Get Ready to Experiment in the Wyld

Wyldcard explores a new paradigm in tabletop gaming: plastic cards with e-paper screens that meld the physical and the digital. Snap them onto a Plinth and the pictures on the cards can change as you play the game. With built-in memory, Wyldcards can persist stats, log moves, and track status effects. Connect your Plinth with a friend’s to collaborate or compete. We’re launching the first Wyldcard DevKit, giving creators the ability to experiment with the platform and explore this new interaction-space.

Wyldcard makes it possible to implement a number of game mechanics that just aren’t practical with paper playing cards:

• Persist state between games - Did your sprite lose a spear or break a tooth in battle? Remove these from the picture on the card and they won't be there the next time you play. The cards grow as the characters grow.
• Change behavior based on which other cards are in play - Unlock certain moves when another card is in play at the same time. Or unlock hidden synergies in a way that would be too complex to keep track of manually!
• Change behavior based on the location of cards in play - Maybe the different card wells have different characteristics that give a card offensive moves in one spot and defensive moves in another.
• Change behavior based on time of day - A mysterious sprite with its eyes closed seems to do nothing during the day, but what's this? The eyes are open when we're playing at night!
• Procedurally generated cards - With a computer powering your game, it's possible to have an incredible variety of cards based on different combinations of characteristics. And this variety of stats and abilities can be reflected in the images on the cards themselves. You could even add a "breeding" component that allows you to create new cards from a combination of other cards you've been playing with!

No Charging Required

The Wyldcards themselves do not have batteries. E-paper displays (like that of a Kindle) will keep their image for months without any power. They’re completely passive but can come to life when placed on a Wyldcard Plinth. The plinth contains a battery and small computer that runs the game mechanics.

Each Wyldcard is equipped with a small memory chip that can store stats and game data. A Wyldcard serves as a vessel for a game element, and the sprite that represents it, without being bound to a particular player or Plinth. These game elements becoming active during play.

Create Your Own Game

Wyldcard DevKits ship with a JavaScript SDK for implementing your own games. Leverage simple abstractions to assign a behavior to each button on the plinth, display images on the Wyldcards, and send messages over the link cable. See our GitHub repo for sample code and tutorials.

Wyldcard DevKits will ship with a simple demo application that displays random images on cards and a game implementation that simulates drawing cards from a Tarot deck.

A Game Changer, Not Just for Games

Wyldcards are appropriate for many different applications. While we invented these cards with games in mind, others in our community have thought of various creative uses, such as stage magic, labeling, immersive art installations, escape rooms, and fancy showpieces, to name just a few examples. The open programming platform provided by our SDK does not restrict you to game-specific formats.

Features & Specifications

Wyldcard

• 1.5 x 3.25 x 3/16 inches
• E-paper display with 128 x 296 pixels
• Two-bit grayscale (black, white, and two shades of gray)
• Screen refresh time of about three seconds

Wyldcard Plinth

• Roughly 15 x 5 x 1.5 inches
• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 with the Wyldcard SDK preinstalled
• Rechargeable battery included
• Four Wyldcard wells with three buttons each

Campaign Products

Wyldcard DevKit

A Wyldcard Plinth with three Wyldcards. Includes everything you need to experiment with the Wyldcard platform. (If you want to develop two-player games, you’ll need another kit for the other player).

Set of Three Wyldcards

Three Wyldcards, pre-printed with a random image. You will need a Wyldcard DevKit to change the image on the cards. These are intended as an expansion to your Wyldcard DevKit, for games and other applications that require more than the three cards included with the kit.

Wyldcard Deluxe DevKit

Wow, you’re fancy! And so is the Deluxe DevKit. It includes an extra-fancy programmable Wyldcard Plinth and three Wyldcards. We broke out the Japanese block planes for the handcrafted black-walnut plinth and fashioned our own brass fittings by hand. The Deluxe DevKit includes everything you need to experiment with the Wyldcard platform. (If you want to develop two-player games, you’ll need another kit for the other player. They don’t have to be as fancy as you are.)

Support & Documentation

The open source Javascript SDK with documentation and sample code can be found in our GitHub repo. Tutorials and guides will be posted to the Wyldcard Blog. Open source schematics for designing your own Wyldcard-compatible hardware is also available in our GitHub repo.

If you have questions or need help programming, don’t hesitate to email us or join our Discord server.

Manufacturing Plan

On top of being a lifelong crafter and maker, Jonah has been managing teams at software and hardware companies for over five years. He knows how products get built! Wyldcards and plinths are built out of standard industrial components and production can be scaled as needed. They were designed from the very beginning with mass production in mind.

Wyldcards themselves are composed of a standard-sized e-paper screen, a simple custom-manufactured PCB, magnets, and a two-part epoxy resin poured into a silicone mold. If we need to ramp up production to over a hundred cards, we’ll switch to card enclosures milled from plastic sheet. If we get into mass production, we can switch to injection-molded card enclosures.

A batch of standard plinths is easy to produce in our woodworking shop. If we need to scale production up to more than 50 plinths, we will likely use a CNC router or laser cutter to speed things up. We have optimized our component design to accommodate either option.

Fulfillment & Logistics

Wyldcard LLC will ship batches of the finished product to the fulfillment warehouse of Mouser Electronics, Crowd Supply’s parent company. From there, Mouser’s world-class facility and staff will fulfill all orders placed during the campaign. For your convenience, we are also covering all US domestic shipping costs and we are subsidizing international shipping costs. You can learn more about Crowd Supply’s fulfillment service under Ordering, Paying, and Shipping in their guide.

Risks & Challenges

The best problem to have would be getting a huge number of orders! At the point of needing to manufacture hundreds of plinths or thousands of cards, we’d need to step up our product from a one-person shop and begin using a contract manufacturer with industrial automation. We have worked in this environment before. It would delay our first shipments a little, but production would move quickly once all the paperwork has been signed and the tooling has been set up. Wyldcard was designed with this sort of manufacturing in mind, so we would not need to go back to the drawing-board and delay things further.

The highest risk is availability of Raspberry Pi Zero 2 computers. Global supply of Raspberry Pis is steadily increasing as it recovers from pandemic-era shortages. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that these units will be readily available in the second half of this year, with enough quantity to satisfy all possible demand. This timing coincides perfectly with our estimated ship date. Raspberry Pi availability does not block production of the other components, so—in the event of a shortage—an older Raspberry Pi Zero can be swapped in at the cost of a slightly worse developer experience.