For many players, the core of Custom Heroes will be very familiar. This is a ladder-climbing, trick-taking game — a common style of game that’s well-liked in the gaming community. Most of us have, at one point or another, played a version of this sort of game, probably with just a standard deck of cards. One of the more common variants is President (also known as Scum or Daifugo), which, of course, has all kinds of different house rules and variants depending on who you learn it from. There are also many published games that play with non-standard decks, such as Tichu and The Great Dalmuti.

President is what my friends and I played growing up. Before I was deep into the gaming hobby or had discovered that many trick-taking games existed, I thought it would be nifty to “make a game like President, but with a cool and different twist.” The result was quite fun and, as I learned as I got deeper into the hobby, not nearly different enough. I tried (unsuccessfully) to pitch the prototype to publishers and ultimately shelved it when I realized how crowded and competitive a design space it was in.

In 2013, I started working on a game that used what AEG is now calling the ‘Card Crafting System’: a mechanic where cards are in sleeves, and sleeved with one or more semi-transparent cards — essentially turning multiple layered parts into a single card. The key here is that a card can be “crafted” with new powers and modifiers, while still functioning like a single card; i.e., it can be shuffled, dealt, drawn, played, and discarded while still retaining the modifications.

That game was Edge of Darkness, a medium-weight, euro-ish game that AEG ultimately licensed back in 2015 and is now in the late stages of developing and producing. I followed up that design with Mystic Vale, a fairly light, deck-building game released by AEG in 2016, and continued exploring the enormous amount of design space that the card-crafting system opened up.

It occurred to me that a relatively simple, yet potentially quite interesting project would be a merger of card-crafting and climbing tricks. Take a classic game like President, with a symmetric deck of numbered cards, and add the ability to modify cards as they’re played — the key being that all modifications on the cards are retained between hands, so that the deck of cards dealt out in later hands will be increasingly different than the deck dealt out in the first hand.

I wanted to keep the game approachable, so the variety of modifications players could apply to cards remained pretty simple — things like increasing or decreasing the value of a card, or turning the card into a wild or a trump. I experimented with more complex effects, like permanent abilities players would keep from round to round, but the AEG guys felt that this slowed the pace of the game and took the spotlight off of the card crafting.

The scoring system I went back and forth on for a while. It was important to me to have a scoring system that kept all players in the running. I tried several different variations, but ultimately ended up with a “win threshold” concept. More points are awarded the better you perform in each hand (e.g. the first person to play all their cards gets 5 VP, the next player gets 3 VP, and so on), but to win the game a player must get to 10 or more points and then get 1st place in a subsequent hand. What this means is that even if you are trailing 12 to 0, if you get 1st place in a hand you deny other players the ability to win the game and force another hand. Eventually, either someone has won or all players have 10 or more points, creating a final winner-take-all hand.

Thematically, I originally had a space theme on the prototype — each card was a planet, and the card modifications were things like asteroids or explosions on the planets. I called the game Entropy, which seemed to fit: the deck starts symmetrical (an equal number of each card 1 through 10) and gradually becomes disordered with all of the plus and minuses, and other effects. Likewise, the planets and space start orderly and gradually devolve into hurtling asteroids and disintegrating worlds. I wasn’t particularly attached to the theme, however, so when AEG suggested the idea of dual releasing the game in the US and Japan and making the theme Anime heroes getting equipped with cool or silly items, I was on board. I love the way the artists made the items sleeved onto the character cards look like they’re actually holding or wielding them — Todd Rowland of AEG did a great job pulling that graphic design together.

Other contributors on the AEG team that certainly deserve acknowledgement include Bryan Reese, who helped develop the game, Seiji Kanai, who contributed the hero theme idea, and John Zinser, who not only published the game but also helped playtest quite a bit and was crucial in developing the end game mechanic. And, of course, a big thanks to all the great friends in Los Angeles who playtested Custom Heroes and many of my other designs — you guys know who you are.

Thanks for your interest in Custom Heroes! I hope you have a chance to play the game, and find it fun and engaging!