The Palace of Cards maintains a collection of 11 classic card games that players can play online with and against each other. Among them are the two German classics Skat and Doppelkopf, the internationally known Rummy and Canasta, and the two solitaire games Spider and Klondike.
The game clients run on iOS and Android, PC or Mac.
Role: Game Designer
Responsibilities: Research. game mechanics & custom rules, UX design, documentation, teaching the card games to collegues.
My first task at the Palace of Cards was to document the nine games the studio had at this moment, as not a single line of documentation existed. Over the next four years I'd do anything from designing new features or redesigning existing ones, creating UI Mock-ups, research new card games and their established variations, and how our competitors brought these games to the online world. Improving our UI and thus the players' experience was an ongoing endavor. When the decision was made to add advertisement to the game clients, it fell to me to find out where and how. I also assisted with localization, reviewed texts for the company website, and wrote design docs for new custom rules for existing games and for the two games that we added to the portfolio of the studio: Bid Whist and Gin Rummy. I revised the tournament and updated the tournament schedule. In weekly training sessions, I taught the rules to my colleagues.