Building a card game does not require flash. Instead, you can begin with plain paper, a bunch of dice and a stack of bagged leftover Mythos cards. In our case, the game rules came together on one of the designers private forum, all kinds of stuff and ideas accumulated over the years and things were thought over, organized and massaged in many ways.
In the summer of 2011 all these ideas became tactile when the cards were printed out and slipped on top of the mythos cards. That version had many things that required all manner of counters like 10 penni coins from the Hastur stash. Stuff like Warhammer 40k figurine bases and some other stuff from a 4e Texas Hold-em poker kit. Makes sense as the development budget being exactly 4e plus anything we could find around the house.
Printing out the cards and playing the thing for realz was very revealing. Lots of gameplay niggles and flow problems reared their ugly heads as we tried to play and memorize the rules. It was _very_ slow.
We would stop a lot, talk and make notes of things, rework the gameplay and item prices and on the next meeting do the same again. Re-editing the cards and printing them was no fun at all, in the end most of the cards looked like rugs that are stitched together from various scraps of paper.
Testing on 'real-hardware' is very good. You can estimate how long it takes for a beginner to learn how to play, how many rounds of the game it takes to win and what cards get dropped into the discard pile no questions asked. Analyzing the discard pile is very revealing, our feeling is that if the card went straight away into the discard pile, there must be something wrong with it. Tweak the card, glue some new stuff on it and play the next iteration.
After 1.5 years of iterating and playing we are where we are now. Dead.. plays quite well and I coded the pre-alpha browser version for internal testing. Playing the game on paper cards and on the net is very different, the pacing is much faster when you do it from the ui and especially with a bot when there's only one player thats struggling to memorize the rules =)
So plan and test carefully and don't be afraid to kill your darlings if they get in the way of smooth gave flow. Easy!
If I recall right, first sessions usually took half a day per game, and because of constant note-making and rule-twiddling we hardly had energy for another session on that same day. At first the game was designed for four players which also added to the length of the game.
VastaaPoista