Show HN: Aether Summon – A New TCG

Hey

I've been working for about 8 years on a new kind of Trading Card Game (TCG) that doesn't rely on drawing cards, shuffling and the inherent randomness to those kinds of games. It's already developed and fully working - playable through a browser (mobile/tablet/desktop responsive) and I'm now running a campaign in gamefound.com to open-source the whole thing. It sits perhaps between a variant of chess - in the sense that you always have access to all your "cards" - and a traditional TCG - in the sense that it's still an imperfect-information game, as you don't know what your opponent has.

I've launched a beta version this year but had to take it offline after a couple months due to not being able to monetize it (not that I had a plan, network or marketing) and the costs of running it on a full production cluster - specially because I haven't been able to find a remote position for a while now and that's how I funded the development of it for the past years - working full/part time and then during downtime working on this project.

In the meanwhile I thought that perhaps crowdfunding could help me get some funding to justify open-sourcing the whole game as AGPL-v3 in order to keep working at it and build a community around it. I'll also be working on simplifying the production stack to be able to deploy it in a combination of platforms to at least have it online during the last part of the campaign, leveraging the free offerings there are.

Although it obviously has similarities with other household names such as Magic The Gathering and Hearthstone (and I think you'll enjoy it if you like those kinds of games) it's very different in important aspects and plays differently, while still having - or aiming to have - the same fantasy related world-building themes and flavour that drew me into other TCGs. Nonetheless my interest and influences came from way earlier than MtG, they came from "Build your own Adventure" type books, Warhammer and other tabletop games, and the reason why I even started this project was because at some point the random/poker nature of the existing TCGs wasn't appealing to me anymore.

I thought it would be fine to show it here and perhaps get some more eyes on it and start some discussion about non-random card games and see if anyone has interesting things to say about it.

Thanks