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About 30 people showed up at Zulu’s Board Game Cafe in Lynnwood last Sunday for the debut of the card game Legend of Gadia. It’s an original fast-paced, 20-minute game that is based on Mill Creek author Su Mon Han’s upcoming novel series that bears the same title.
According to Han, the game may remind some people of rummy and bridge, “but incorporate[s] a bold fantasy twist with magic spells and card team-ups that elucidate the stories and histories of the 12 heroes from the world of Gadia depicted in the cards.”
The cards’ aesthetics and artwork has a “tarot-inspired” appearance, illustrated by artists Cyvii and Olha Hyshchak. No artwork is AI-generated, Han said.
Han earned a bachelor’s degree in English and literature from Yale University. In an interview with Lynnwood Today, she said that creative writing and drawing have always been the core of self-expression, and knew that English would be her major before her first day as an undergraduate.
The Legend of Gadia (LoG) card game was a “happy accident,” she said.
“Legends of Gadia was originally just meant to be a fun, little extra bonus for readers of the fantasy novel series that I was writing,” Han said. “One of my protagonists, Rell, is often off in taverns playing this card game, and I had planned to just make up some rules and put them up on my author website for fans as a bit of bonus content, so they could try playing the same game Rell played and feel closer to my characters.”
She said she wanted to design a card game that she also wanted to play, such as one that combined the look of fantasy tarot cards with the playability of a poker-style game for three to four players. As she developed the Legend of Gadia [LoG], she discovered two things:
“[LoG] offered a rich opportunity to do some additional, insidious world-building that I couldn’t help turning the fantasy archetypes on the LoG cards into historical figures from its back history,” she said. “And it was a legitimately fun game to play – to the extent that the many friend groups I play-tested with over the years all responded positively to it and kept asking to play again.”
After she hired the artists to illustrate the cards and characters, Han decided to crowdfund and produce the game herself ahead of the books’ release because “I had the feeling it could legitimately stand on its own as a game.”
Han said LoG is like the “antithesis” of other popular card games, such as Magic: The Gathering.
“You buy it once, and you’ve got the whole game,” she said. “There’s no need to buy more packs or build out your deck. Plus, you can win a full game of LoG in under 20 minutes once you know the rules. And yet, the way the gameplay works and engages and ultimately entertains your brain makes it such a satisfying experience you want to play again and again and typically end up playing for hours.”
The Legend of Gadia card game can be purchased online or at several retails around the Seattle area, including Zulu’s Board Game Cafe in Lynnwood and Bothell, Fireworks Gallery in U Village and SeaTac Airport, and Geek Villain Tabletop in Everett.
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