Card GBA

Four Cartridges, One Rulebook

August 2026 was card games on the Game Boy Advance. Four separate ROMs in a month, all written in tish on the chuggie engine, built from outside the engine repo on purpose so I'd be using chuggie the way anyone else would.

Triple Triad with the FF8 rules, walking Balamb Garden and Timber. Ninja Blood on its three by five board with pawns, ranks and lanes, set in Kalm, Under Junon and Costa del Sol. Gwent with three rows, leaders, weather and muster, through White Orchard and Novigrad. Each one has a world around it: you walk a town, talk to people, get challenged, play a match, and the result moves the campaign forward.

The fourth ROM, Netherblood, uses Ninja Blood's rules unchanged in a different world, to prove the rules work as a reusable component. Every rule comes from the Ninja Blood package, and none of them needed changes. Underneath are shared packages, card, card-ui, card-input and card-sram, none tied to a specific game.

The asset generation is Python. Years after Zepa Studios, I was making handheld games again, in a language I wrote.