Mr Greenz Blackjack Challenge is a leveled-up version of Blackjack played with original Grotto Beasts! Cards. Can be played with any existing deck or random assortment of Grotto Beasts cards.
Games are fast and exciting, but force you to rattle your brain and be strategic to make your way to grand finale!
Play now! ♠️I kept hearing from other Grotto Beasts enjoyers and collectors that they had nobody to play with in real life and therefore nothing to do with their Grotto Beasts cards (besides displaying or eating). Thus, I set out to design a singleplayer game using the existing GB cards without any modification whatsoever.
This was a very interesting and new game design challenge for me: I had to design a totally new game using existing cards designed for a very specific game without any modifications.
I set myself the restriction of using the Grotto Beasts exactly as they are and having this game be playable in real life, so I had to keep the game simple and rely on what's already there. I wasn't going to make a solo "AI" to play Grotto Beasts, but instead a totally new game, so I pretty much discarded all the printed card effects, and therefore had to go with a "numbers game": as numbers are all that's left on the card besides their text effect.
Given that gambling and casinos are a big sub-theme in the Grotto Beasts world, I had to go for a casino inspired game, so I chose Blackjack because:
After playing around with various concepts and playtesting them myself with my cards, I came up with the gameplay system of additive and multiplicative score that's present in the final version (refer to the video or help page to see it in action). In essence, it gives the game a lot of:
After playtesting, this system seemed to be perfectly playable with all existing decks and even random combinations of cards, so I was very happy with the outcome.
Having a solid concept, I decided to share it with the Grotto Beasts community in the form of a game design document / manual. However, I realised that - while the game itself was pretty intuitive and fast - they found it hard to learn from the manual thus and was playing. So I figured I'd have to make a digital version on grotto.builders to onboard people into the game and show them how easy it is to play. I spent a few days designing the UI and giving it a lot of animations to feel alive and juicy (inspired by Balatro).
Then after a couple of weeks I implemented the game using JS, HTML, and CSS so it could be perfectly playable in the browser natively and directly embedded into grotto.builders. One key addition in the digital version was a score preview on a per-card basis, so players could see exactly how the scoring worked in real-time, making it much easier to learn and make combos.
At this point, people finally started playing the game, with some even beating it much faster than I expected. People were enjoying it and I had fun working on it, so I kept adding more features to make it more interesting and replayable: such as adding unique gameplay-altering effects to all Challengers. By now, people were so comfortable with the digital version and its new features (challenger effects and score previews) that still nobody plays it in real life. Ironic! Oh well.
Check out the source code