Can You Use ChatGPT to Make a Collectible Card Game? I Gave It an Honest Try

I dabble in a little Magic the Gathering. Nothing serious, mind you. I have at most maybe two or three hundred cards, but I have always thought it would be fun to make up my own card battle game. However, lacking the artistic talent, what better to tool to turn to than AI image generators? Could I in fact use ChatGPT to make my own homegrown card game?

Games like MTG, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and the like are really just number manipulation according to a set of dynamic rules. However, since Numbers: The Mathening probably wouldn't sell very well, the ruleset is given some flavor using art, lore and flavor text.

Now, if you just want to create custom cards for your own home games and personal enjoyment, you can just use the existing lore and rules of the games you already play. However, if instead you want to make your own original game, a tool like ChatGPT is perfect for coming up with a template for your rules.

In this case, I asked:

Which resulted in ChatGPT giving me a rundown of a basic TCG.

From here you can tweak things as you like, but staying within this conversation thread, I'm just going to leave it as is. Of course, you should also check that it actually makes sense, but just as with all game rules, problems might only come to light when you test it in play.

Establishing Lore and Settings

If you have the rules you want, next comes the lore and setting. If you don't want to make one up all by yourself, you can give ChatGPT the broad strokes of what you're looking for. In this case, I started with the prompt:

From there you can tweak it with more conversation, but here we already have a base premise and factions.

That should be enough to work with for the purposes of demonstration.

Creating Card Flavor Text and Art

Now we get to the fun part, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to generate some cards. Maybe let's start with a creature card. Here I asked for a Martian Syndicate Soldier. ChatGPT gives me its stats, some art and flavor text.

If you're using the free version of ChatGPT, then you can only make two images each day, but there are plenty of free options, some of which will create better results, in my opinion.

Now we have all the pieces needed to make cards, except for the card backs and frames. Now, you can make these easily enough using something like Canva. I tried getting AI generators to make card frames, but that isn't reliable. Card back art on the other hand, works well. If you don't feel like making your own frames, you can simply do an internet search for "blank TCG cards" or something similar, and you'll find plenty of templates that are ready to use. In this case, there were already some usable TCG card templated in Canva's element library.

Now all you have to do is bring it all together in the design software of choice. Personally, I like using Canva because I'm a big dummy when it comes to graphic design, but use whatever you find comfortable.

Once you have cards that look the way you want, print them on card stock and cut them out. When you have enough cards for two decks, you can play! Based on that experience, you can judge whether your ruleset or cards will actually work. Hey, even the professionals who make these for a living constantly have to refine things and nerf cards, but it's a start!