Designer Diary: Dragon Tricks

Dragon Tricks is a trick-taking card game for all ages, featuring adorable artwork that will delight kids and a unique trick-taking mechanic that will engage grown-ups too. The design of Dragon Tricks is a story of iteration, with the initial inspiration undergoing a long transformation into the game you see on Kickstarter today.

Our Kickstarter banner image for Dragon Tricks. Check it out now!

The idea that became Dragon Tricks came from a series of math games I designed to use during homeschool with my kids. These are all played with a standard deck of cards. I figured it would be a fun project that would spice up our homeschool lessons, which it has. I’m also going to offer the game rules on Teachers Pay Teachers as a resource for other parents, teachers, and students who want extra enrichment and a fun way to practice core math skills.

At some point, while brainstorming trick-taking mechanisms, we came up with the idea of the highest card in the most played suit taking the trick. At this stage, these trick-taking games often involved using pairs of cards as addition or subtraction, so the mechanic didn’t quite fit. But it sounded like a fun idea, so we started making a new game around that mechanic – a classic trick taking game rather than a “math game” that relied on doing math operations.

Lo and behold, it was fun. Nearly all other trick-taking games I’ve played – especially the classics we grew up with like Spades, Hearts, and Euchre – revolve around following suit. This new mechanic was strange, in a good way, and brought a fresh take on trick-taking games. I found that I couldn’t immediately decide on the best strategy, and wanted to experiment, which to me is always a good sign that a game will be engaging over the medium to long term.

Once we had a solid foundation for the game, we decided it needed a theme. During a brainstorming meeting, our CEO and graphic designer extraordinaire Hannah discovered the adorable dragon art and we were hooked. Based on the artwork, we quickly came up with the idea of hatching dragon eggs, and trading in tricks on a one-per-one basis. Browsing our licensed artwork selections, we designed suits based on cute magical items that we felt fit the theme of a magical school or workshop where baby dragons were hatched.

Playing Dragon Tricks at The End Games in Charlottesville, NC.

At this point, the fundamental design for Dragons Tricks was set, but the game would continue to go through several evolutions based on playtesting.

In the first iteration, we simply traded tricks for dragon eggs, 1-for-1, and an egg’s color didn’t match the dragon on the card’s reverse side. I felt like the system of trading in eggs, while fun and cute, was arbitrary. The eggs were just a proxy for how many tricks you won, but weren’t actually adding anything new to the design. It was cute, but…it bothered me for some reason.

In order to fix this issue, I assigned numerical values to the eggs (look closely, and you can see a prototype of this version in the Kickstarter video). The idea was that this would make the eggs “matter,” rather than being an arbitrary add-on. And, well, it worked. The eggs did matter. In fact, they now mattered so much that they pulled focus from the trick-taking game itself. Everyone scrambled to collect the 1-value eggs, and the display routinely clogged up with 3-value eggs. We tried adding a rule allowing players to clear the display when it was full of 3-value eggs. We tried allowing players to trade 1-for-1, 2-for2, and 3-for-3.

But, when you’re adding rules to fix problems created by the rule you added to fix a different problem…it might be time to go back to the drawing board. But I didn’t really know what to do next. This was the biggest sticking point in the design of Dragon Tricks.

The answer, as often happens, came in a moment of inspiration, immediately felt correct, and now seems like an obvious and fully-integrated part of the design that has been there from the start. The inspiration also wasn’t mine. The suggestion came from Mike Belsole, designer of the award-winning party game Smug Owls (check it out!) and a manager at the Well Played Board Game Cafe in downtown Asheville.

The Well Played Board Game Cafe in downtown Asheville, NC. Worth a visit if you’re in town.

We showed the game to Mike, played it with him, and told him about the design issue we were having with the double-faced egg/dragon cards. “What about set collection?” he asked.

Right away we knew it was a good idea. We quickly brainstormed the various sets and point values, and decided to change the cards so that the eggs and dragons matched colors, front and back, so you could choose eggs based on their color and know what you were hatching.

From that point on the game played like a charm. There were some more tweaks along the way, mostly regarding how to resolve ties. At one point I has us setting them aside for the winner of the next trick. Clunky. We also had some fiddly ideas about saving tricks to trade in later, using “gold nugget” cards to represent tricks so that we could shuffle them back into the deck — very clunky. Ultimately, we pared the excess design features down until we had a game that was fun and smooth to play.

We’ve tested Dragon Tricks with as few as two and as many as nine players, and it was fun at every player count. One thing to note is that this is a very, very different game depending on the player count, due to the nature of the trick-taking mechanism that relies on the most played suit. But I see that as a feature, not a bug, and I enjoy the variety presented by different player counts.

Playing at Tantrum Con in Charlotte, NC. Loving those baby dragons. And in a set of all five colors!

