Games Within Games

My wife and I love taking a deck of cards to a coffee shop or brewery. But big board games don’t fit on those tiny tables — and even most “portable” games still come with bulky boxes or too many components.

So we usually just bring a standard 52-card deck. It’s simple, quick, and universally playable. But over time, I started wondering: what else could this deck do?

That’s where Project 52 began.

The idea is simple: design games that live inside a standard deck of playing cards. No dice. No boards. No extra parts. Each game should be fully playable with just those 52 cards — and still let you use them for classics like Poker, Spades, or Solitaire.

Some games will be fast and social. Others might be complex, strategic, or weirdly specific. But they’ll all follow the same rule:
→ 52 cards in, new experiences out.

The first game under development is Solo Dungeon Shuffle: a single-player dungeon-crawler inspired by roguelikes and Lovecraftian horror. (I know a solo game doesn’t solve the problem of portability multiplayer games, but I want to make a fighting mechanic and its easier to build a solo fight before getting multiple players involved.) And there are more coming.

This blog is here to document the process — design notes, printable files, feedback, playtests, and game-by-game discoveries. My goal is to make portable, beautiful, clever little games you can take anywhere, play in weird places, and share with anyone holding a worn-out deck of cards.

Let’s see how deep this deck goes.