Card Hunter: A Boring Title Conceals a Game Design Dream Team

Card Hunter isn't the first indie game made by seasoned industry professionals driven from the world of AAA games by strictures and disappointments of corporate life. But never before have so many distinguished vets gone indie to work on the same exact game!

Jon Chey is the cofounder of Irrational Games and one of the men behind the popular first-person shooter BioShock. His new self-funded venture Blue Manchu is tackling the new Flash-based collectible card game—Card Hunter.

Joining him is Dorian Hart from the prestigious, but defunct Looking Glass Studios, indie game designer Farbs, Irrational's old art director Ben Lee from Freedom Force, developer Tess Snider, and ex-Wizards of the Coast VP Skaff Elias, who also spearheaded the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour. And let's not forget the one, the only... Richard Garfield. Yes, that's Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and one of the world's most revered nerds.

Just so you know how valuable the Blue Manchu team is, here's a short list of games that the members have been involved with—in some cases, several of them on the same game.

• System Shock (I & II)
• BioShock
• Thief (I & II)
• Freedom Force
• Rift
• Magic: The Gathering
• Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri
• Captain Forever

All of these are great games, all made in part by these guys (and gal) who now turn their collctive powers towards a free browser-based faux board game. As the teaser trailer above shows, the gameplay appears to play like a turn-based strategy board game, but with the collectible trading card elements of Magic.

The game's website is less than a week old, so information about it is sketchy at this point, but a team like this has never made an indie game before—that alone makes it something to keep an eye on.