Finishing What I Started in 1999

In 1999, I was 8 years old, cutting wrapping paper at the back of my parents’ store and turning it into cards. I was so obsessed with Pokémon, that I simply had to create my own universe alike. The result was a pretty obvious copy, but at that age it really didn't matter. I was making my own cards and universe. I recently discovered that my mom kept that original deck in a folder for 27 years.

Then life happened, and I pretty much never thought about game design again for more than two decades. In 2023, a Secret Santa joke among friends somehow brought me back to it. It started with a board game, then another version, then maps, cards, systems and more serious prototypes. At some point the joke stopped being a joke, and making a "real" game started being a bit of an obsession.

Kravestorm didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew from many previous projects and slowly became the tactical card battler it is today, built around Capitals, Kravers and Nekthar. The territorial importance of the Capital came directly from the board games I was making before it. Other ideas changed completely, disappeared, or survived only as small pieces of something that eventually became very different.

The artwork became a whole project inside the project. I didn’t have the budget to commission an entire card game, so if I wanted this world to actually exist visually, I had to learn how to draw it myself. I started from zero. There were months of bad sketches, abandoned illustrations and things I had to redo completely. Eventually I started developing something that felt like my own style. Some people like it, some hate it. And I’m fine with that.

The game itself changed just as much as the illustrations. Playtests became regular gatherings. Rules were rewritten, cards were destroyed, mechanics were simplified and a lot of ideas that sounded great on paper completely failed once they reached the table. Even the bad versions helped, because every failed idea made the next version a little better.

The weird part is that when I came back to game design in 2023, I wasn’t trying to finish something I had started as a kid. I only really noticed that connection much later. The games are completely different, but I guess the reason behind making them is pretty similar. Kravestorm is obviously not the game 8-year-old me was making in 1999, and it’s not the board game I was holding in 2023 either. But it comes from the same place.

Reed Arsenhorn