To this date, The Deck has grown a lot. At its earliest stage, it only consisted of Hierarchy (a game included in the rules booklet now), and even that was a far cry from what it is today.
Hierarchy was originally intended to be a bluffing game played with numbered cards where the purpose of the game was to capture as many of your opponents cards as possible. It was supposed to be quick and easy, but the concept had been done and done well by plenty of others. Hierarchy quickly turned into the hand building game it is now, where players try to hold onto as many points as they can or build special hands worth a lot of points. Those who have tested it have found it fun, but there are always bugs to work out. Between version 1 and the current version 3, the deck increased from 120 cards to 135 in order to accommodate more special cards for the players to use. The rules themselves sustained minor changes as well, mostly in the way some of the cards worked.
There was quite a bit of a lull between the play tests of version 1 and 2. It was during this time that the other three games were designed: Castles, Make It Work, and Perpetraitor. Of these three, the first two have been tested a little bit, with no variations to the rules. Personally, I'm excited to see how Perpetraitor will hold up. Even as the creator, I think it's a bit of an odd game, but it has promise.
The biggest bottleneck in the design process right now is play testing. People are busy, so getting a group together with any sort of consistency is nigh impossible at the moment. This is merely within a close group of friends and family however. I have plans to open up testing to a wider audience, but what I'm going to focus on for the time being is less a matter of designing mechanics than it is of design, period. The cards and the rule book have gone through multiple revisions, but they could use a lot more work. You'll be seeing a lot more of that over the following weeks for sure.
-Kurt
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