Restart Round brings you Roster Reshuffle, a football themed deck building card game currently in development.
The themed deck-builder is an extremely popular format but sports-based versions are suprisingly uncommon. With Roster Reshuffle, we are aiming to create a game that combines the best of classic deck-builders and sports card games into one.

At its core, the mechanics of Roster Reshuffle are fairly simple. You start with basic players and use your turns to upgrade them to more advanced and unique players. Once you have an elite squad, you start scoring field goals and touchdowns to try to beat out your opponent before the game ends.

What makes Roster Reshuffle unique as a deck-builder? For one, you are actually building not only one deck, but two decks: a deck of offensive players that gain yards and a deck of defensive players with abilities to stop the offense, force turnovers, and wreak havoc. The two deck format means that both players are engaged even when it isn't their turn. Balancing these two decks is the biggest challenge of making Roster Reshuffle. We still have more play-testing and tweaks to go here, but are moving in the right direction with each successive round of play-testing.

The second unique feature of Roster Reshuffle: while you are building your offense and defense decks, they never go above or below 11 cards. As we have been play-testing Roster Reshuffle, the rule that really tied the game together is "get a player, cut a player". Like how football teams have a roster limit, your decks in Roster Reshuffle aren't endless. Every time you buy a new player, you need to cut a player from either your discard pile or the top card of your deck. This means you need to think twice about what you add and remove from your deck. It also means you cycle through your starter cards quickly to get to your new, powerful cards. This was a huge pace of play improvement from early versions of Roster Reshuffle.

The last major feature of Roster Reshuffle: the running clock. It's not uncommon for deck-builders to end when the deck runs out. This is no different in Roster Reshuffle. However, the major difference in our game is that every turn, the top card of the deck is destroyed, leading to the game getting increasingly closer to ending. With only 53 total cards in the deck, this means you have to take the lead and fast before the clock runs out!

The result of all of this is a fast-paced deckbuilding game that feels true to a real game of football. When we playtested the game and it ended 28-24 on a game-ending interception touchdown, we knew we had a good one! More to come in 2024.