Attrition

I’m happy to finally share Attrition, a card game I’ve been working on, revisiting, overthinking, polishing, breaking, fixing, and generally having a lot of fun with.

Attrition is based on a physical card game that started years ago with a deck of cards, some boredom, and the sort of rules that emerge when friends have enough time to argue about exactly how a game ought to work.

The basic idea is simple: it’s War, except there are decisions to make.

What grew out of that has become something considerably more elaborate—campaigns, achievements, opponents with personalities, a field manual, statistics, bits of history, entirely too many cheesey jokes, and a lot of little details that probably nobody needed me to spend this much time thinking about.

But that’s also the point.

This has never really been a business project. It’s a hobby. I made it because I enjoy making things, because I enjoy card games, and because it has been fun taking something that existed around a table years ago and asking what it might look like as a real game that I could share with other people.

A lot of people helped me get it there.

I owe a huge thank-you to the people who played builds, found bugs, questioned decisions, endured unfinished interfaces, and generally served as guinea pigs while Attrition turned into something resembling a finished game:

Lacy Boler, Aidan Boler, Kieth “Blake” Blakeney, Kelsey Stanley, Steven Bunkley, Cassandra Pittman, Amber Fermo, Vince Fermo, John Horton, Joe Maclean, Joshua Reed, Brooke Walker, Kevin Walker, and James Pettitt.

Thank you for the testing, feedback, patience, and willingness to play a card game whose rules and interface occasionally changed underneath you.

There’s another group I need to thank as well.

Josh Lindsay, Matt Hinson, and Marc Hinson were there for the inspiration, boredom, friendship, and countless circumstances that eventually produced the original physical version of this game.

Attrition exists because of those years and those friendships.

I hope people enjoy the game. I hope somebody gets overly invested in saving a two, gets annoyed when an opponent refuses to surrender, discovers one of the dumb historical references buried in the interface, or simply kills a few minutes playing a strange little variation on War.

Mostly, I’m just glad it exists.

And I’m glad I finally get to share it.

When the game is finally available for open testing, I’ll share the Play Store link here.

— Chris