Calling Cards - New Solo/Duo Game By High Level Games

Sometimes a game is simple. Sometimes a simple game requires a lot more words than you expect. Calling Cards is a rules light tabletop roleplaying game available now on Itch.io.

Calling Cards is a game of family conversations. You pick up a tarot card, take a long look at it, and then describe the character you see on the card to your fellow player or you write down that character description on a piece of paper. That character is a member of a large sprawling family capable of moving between Sapphire and the Unbridled Realms, a multiverse with any world your family can imagine existing between Order and Primal Chaos.

Once you've created your characters, you have a conversation as if you were talking to one another through the tarot card. If you are playing solo, you can journal the conversation you just had with your family member.

If that idea sounds familiar, it should. This idea of talking and magically transporting to a different place is at least as old as The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny. That's what inspired Calling Cards. In the Amber multiverse, the Trumps (or tarot cards) were drawn by an ancient wizard named Dworkin using magic drawn from the very essence of Order (the Pattern) spawned from the depths of Chaos. That said, you don't need to be a fan of that universe to play Calling Cards, but we want to give credit to our inspiration.

In Calling Cards, you use the court cards from each suit of the Tarot to generate family members who you can talk with. We've provided extensive support guidance for each card to help you generate the characters and their motivation. We've provided standard tarot explanations for each card that we think are useful for this game and for working with the tarot in other formats. We also provide specific details that fit the setting of our game. We've used the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith images for this initial version of the game. Those illustrations were done by Pamela Colman-Smith. If we raise enough money we'll commission our artist, Jayne Firstenberg, to make a full deck for use with the game!

The conversations you have are designed to be free-form. You are a family full of drama and that drama is the reason for your 'phone call'. The game provides guidance on complications, conversation framing, and reasons for the drama that is currently causing a stir at the Court of Sapphire. All of this is support guidance for helping move your conversation along, but nothing locks you in place. Feel free to keep adding more interesting elements to your characters and the conversation you're having!

During character creation you'll also create memories for the characters who are talking to one another and decide what they are the Best at in the family. Characters who are the Best at that thing, are universally the best at it in the entire multiverse. Fans of Amber Diceless will be familiar with the general concept, but again, that game is not a requirement to play and enjoy Calling Cards.

Calling Cards is a fun rules light game that you can use as a framing for other tabletop roleplaying game adventures as any world that you can play a game in can become a world that the family members of the Court of Sapphire can explore.