At the end of May every year, tabletop gamers from across the world gather in Birmingham. Britain’s second-largest city has played host to the UK Games Expo for 18 years now, running the convention since it was established in 2007. This three day long exhibition celebrates the best that tabletop gaming has to offer. Board game companies, big and small, demo their games, indie designers bring along self-published zines and adventure modules, and there are more prints, T-shirts, and accessories than you could shake a dice bag at.

This year’s expo had plenty to offer anyone interested in loading up on geeky gaming goods. Of course, that includes plenty of card games. Here at Card Gamer, we scoured the convention hall to get the scoop on several upcoming card games. Here are three of our favorite projects.

Rookling Heroes

The solo-journaling RPG Colostle was released in 2021 to significant critical acclaim. It was listed as one of Tabletop Gaming Magazine‘s Best Games of 2021, and won a Gold ENNIE Award. Now Nich Angell, Colostle’s designer, is working on a card game based spin off entitled Rookling Heroes.

The world of Colostle is a colossal castle (hence its name). This massive castle contains entire ecosystems within its walls, known as the Roomlands.

The Roomlands are inhabited by a variety of masonry-based monsters known as Rooklings. In Rookling Heroes, two players each build a team of Rooklings, and battle it out against one another. 

Speaking with Card Gamer, Angell described the game design goals of Rookling Heroes. He stated: “I always loved card games like Magic, Pokémon, and Flesh and Blood, but I’ve never been very good at them. I wanted to bottle that experience, and present it in a more accessible form.”

Rookling Heroes was designed around accessibility, and that comes across very clearly in its gameplay. No deckbuilding is required, players just choose three Rooklings each and they’re good to go. Attacks are launched by playing energy cards that are drawn from a shared deck.

Some abilities manipulate this deck, and some shuffle more cards into it, but the game never gets too complex. Since players are drawing cards from the same pool, there’s no need to worry about deck optimization or game breaking combos. Above all, this is a monster battling game with a focus on simple, clean fun.

The Kickstarter campaign for Rookling Heroes is currently in progress. Having already exceeded its £5,000 target, the game has been comfortably funded.

If you’re looking to grab some Rooklings of your own, the campaign will keep running until the 25th of June, and the game is scheduled for release in November of this year.

Future expansions are also in development which will add features like solo play, cooperative play, and boss battles.

World Domination!

Since the beginning of fiction, supervillains have been united by a single shared goal: world domination.

But of course, there’s only one world to dominate, and only one bad guy can reign supreme. In the World Domination! card game, players compete with one another to be the biggest, baddest world conqueror that they can be.

In World Domination!, players gather components to build a superweapon that will wipe out the opposition. They achieve this goal by playing minions to do their bidding, collecting weapons, and disrupting their opponents’ strategies using sabotage cards. The game will be the first release from World Domination Limited, a Kingston-Upon-Hull-based board game publisher, who are hopefully not actually plotting a campaign of global subjugation.

The base game draws on a variety of mad sciencey supervillain tropes. A planned “London Anarchy” supplement will add in a selection of Steampunk-based cards, and another will be focused on vampires, werewolves, and other monsters.

The Kickstarter for the campaign for World Domination! has not yet begun, although it is due to launch in the summer of 2025. More information about the game can be found at the World Domination! website. 

Fight for Inheritance

The King will be dead soon; long live the new King! In Fight For Inheritance, players control the heirs of a mad monarch on his deathbed. They will spend the game plotting, scheming, and killing one another until only a single survivor remains to take the crown.

Fight For Inheritance is the debut project from Red Cannon Games. The founder of Red Cannon Games, Hassan, was made redundant from his previous role in June of 2024. The idea for Fight For Inheritance came to him in a dream, and he awoke in the middle of the night to bring that dream into reality.

In this game about backstabbing royals, players build up their defenses, while undermining the safeguards of their opponents. Everyone starts the game with two bodyguards, but they can easily be bribed, killed off, or otherwise indisposed, leaving their wards alone and unprotected.

The game is designed to be played by groups of 2 to 4 and is described as being ideal for families. That said, hopefully any families playing this game won’t be quite as bloodthirsty as the royal family they’ll be controlling.

This game is currently being Kickstarted, and it’s due for a November release. Players who back the game at the £250 tier will be able to have themselves illustrated in the game as a playable prince or princess.

The great thing about conventions is that they provide everyone with a platform to show the world their ideas. The big TCGs like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Flesh and Blood, and Lorcana all had several booths set up at UK Games Expo to drum up player interest. Nestled in amongst these tabletop titans were smaller projects, like the ones we’ve discussed today.

Dreaming up a game of your own takes creativity, initiative, and passion, but it’s not an impossible task. Backing any of these games, or creating something of your own, will make you a part of a brilliant ecosystem of designers, creatives, and passionate gaming advocates. The world can always use more card games.