The Day the Idea Was Born

One random day after summer camp, when I was around 12-13 years old, I sat at my kitchen counter with a notepad and a deck of playing cards, trying to invent a game.

A bunch of other kids and I had created this goofy little club called the “Secret Ninja Society Club” at the summer camp that year. We were just kids being creative.

That day, I thought, “What if I made a card game I could bring in and show everyone?”

All I had was a standard deck of playing cards, a pencil, and whatever ideas a 12-13-year-old could come up with.

So I started laying the cards out across the table, almost like solitaire. I remember staring at them, trying to imagine some kind of system. Eventually, I started thinking about towers, climbing floors, kings, guards, poison, assassins…almost like reading a story through cards.

The King became the ruler.
The Queen became a defender.
The Joker became an assassin.
The Ace could poison the King.
And somehow, from that pile of random playing cards, the first ideas behind Sovereign’s Gambit were born.

At the time, there were no official mechanics. No artwork. No worlds. No polished systems. Just imagination.

Looking back now, it’s funny realizing that what started as a middle school kid scribbling ideas into a notebook slowly evolved into the dungeon-crawling strategy game I’m building today.

Sovereign’s Gambit started as a kid wanting to make something cool for his friends.