3-2-1! The Card Game

Battle your friends with silly scribbles.

The text '3-2-1! The Card Game,' stylized.
Role: Product Lead, Graphic Design Lead, Game Designer
Duration: September 2021 – June 2022 (9 months)
Team Size: 8
Project Type: Physical Card Game

3-2-1! is a competitive card game between two players that fits in your pocket. Players simultaneously play cards over five turns and then tally up points.

Card Gallery

Design Process:

Fast, portable, and customizable are 3-2-1!'s design pillars. Inspired by trading card games but at a tiny scale, each card has a unique ability, and players choose just five as their starting deck.

Prototype cards laid out on a table. Each is a white piece of paper with blue ink text and doodles.

We created our first prototype quickly, and from there we constantly iterated on both the cards and rules, and tested with our peers at school.

During production, some of our challenges were:

  • Keeping the rules simple while promoting strategy and depth of play
  • Creating a variety of interesting card synergies given the small set of mechanics
  • Avoiding complex and unintuitive game states

We eventually settled on 3 base card abilities: flip, lock, and swap. We spent a lot of time refining the rules to minimize confusing scenarios (like situations where two conflicting events happen at the same time). In combination with varying points and conditionals, we made several "build-around" cards that encourage unique strategies.

We reduced around 60 tested cards to 27 for the final set by removing similar cards and balancing different functionalities (gaining points, protecting yourself, hurting your opponent, etc.).

Aesthetics and Graphic Design:

After a few false starts, we came to a notebook aesthetic inspired by the many silly sketches our team made while prototyping. I then designed a card template, including a custom font.

Serenade: 1 point. End of game: Flip up [left] [up] [right]. Ambulance: 0 points. Swap [this] with [left] or [right], then flip up [left] [right]. Lightlock: 1 point. Lock [left] [right]

Most of the art was taken from those prototype sketches and then vectorized. I colorized all the line art and assembled the cards using Affinity Designer plus a custom program to handle symbols in the card text.

We printed the final set of cards, along with box packaging I designed, through The Game Crafter.

Box packaging and three cards, professionally printed, on a table.

Project Credits: NHHS (North Hollywood High School) Board Game Design Club (2021–2022) (Maze Labowitz, Tyler Chow, Zander Denning, Jackson Hyde, Alexander Werth, Tai White, Aaron Dong, Enzo Banal)