by Tom Lehmann

Gadget Builder is a family card game for 2-5 players in which players build gadgets to help them go out first.

Everyone knows the core idea of Crazy Eights or UNO: be the first to get rid of your cards by playing them to a central pile, matching either the number (rank) or color (suit) of the top card or — if you can't do that — draw a card. I wondered: Could I make this more strategic, while keeping it a fast, fun game?


Since this central mechanism is one that most players know, for this preview I thought it would be interesting to go into more design detail than I usually do to show how I transformed it.

Introducing Gadgets

Suppose you could build gadgets that will be placed in front of you and which you can later activate to help you go out in various ways:


For example, a gadget that lets you play cards of the same color, all at once, or....


A gadget that lets you discard a card in addition to your play? Suppose, during play you get down to two cards in hand. If on your next turn either card can be played, you can use this gadget to discard the other card and go out. That's pretty sweet.


How about a gadget that lets you play any card on the top pile? Or one that lets you make two plays in a row? With gadgets, hands should be pretty quick, solving one issue with this type of game: They often drag on with no player quite being able to go out.

What if built gadgets stay in play from hand to hand? This would let players build positions, adding a strategic element.

Adding Things Up

How should playing regular cards without using gadgets work? Without gadgets, if all you can do on your turn is play one card or draw, that's pretty boring.

I wanted some way to play multiple cards in a turn without using gadgets as that's both more fun and creates uncertainty about how close someone is to going out.


What if you could add successive cards of the same suit to your play? Suppose a green 2 is showing and I play a red 2 (matching by #), followed by adding a red 3 and a red 4 to it. That's three cards out of my hand in one turn.

Should you be able to subtract as well? I considered and rejected this. I liked how adding tends to move the #s on the pile upward, making it generally easier to play 5s, 6s, and 7s and harder to play 1s, 2s, and 3s. That felt like interesting texture.


Suppose a red 2 is showing, and you have a red 1, 3, 4, 5, 5, and 7? Do you play the 3 and add the 4 and one of your 5s to it to get rid of three cards from your hand? Or do you play that pesky 1 since a 1 is often hard to get rid of?

Your decision will be informed by your gadgets in play. With a discard gadget, you can play the 3 and add the 4 and one 5 without worrying about the 1 since you can discard it later if it doesn't play.

Given a custom deck, I could design the suits any way I wished. My first attempt had only ranks 1-5, plus wilds. This didn't quite work as adding was a shade too easy with such a small range of number values. I increased the number of ranks from 1-5 to 1-7, which worked well. Adding still occurs, but can be harder to arrange. This led to another gadget:


Since adding makes having runs in a suit valuable, the hand selection provided by this gadget is often quite useful. Originally, this gadget was "Draw 3, Discard 3", but testing revealed that it was too strong.

I also designed a gadget around adding cards:


This gadget lets you add cards of the same rank once during a play. For example:


That Wild Thing

I knew Gadget Builder would need wild cards as the ability to play on anything and change suit is central to this type of game.

However, since wild cards increase the luck of the draw and often feel far too powerful compared to ordinary cards, in my games I often design wilds to be strong in one way, but weaker in others.


For Gadget Builder, I did this in two ways. First, wilds are suited; they can play on anything (and therefore are often used to change color or go out), but have a fixed color, reducing their flexibility. Second, they have no rank and therefore can't be added to. They're a guaranteed play, but not, by themselves, a way to get rid of lots of cards.


This led to a nice combination in which a wild and gadget 4 can be used together to play all cards of that color — in this case, blue — from one's hand in a single play.

Finally, wilds occur half as often as any other card, with only six of them among the ninety game cards.

The Gadget Suit

How should gadgets enter play? Are they items off to the side that you buy? Or a special suit? What should they cost?

Hmm...let's make them game cards for simplicity: a fifth suit in which each card can either be built as a gadget or played normally. This means you don't need to separate gadgets from other cards at the end of a hand.

Let's make this suit double the size of the other suits, so that players see a variety of gadgets to possibly build. This also ensures, even after players build many gadgets, that enough gadget-suit cards remain in the deck for these cards to play normally.


Gadget costs are card combinations, vary by gadget, and are listed in their robot heads. Their powers are described in the robot bodies.

Costs are discarded from hand to the bottom of the play pile (so as to not change what's on top). The builder then draws new cards equal to the number that they discarded because otherwise building gadgets would be too easy a way to get rid of cards.

Building a gadget still reduces your hand size by one — the gadget card itself — so building a gadget has the same hand size effect as playing a single card (without adding to it). Given this, let's make building a gadget an alternative to playing a card.

Gadget Powers

To keep things simple, gadget powers can't be combined. Further, a player can use only one gadget on their turn. Otherwise, in later hands after building several gadgets, the first player might be able to go out on their very first play by using all their gadgets in combination.

To go out, a player not only has to get rid of all their cards, but they also must have no unused gadgets. If a player ever has no cards and unused gadgets, they immediately draw cards equal to their number of unused gadgets.

To avoid rules questions about whether a player can use a gadget to no effect (just to have "used" it), instead of using one gadget on your turn, you can simply "power down" one gadget by turning it to no effect.


