by Jakov J

What’s This?
Countryball Cards is a chaotic card game in which you attack your friends with the British navy, Swedish vikings or the Polish winged hussars, then build Romanian forts, Chinese factories or even heal your team with French baguettes or Hungarian goulash.

At its core, it is a fast combat game (1v1 and 2v2, around 25 minutes) where players draft teams of countryballs, trade on a dice-driven market, and chain abilities to eliminate the other team.

As I write this, the first finished copies are arriving at players’ doors. A year ago, the entire game was a stack of cards printed on photocopier cardboard. This diary covers the path in between, with notes on the parts that were harder than expected.

I’m Jakov Jandrić, based in Zagreb, Croatia. I run Glare Studios, a one-person studio, and Countryball Cards is my first physical product. I hope you enjoy it!

The Idea
If it isn’t already clear from the name, countryballs are spherical personifications of countries that often appear in webcomics, with each country having its own running jokes. The online community is large, especially on Reddit.

The design goal was to take that humor and pair it with a fast, strategy-driven combat system: drafting, resource management, and ability chains rather than a straightforward play-a-card-end-turn structure. One thing worth saying about the theme: countryball humor can run in a few different registers, and I deliberately kept this one light. Abilities lean on geography, history, and recognizable cultural shorthand like Australia’s kangaroos, Switzerland’s banks, Germany’s roads (autobahn) or Canadian hockey. The target was webcomic-warm, family-table-safe.

The Mechanics
The current version plays like this:
→ Draft: Each player picks 3 countryballs for their team. There are 20 to choose from in the base set, 10 additional in the Extended Edition. Each has 2 unique abilities.
→ Economy: Coins come in each turn (10 on the first turn, five thereafter). Four resource dice (D6) are rolled each round to set prices for a shared market with iron, oil, horses, and grain. Players trade in that market to use the abilities, or even flip the resources for profit (although the sell price is always 1 lower than the buy price).
→ Combat: Each countryball can take up to three damage tokens. At three, it’s eliminated (removed from the game). Abilities often deal damage, debuff, heal, create project cards that bring passive bonuses or directly generate resources. A lot of them require a combat die (D20) roll to succeed.
→ Win condition: Eliminate all enemy countryballs.

Each country plays differently because of its abilities. Here’s an example of what some cards can do:
→ Switzerland can create a bank and passively collect coins.
→ Romania can create forts to protect its allies.
→ Norway can use its navy to make its attacks more powerful.
→ Hungary can heal its whole team with some goulash.
→ Croatia can gain coins with the Tourist Season.
→ Netherlands can attack with bicycle infantry.
→ and so on…

Each card has two abilities and there are 30 cards so it would take a while to describe it all here.
There are 1v1 and 2v2 modes. Average game length is around 25 minutes.
More information about the cards + the rulebook can be found on countryballcards.com.

Game Development
Game design took the longest of anything, as it should. Asymmetric card games live or die on ability balance, and the early playtests made that brutally clear. I couldn’t have done it without friends willing to keep showing up. I was going to my local retail store every other week just to print a new set of cards on their photocopier’s nice cardboard. Got some weird looks from the cashiers, as people usually use it to print family photographs.

The first stable version had three abilities per countryball, and that turned out to be too many. Players spent more time reading their own cards than playing. I’ve cut it to two.

The harder question was what those two abilities should look like. A lot of abilities I prototyped got scrapped not because they were unbalanced but because they were too hard for the opponent to track. If your card does something situational, your opponent either knows it cold or has to read it before every decision. That hidden-information overhead is, I think, a common failure mode in asymmetric card games. The game stops being about strategy and starts being about who can memorize twenty ability texts faster.

What I landed on, with some exceptions, is a two-slot template: the first ability is an attack, and the second is open. It could create a project card, generate resources, heal, buff, or even be a second attack.

Here’s how that played out for Sweden, from early prototype to final version:

2v2 took its own design pass. The first version just doubled 1v1. Three countryballs per player, twelve cards on the table. Nobody could track the board. Dropping to two countryballs per player got it to eight cards, which is busy but readable. Turn order also got reworked so teammates don’t play back-to-back. Teams alternate, which stops one side from stacking ten attacks in a row and ending things before the other team can react. The mode is meant to feel louder and more chaotic than 1v1; the work was making sure the chaos stayed fun.

Flipping the Market!
The market was the part I tuned the most. There are four resources on the market: iron, oil, horses and grain. They get priced each round by a die roll across faces 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, and players can buy and sell freely.

The first version had buy and sell prices identical. Within two playtests the game stopped being about countryballs. Buy horses (or whatever resource) at two, sell at five the next turn, repeat, ignore combat until both players have a ton of coins. Wealth grew exponentially and the actual game began after 10 minutes of flipping the market. Two changes fixed it. Sell price is one coin below buy, so the spread eats into the compounding. And maximum available amount of resource was set to 15, which kills the “hoard cheap iron forever” strategy. Investing still works, but it’s just no longer the only thing worth doing. Most turns the real question is whether to attack, spend on a project, or trade, and the dice change the answer.

On Luck
A lot of abilities require a D20 roll. Choosing your strategy, picking your abilities, drafting and market decisions are yours; the dice decide whether plans survive contact. The result is a swingy game where it’s often unclear who’s winning until the final turn. For a game about countryballs hitting each other, that felt right. If you want zero luck, this isn’t it.

The Kickstarter Hurdle
Kickstarter does not currently accept creators based in Croatia. The list of accepted countries is fairly short and mostly Western. To launch a campaign I needed a US entity.

Thus, on my 18th birthday, I formed a US LLC. It took me a bit to obtain all the documentation, but after all was done, I was finally able to launch a successful campaign! There’s a fair amount of ongoing admin that comes with a US entity as a non-resident… but it’s out of scope for a designer diary. If there’s interest, I’m happy to write a separate post about that side of things.

Where It Stands
The Kickstarter funded at $6,000+. The official website has added almost a hundred orders since! Production is complete, the pallets arrived at the warehouse in June, and fulfillment is now live: every backer and pre-order shipment is going out, and the first copies are already in players’ hands!

More information can be found on the official website countryballcards.com and on BoardGameGeek. The full set of cards and the rulebook, along with a showcase + tutorial video, are free to browse there.

With fulfillment underway, the focus shifts to what comes next, and I hope that will be even more cards! There are a lot of countries (and mechanics) that didn’t fit into the base game, or even the Extended Edition, that might be nice to see in the future. Currently considering a Jungles & Deserts expansion which would include some SE Asian, South American & Arabic countries, as well as an expansion that would have ancient empires as cards instead of modern countries. All of this is work in progress and far from actually being made, but seriously considered, especially if there’s interest.

Questions Welcome!
Happy to answer questions on any part of the game development or even the factory selection, the LLC & admin work behind it, and fulfillment. Contact details are on the site and there’s a Discord link on the homepage. If you’ve played it, a rating and an honest comment on the game’s BGG page, good and bad, would mean a lot. ⭐

Thank you for reading my story!

Jakov Jandrić
countryballcards.com