18 Card Minigame Contest

So another shiny object came into view last night, and as a creative person who is easily inspired to do other things, it caught my attention immediately.
It was yet another game design contest, this one requiring a 12-18 card minigame that cannot use any other components.  Very restrictive, yes, but also kind of liberating knowing that you CANNOT use tokens, minis, gameboards, dice, etc.  And for a new and aspirational game designer this was an opportunity I just could not resist.
My brain start churning, searching for what could be done, and it brought me back to another contest I was considering, that has not yet become overdue, for a single player game concept.  The idea I had for that game was a Dragon based card game about developing your Dragon to survive combat and encounters against a world set out to destroy it.
I thought on it for a bit, then altered the basic principle down to an 18 card concept (vs the 100 card concept originally planned).  How much easier is it to create card files and gather art for just 18 cards!

6 hours later (last night plus some time this morning), and I have a core idea templated and prototype printed to playtest.  No good game can happen in that short of time, I completely understand that, but if the concept and basic mechanics of the game work it is easy to adjust the rules and statistics in the game after that.

So tomorrow, my day off, will have some time devoted to personal playtesting, then setting up an easy to download Print and Play file to offer select players through the FB network I am part of.  With such a quick game and so little to print, I am sure some of the avid PnP fans out there will give it a try, then provide me with some malicious and thought provoking feedback to improve the game over the course of the next month before the July 12th deadline for submission.

Can't hurt to try, and gets my name/game thoughts out into the Board Game community...

The sketchings of a madman done at 1am last night are attached, have fun interpreting them!  This is how I predesign anything I create... Pen and Paper are so much easier to start with than a word document or Photoshop...

Then below that are the initial PnP PDFs I have created to prototype the personal playtesting...

Rules are in my head, eventually to follow.