Game CCG:Main Page

This subspace is for customizable card games, card games in which the players can build their own decks out of larger pools of cards. Famous (non-open) examples of customizable card games include Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game. "CCG" can also stand for collectible card game, which is a subset of customizable card games in which the cards are sold in random packs and collecting specific cards requires either the luck of the draw or acquiring them from secondary markets; while most of the best known customizable card games, including those mentioned previously in this paragraph, are collectible, in the Wongery "CCG" should be taken to stand for the broader term "customizable card game" unless otherwise specified. (Other terms sometimes used for particular kinds of customizable card games—or particular business models under which the games are sold and marketed—include "trading card game" (TCG), "expandable card game" (ECG or XCG), and "living card game" (LCG).)

The open gaming movement has not penetrated the CCG industry as much as it has the RPG. There are understandable reasons for this; while RPG rulebooks and supplements are at their heart just documents and can be published inexpensively, especially in electronic format, producing a customizable card game, especially a collectible card game with all the trouble of collation, is much more involved and expensive, and much less accessible to the hobbyist or startup. (As print-on-demand costs continue to decrease, it is possible that this may become less of an issue over time.) Moreover, there's less to be gained by opening the rule system, both because it's less likely to bring sales to the original publisher—a custom CCG set may be easily playable without the official core set, and there are generally no rulebooks to be bought—and because the same costs that make CCGs less accessible to publishers may also make them less attractive to those wanting to create their own supplements.

As a matter of fact, at the time I made the decision to include CCGs in the Wongery Gamespace, I was unaware of any CCGs released under an open license. (There are a few CCGs that have Community Content Programs, but that's not quite the same thing.) Still, it seemed at least possible someone might have created a CCG under the OGL or another open license, and indeed searching the web I did manage to find a few such games. They were scarcer than I had anticipated, though, and most of them for various reasons didn't really lend themselves to the creation of cards themed to Wongery worlds—either the games were too closely tied to particular settings, or they were too incomplete. So far, I've only found one open-licensed CCG that really seemed ideally suited to this purpose, and thus it's currently the only CCG supported here. There are, however, a couple of other games that aren't quite as perfect a fit, but close enough that I may make cards for them for at least some worlds, and more games may be added later as I discover them.

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