Originally, we’d planned to launch this game in late October 2024. Then in late September, Hurricane Helene swept through Western North Carolina and upended our lives for the next several months. In the immediate aftermath, we were stuck in our neighborhood for two days, with no power, no water, no phone service, and no internet, with the only roads out of our valley still underneath floodwaters.

People were out in the streets cutting fallen trees with chainsaws, driving around, talking and sharing what limited information we had. People were saying that all the highways out of Asheville were closed, but we were finally able to confirm that there was a route open to Charlotte, a two-hour drive away. With two little kids and dwindling food and water, we packed what we could and left town. We picked up cell service on the way, and finally found a place to crash at a family member’s house late that night.

And we were among the lucky ones. Many people lost their cars, homes, possessions, loved ones, or even their own lives. We spent well over a month after the storm staying with relatives and in Airbnbs, and we feel incredibly fortunate to have had somewhere to go. We’re grateful that we weathered the storm, and to all the people who helped us while we were displaced from our house. Everywhere we went, people showed us amazing kindness and generosity, from free food to rental discounts. It was truly humbling and inspiring.

The bridge at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC - our way out of the neighborhood - blocked by floodwaters after Hurricane Helene. The water level had decreased by over twenty feet at this time.

Needless to say, we postponed the Kickstarter. Our demo and playtest event for Dragon Tricks at Well Played was scheduled for mere days after the storm, so that was cancelled. They did eventually re-open during daylight hours, offering free gameplay to anyone who wanted to come in. But nothing in Asheville was back to normal until power and water service were restored, which dragged on for weeks, and then months. When we finally returned to our home in Asheville, we regrouped, and targeted our new launch date of February 3.

I should mention that we didn’t set out to design Dragon Tricks as our company’s first game. It was created incidentally during a prolific period of design, alongside a bunch of other games. So how did Dragon Tricks become Good Idea Games’ debut product?

When we were making a plan for our first few game launches, we decided to begin with something light, simple, and easy to produce. After all, we’ve never run a Kickstarter before, and there were bound to be some bumps along the way. It seemed wise to wait to launch a more complex board game with multiple components once we’d already established working relationships with a factory, shipping company, reviewers, video editors, and so on.

With that criteria in mind, and after some deliberation, we settled on Tricky Dragons as our very first– er, did I say “Tricky Dragons”? Am I legally allowed to do that?

Tricky Dragons, er, Dragon Tricks on the tables at TantrumCon in Charlotte, NC, being played with the good folks at Dragon Phoenix Games.

Funny story: We originally brainstormed a few names for this game, and narrowed it down to “Tricky Dragons”, “Dragon Tricks”, or “Dragon Hatchlings” (an homage to a beloved Magic card). We did some informal A/B testing by asking a range of people which name they preferred, and “Dragon Tricks” and “Tricky Dragons” came out about equal.

We ended up going with the second name (which you can see in some of these photos). We created a Board Game Geek listing and printed a prototype, but, notably, we did not yet trademark the name. Then, a couple weeks before launch, we noticed a new Kickstarter “launching soon” with the name – that’s right – “Tricky Dragons.”

After a quick search, we learned that this game name had been officially trademarked in the United States. We proceeded with our second choice name, Dragon Tricks, and applied for our trademark. And, lesson learned, we’ll be trademarking our game names in advance from here on out.

The last-minute name change prompted a redesign of any graphics that contained the game name (read: nearly all of them), much to the great delight of our graphic designer extraordinaire. And despite the setback, we ended up with some delightful box art and promotional material.

Gosh look at those baby dragons. Don’t you just want to take one or twenty home with you?

A note on the artwork: Since we launched, people have asked us about the artwork for Dragon Tricks. We found this artist through Canva, where we acquired the rights to this package of beautiful baby dragons to tug on our heartstrings and assemble in color-coordinated sets for our gaming delight. For future projects, we’re excited to collaborate with commissioned artists, but this was a cost-effective solution for our first game launch. I should note that we are committed to never using art that we know was produced by artificial intelligence, a commitment we intend to maintain for the lifetime of the company.

Whew! Now that I’ve written this designer diary, I’m realizing what a journey this little game has been on over the past few months. From its humble beginnings, through the devastation of Hurricane Helene, the unanticipated name change, to playing it with board game reviewers and aficionados at TantrumCon in Charlotte, NC – this game has persevered!

Regardless of what happens with Tricky Dragons Dragon Tricks from here on out, I’m thankful for the fun and rewarding experience of creating this game, and the opportunity to share it with friends new and old. We look forward to getting this game in your hands and onto your tables!

If you’d like to know more about the game or our company, find Dragon Tricks on Kickstarter or just Google “Good Idea Games.”

Until next time, may your dragon eggs hatch the color dragons you like best (or need most for victory)!