspired by "Hearthstone" and "Magic the Gathering". "Scourge Brawl" contains all the same basic core gameplay mechanics that "Last Stand" contains today, all missing the core narrative elements to tie the game together. Funnily enough, these core gameplay mechanics are most similar to the card game "Legends of Runeterra", even though "Scourge Brawl" was made years before its release!
The Solution
In college, when I was tasked with creating a card game as my final project for a Game Design course, I decided to remake "Scourge Brawl" to better tell a narrative through gameplay and card design. The game, which was now tied into my "Fahrlend" universe, was now titled "Last Stand," telling the pilot story of the War over the World. "Last Stand" gave "Scourge Brawl" a new thematic of a war game, while still keeping the core gameplay mechanics that made gameplay so smooth. Many changes were made, including renaming keywords and reworking cards to give them a better design that fits the world of "Fahrlend".
A few years after the reworking of "Scourge Brawl" to "Last Stand", I decided to finally prepare the game for an official release on Itch. With this, I used an independent study as an opportunity to inject important storytelling and meaning into my cards. Themed around an intense world war, I drew inspiration from the ongoing Palestinian genocide as a means of looking at how different people react to major events. With this in mind, I gave every region a unique win condition, as a means of representing what different people attempt to accomplish in political conflict. For example, while regions like Dale are hungry for battle, trying to whittle down their opponent, other regions like Wildwood simply use this war as a distraction to reclaim stolen artifacts for their tribes.
Overall, the story of "Last Stand" is the story of my journey as a game designer. The time spent creating this game has taught me much about the fundamentals of game design, card design, graphic design, balancing, and storytelling in card games.
Example Shiramar Commander Card
Example Dale Minion Card
Example Dale Strategy Card
The Tools
Adobe Illustrator: used to make all game assets, including all cards, tokens, boards, etc.
Adobe InDesign: used to make print-ready PDF documents