Puppet Master’s Projects

by Austin Koepp, Sole Proprietor Puppet Master’s Projects PullSomeStr sngi

Ever sit down to duel your friend and on the first draw realize you’ve lost? Ever brought the wrong deck to a tournament? Ever been just one or two expansions behind and felt out of the game? Me too. And I was sick of it.

This brought me to making Puppet Masters! It is a dueling card game entirely and completely designed around the concept of always having a move to make. How is that possible? • Players each choose up to 2 decks of

Puppets from the 18 available in the box. Then all chosen decks are shuffled together and placed in the middle of the table. This is a single draw deck. If there is ever an issue where one deck is considered too strong, well both players have access to it all game. • Puppets are drawn into the center and bid upon by players from a finite pool of power called Strings, unique to each character. If someone is going after a

Puppet you know is key to their victory, you can counter bid on it and make it more expensive for them, maybe shoving them out entirely.

Enough about balance and big ideas! What is this game? Fair enough.

Puppet Masters is a character-based dueling card game where each player chooses from 27 unique characters, each with their own health, string pools, initiative and abilities. Players then take up to two thematic decks of minions, Puppets in this case, that range from undead that shamble and defend with massive health pools to angels who can fly over the front line and hit specific targets to demons that tear each other apart as they deal massive damage to enemies. As stated above, these decks from all players are pooled together and drawn into the center of the table, called the arena, where they can be taken over by players using strings or hunted for money to buy spells and items.

The key to Puppet Masters is the replayability inherent to combination-based gameplay. Between the massive amount of characters and decks, there are also the variety of playstyles; do you want to get a legion of terrible minions to weigh down your foe in bodies or do you want to grab one epic monster and equip it with every item imaginable? Do you want to take puppets and trade them out whenever they get injured, or do you want to sling spells at your foes instead of committing to minions?

Austin Koepp made Puppet Masters over five long years, working on it nights and weekends. It is a passion project from one gamer who aspired to make his own games through the indie board game scene. Is it perfect? No. Is it filled with bang for your buck and fun for many, many nights to come? You bet it is. Pick up a copy today at https://www.puppetmastersprojects. com/ and support a small developer!