Wylde — A party card game

A chaotic, fast party card game built to get a room of strangers laughing in under a minute.

ROLEDesign + build, solo

PERIOD2026 — in build

PLATFORMiOS · TestFlight

PLAYERS4–8, pass and play

Photo

Tech stack

Swift
SwiftUI
GameKit
CloudKit

Stakeholders

Friends & playtesters
Local game nights

“No rulebook, no setup, just pass the phone and play.”

Rewrote the shuffle logic three times after watching where laughter died on real game nights.

The real problem

Party games have a cold-start problem: ten minutes of someone reading rules aloud before anyone has fun. The root cause is that the rules live in text, so the game can't start until everyone's read the same page.

The story that drove it: "As the person who brought the game, I want strangers laughing before I've finished explaining, so the night doesn't stall on setup."

Before & after

Before: a rulebook, a setup ritual, and a host doing tech support for their own party.

After: pass the phone, and the game teaches itself through motion and sound. The first round is the tutorial and nobody notices.

Process

Every interaction had to be self-explanatory, so I leaned on motion and sound to teach the rules instead of text. If a card needed a caption to make sense, the interaction was wrong.

Real game nights were the best eval I've shipped. I rewrote the card-shuffling logic three times after watching where laughter died down — pacing is something you can only see on faces, not in a spec.

Why it matters

A party game lives or dies on whether it comes back out of the drawer. Killing the setup tax is what turns a one-time play into a regular one — retention, but for a coffee-table game.

Decision log

Forks that changed the product. Pick one to see what we chose, what we turned down, and what the choice cost us.

WE CHOSEThe first round is the tutorial. Card design and pacing carry every rule — no page anyone has to read aloud.

WE TURNED DOWNA printed rules card, the format almost every party game ships with.

WHAT IT COSTThe first three cards do a lot of work to earn their keep — get the pacing wrong and the game looks broken, not unexplained.

EVIDENCEPlaytesters handed a rules card still asked what to do. The card wasn't the thing being read.

WE CHOSENo scoring. The loop is the reward — a card lands or it doesn't, and the room moves on.

WE TURNED DOWNA running score with a winner at the end, the default for card games.

WHAT IT COSTSome players expect a winner and ask for one. There isn't a satisfying answer yet.

EVIDENCEScore turned a warm-up into a competition. People stopped talking to each other and started tracking points.

WE CHOSEHand-tuned shuffle weighting, rewritten three times after watching real game nights.

WE TURNED DOWNA true random shuffle — simpler to build, mathematically "fair."

WHAT IT COSTMore code to maintain, and "fair by feel" is harder to defend than fair by math.

EVIDENCETrue-random runs produced dead stretches. Laughter tracked the rewritten weighting, not the coin-flip version.

Artefacts & trigger files

no-rulebook.mdThe one line written before the brief: if a stranger needs the rules explained twice, the card failed.MARKDOWNREAD shuffle-log.csvEvery shuffle-weighting pass, with which game night flagged it.DATASETOPEN card-deck.figFull deck art and layout, including the cards we cut.FIGMAVIEW playtest-notes-12.pdfSession notes from all twelve game nights, coded by where laughter died.PDFREAD scoring-prototype.swiftThe scoring build we cut, kept for the record.CODEOPEN

Questions I get asked

No. The first round teaches the loop by making you play it. If a card needs a caption to make sense, that's a bug.

Not yet, on purpose. Testing showed scoring made people play to win instead of talking to each other. That's the open question I'm still sitting with.

Built and tuned for four to eight — pass the phone works best in a room that size.

It's weighted against that. Early versions used a pure random shuffle and it produced dead stretches; the current weighting rules out immediate repeats.

Not yet — it's in active build. Write to me if you want in on the next playtest.

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