I finished my second physical card game project, Escape From Tag World! This is the last blog post about this project as I wrapped up all of the loose ends and it's officially posted now.
Here's where you can find the game online:
🎲 Play digitally through Tabletop Simulator here.
🃏 Physical version for sale on TheGameCrafter here.
To start off, the final version of the game arrived in the mail, which meant I got to finally play it with the final cards! It was fun and I was happy with how it all turned out. I made a list of what all I didn't have to print for my own copy of the game since I printed a few extras that I didn't fully need.
Then I made the how to play video! I recorded the video footage, then a narration to go over it. From there, I edited the clips together. There were a few parts that I wanted to add more footage to though, so I went back and re-recorded some.
And with that, I ordered the final copy! I just had to finish a few final posts and then the game was officially wrapped up. The game itself was finished and printed by September, so the last couple of months were just putting together the how to play video and getting all of the online posts finished up.
So with that, there's not a lot to show for this post, but I officially am done with the project, so I wanted to take some time to reflect on the project as a whole!
Overall, I clocked around 240 hours for the full project. I wasn't clocking my hours back when I worked on Nay Saga, but I can imagine this time was a lot less because this project was much smaller. And for comparison, my GGJ project was around 102 hours (with the post-GGJ updates) and my RPG Maker Game Jam project was about 140 hours. So even though this one was worked on for a much longer period of time, it wasn't too much more time.
The goal of this project was to scope down from Nay Saga, and I think I did a good job with that. As you may have seen in my yearly recap post, I worked on a lot of game projects in 2025, and I wouldn't have had time for that if I tried to make another massive Nay Saga project.
For Escape From Tag World, I focused a lot on the game mechanics. The part that made it a bit more involved than Nay Saga was the balancing because it has more strategy. With the character abilities, Birdian and Point costs, etc. it really became a much more complex system to balance. But that's what made it a lot of fun to work on.
I thought I did a lot of testing with Nay Saga, but I would argue I tested Escape From Tag World more. I definitely did more tests in Tabletop Simulator and then each game took a lot longer, which made testing more involved. I recorded 24 playtests for Nay Saga and 20 for Escape From Tag World, but 1 game of Escape From Tag World would usually take an hour or more, while with Nay Saga, I could test individual game modes that went a lot faster.
Overall, because I had figured out the process of making a card game with Nay Saga, a lot of the actual development went faster for Escape From Tag World. I didn't have to learn nanDECK and its connections to Google Sheets or figure out how certain assets needed to be formatted. I also reused a lot of assets like the drawings of the characters and group symbols. So with a lot of that knowledge, I had the time to focus on those more advanced mechanics.
Another aspect that made this one easier was that I was trying to make it into more of a card game instead of a board game, meaning that I wanted as little extra pieces as possible and challenged myself to fit it into a very small box. It ended up having a few extra pieces to help with tracking scores, but overall can be played with just the cards.
I also didn't create a digital variation for this game. I briefly thought about it, but I had to remind myself that something like that would be out of the scope of what I had planned. So I reeled it back in. This happened with a few different instances, and I'd say I restrained myself enough to make this game smaller, as intended!
So overall, when comparing the two, I do think that Nay Saga is more polished, because that's what my intentions were for that project. But gameplay-wise, I'd maybe say Escape From Tag World is more fun.
After officially playing a 3-player game with my family, I did realize that the downside of this game is that it's very long. They liked the aspects of building up your deck and gradually getting better cards, but after 3-4 hours of playing, I was the only one with any Linkship Pilots, and we decided to shorten it to just needing 2 because of how long it had been going on. I suppose I should've calculated it and realized it would be about an hour or two per player if my 1-player games were turning out to be at least an hour, but it didn't occur to me until we were actually playing it. So a good reminder that there can never be enough playtesting!
We decided that for next time, we'll try cutting all of the Linkship Pilot recruitment costs in half and see if that cuts down on time at all to feel like a better time. And if it does, I may consider updating and reprinting those cards so the game doesn't go on quite as long and can be a bit more digestible.
I didn't originally think I was going to make a second physical game, but I'm glad I did because it was a fun project and I'm happy with how it came out! I'm not sure if I would make a third board game because I do overall prefer making video games, but who knows what the future will hold.
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