Players can't build duplicate gadgets, but they can use the 1-gadget to straighten an already used gadget. However, spending a turn using a gadget to straighten another gadget to use on a future turn is slow. (This disadvantage is why the 1 gadget is so cheap to build.)

Restricting a player to using no more than one gadget per turn and requiring all gadgets be used to go out turned out to have nice play effects: If you build too many gadgets, you may be able to empty your hand easily, but won't be able to go out. The trick is to get a combination of two to four gadgets that work well together, and this combination can vary from game to game, providing strategic variety.

Suppose, on average, you build three gadgets during a game. With eight different gadgets, there are 56 different combinations of three gadgets to build and explore across multiple games.

Ganging Up on Dad

In UNO and similar games, messing with your opponents by skipping their turn or forcing them to draw cards is part of the game. Did I want any of this in Gadget Builder?

I knew I didn't want a lot of attack gadgets as they can make a strategy game too "political" or slow it down too much or introduce too much right-left binding where seating order looms large, but in a race to go out, being able to slow an opponent down just a bit can be quite useful.


Gadget Builder has one mild "directed" attack gadget: Choose an opponent to draw a card. Sometimes an extra card won't hurt an opponent at all — as they just add it to a play — and sometimes it will help them by giving them a wild or forming a run between two disconnected cards, but on average, it slows a rival down by a turn, which may be just enough time for you to go out first.

If the 6-gadget owner waits to use it until an opponent is nearly out of cards (when they hope it will be more effective), they often pay an implicit cost as well: On the turn they use this gadget, they can't use another gadget to get themself closer to going out.

I know that some players detest player-directed attacks, but I believe that mild ones can be useful, especially in family games. Hear me out.

Kids grow up having to do what adults tell them to do: their parents, teachers, coaches, etc. Games both add more rules to follow (the game rules, taking turns, etc.) and offer an inversion of this natural order, where kids can be a bit mean to their parents (or, perhaps, an older sibling) without fear of consequences — it's part of the game, after all!

It's fun to be able to force Mom to take an extra card or for several children to gang up on Dad by giving him multiple cards, and parents will often ham it up a bit when their kids do this, groaning as they take the extra card in hand while their offspring chortle.

A mild directed attack in a quick family game can work well, whereas a nastier directed attack in a longer strategy game may completely change its character, often for the worse. The psychology of quick family games is different from that of long strategy games.

We Don't Need No Stinking VPs

In Crazy Eights and similar games, the player who goes out scores points for the cards in their opponents' hands. Victory points are a useful design tool when balancing multiple paths in a game (such as, in basketball, balancing 3-point shots from afar vs 2 points for driving in for a layup), but here the goal is clear: Go out first. Why complicate matters?


In Gadget Builder, when you go out, you take or flip a score card. The next hand starts with the player clockwise from you, so you go last, giving a slight bit of catch-up for the other players). The first person to go out twice (in four- or five-player games), three times (in a three-player game), or four times (with two players) wins. No game will last more than 5-7 hands (depending on the number of players), and most games will typically last 3-4 hands.

Once players are experienced (and hands go faster), if desired the numbers needed to win increase by one.

From Prototype to Production

After Rio Grande Games accepted Gadget Builder, I wrote an artist's brief for Harald Lieske, with whom I had previously worked on Holly Oak and Winter Court (also for RGG).

In it, I emphasized that Gadget Builder was a family game and suggested that the gadgets could either be Rube Goldberg card contraptions or robots playing cards, and the four normal suits could represent different gears put together to form gadgets or robots.

Harald sketched out sample gears, parts, robots, and devices, from which I selected two robots for the box front scene. Harald chose a playful font suitable for a family game and sent me this first rough mock-up:


We iterated on this to produce the final box top:


Doing the cover gave us a visual motif of four background colors behind purple foreground items that we reused for the card backs and rules page layout:


For the four gear suits, Harald created distinctive gears that could serve as suit indices.



We reviewed our initial colors with various colorblind filters and adjusted them, making the red suit more orange and the green suit a cooler, darker forest green so that the colors were more distinct for colorblind players while still reading as red, blue, green, and yellow for others.


I then ran these cards past a friend, Larry Rosenberg, who is severely colorblind. He indicated the colors worked well, but that the contrast between the gears and the colors wasn't strong enough, so we lightened the background colors and darkened the gears slightly.


For the gadget suit, after experimenting with a combined gear approach, we settled on a robot outline, which worked well and set off the gadget suit from the gear suits.


I felt Harald's first attempt at the score cards—


—looked too much like another suit, so I suggested shifting the number from the center and using a star outline in the background. Harald liked that idea and devised a series of belts and gears going from 1-4 for them.


Harald then added turn and gadget summary cards, tying them visually to the gadget and score cards by color.


As always, Harald Lieske was a pleasure to work with, both in suggesting ideas and considering my feedback as we rapidly homed in on the finished game.

Gadget Builder is a quick, family strategy game of building gadgets and discarding cards. Enjoy!

Tom Lehmann