How Spellslingers Began

With Spellslingers experiencing its FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY this year, we wanted to explore some fun topics for all the spell-loving spellslingers out there!

Let’s Rewind

Rewind all the way back to December 2015, Vincent was in his early twenties, cornered in his poster-to-poster walled room, drafting up his first big card game to launch.

Otherworlds, a tabletop RPG, was his first game. The problem however, is showing people a “quick tabletop RPG” experience can still take hours, so Vincent wanted to design a game that would be extremely portable, easy to teach, play, and fun.

A Viking From Otherworlds Giving A Fist Bump

Diggin’ Graves!

As a fan of all things spooky and with some shades of enjoying dark humor, Vincent was toying around with a game centered on gravedigging. 

This didn’t get very far in concept.

Shotgun Zombies

The next design was similar to Exploding Kittens in some ways. 

Essentially, in this zombie game, you’d try to avoid zombies biting you when they become revealed from the deck. You could shove other players or use cards like “Shotgun” to blast a zombie away. Zombies were also a little less tired in 2015, so this seemed like a solid start, but eventually ended up hitting a brick wall here too.

Think Vincent Think

These games weren’t cutting it, but Vincent was determined to make something work. That’s when he remembered a trick taking game he had made in 2012, called Bullet.

In Bullet, each player has an opening hand of seven. The dealer puts the top card of the deck into the shared discard pile, and then the following player needs to play a card from their hand of a matching suite or a higher number.

Play continues this way until a player can’t play a card, in which case, they “Bite The Bullet,” forcing them to play the top card of the deck. If the top card matches the suit or is a higher number, then it is a success and gameplay continues! 

Both players can “Bite The Bullet” multiple times in a single game. The game all in all is definitely luck based, but is simple, fun, and easy to play.

Vincent used this as a base for Spellslingers. By just adding some interesting abilities to change the gameplay (hello redirect and negate!), it took Bullet to a whole other level and beyond! 

The Name

The name was a natural one. The game was inspired by a game called Bullet and had a mechanic called “Bite The Bullet,” but used spells.

What uses guns and spells? Spellslingers! A fun take on the world “gunslinger”! Vincent is a fan of wordplay as evident by not only Spellslingers, but things like Ghoullotine (Ghoul + Guillotine).

“The Fastest Game of Wit & Wizardry” was added for further distinction as a sub title and to help fully describe what the game was going for.