Year of the Devil
The Card Game
An asymmetric two‑player card game. One player is Diego. The other player is everything hunting him.
Internal concept direction · August 2026 · Zack Howe and Cole Beardsley
One man,
four riders, five centuries.
Diego is a single card. High health, high attack, and alone. He does not build a board. He survives one.
Across the table, the other player holds four decks. Each one is a Horseman wearing the face of power in a different century, and behind all four sits the Devil. The Horseman player is not trying to out‑tempo Diego. They are trying to grind him down and choose the moment the Devil arrives.
Two players, two completely different games, one table.
How it sets up.
The Horseman player holds four short decks. Behind each sits a Horseman, face down, and behind all four sits the Devil.
They know which deck is which. Diego does not, and the minions overlap heavily across all four so he cannot read it off the first few cards.
Diego is one card on the table from the first turn. Everything else on his side exists to keep him standing.
One board · two entirely different gamesFight through a deck.
Then meet what was behind it.
The onslaught
The Horseman player feeds minions and effects out of one deck. Diego cuts through them, or gets worn down trying.
The Mark grows
Every kill Diego makes advances the Mark on his chest. He cannot avoid this. Killing is how he survives and how he loses himself.
The reveal
Deck empty, the Horseman flips face up and fights as a boss with a leader ability that has been shaping the deck all along.
Next century
Beat the Horseman and the era ends. The next deck comes forward, a new face of power in a new century.
Four decks, four eras, four Horsemen. And the whole time the Mark is filling, which is the other clock running underneath the one Diego can see.
The Mark is the game's
real resource.
Every kill makes Diego stronger and makes him less himself. The Mark buys power and it spends humanity.
This is the Arkham Horror sanity dial, pointed at a different thing. Call it humanity. The closer Diego gets to the truth on his chest, the closer he gets to becoming the thing he has been hunting.
Both players want to
push it, and both want to stall it.
Kill to live, live to lose
He has to clear minions to survive the turn. Every one he clears fills the Mark and brings the Devil closer. He cannot stop swinging and he cannot afford not to.
Feed him or starve him
Throw cannon fodder early to fill the Mark and summon the Devil while Diego is still healthy. Or hold back, chip him down, and bring the Devil out against a wounded man.
The Horseman player is choosing when the endgame starts, and paying for it in board presence. That is the decision the whole game turns on.
Four decks that feel different
before you know which is which.
Minions overlap heavily across all four, so Diego reads the deck by how it hurts him rather than by what it plays.
Beef and buffs
Bigger bodies, augmented attacks, straight combat pressure. The deck that wants Diego trading blows.
Denial and decay
Hand size, resources, discards, status effects. Wins by taking Diego's options away rather than his health.
Ground taken
Position and control. Board space that does not give itself back once it is lost. to design
Volume
Bodies that keep coming back. The deck that feeds the Mark fastest, on purpose. to design
Each Horseman card works like a Gwent leader. It sits face down behind its deck, shapes what that deck can do, and only shows itself once the deck is spent. And when it flips, it flips as a person. A magistrate, a general, a governor. Unassuming on the card face and catastrophic in play, the way Ares spends most of a film as a mild man in a suit.
A man with a blade,
and whoever he can find.
The swordwork
Overhand chops, stabs, slashes, parries. No spellbook. Diego fights the way Trejo fights.
One century at a time
People he meets in each era and loses when it ends. A gunslinger in 1870. Someone else in 1973. Temporary by design.
Reading the room
Cards that blunt a specific Horseman. Hold them until you are sure, or commit early and hope you guessed right.
The counter cards are what make the hidden Horsemen matter. Guessing right early is a real advantage, and guessing wrong costs a card he needed.
You do not have to beat
all four. You have to reach him.
When the Mark fills, the Devil comes out. Killing the Devil is how Diego wins, which means the thing that is destroying him is also the only road to the win.
The Mark fills, whether Diego wanted it to or not.
A short countdown runs. Both players get to prepare, and both know what is coming.
The Horseman player flips their Devil. Different printings, different threats. Some fight, some buff whatever is left on the board.
Diego kills him and wins, or does not.
The two ends
of the same clock.
One to five players,
out of one box.
The Horseman side is already four separate decks. Who operates them is the only variable, so the player count falls out of the structure instead of being designed in twice.
At five, the hidden identity gets better rather than worse. Nobody has to keep a secret from themselves, and each player only has to learn one deck.
The same rider,
a different century.
Each Horseman wears the face of power in whatever era he surfaces in. That is canon, and it is also the cleanest reprint engine a card game could ask for.
One character, many cards, each with its own art, cost, and ability. The eras give every printing a reason to exist beyond a new frame, and the visual identity of the game shifts as the centuries move. Conquistador steel to frontier dust to the shit end of South Texas.
The Massacre,
as a prequel set.
A smaller, self‑contained game covering the only part of the story we actually know in detail: Toxcatl, Diego turning on his own, the woman he could not save, and the prison under Chichén Itzá.
We looked hard at leading with this, because it is the part where we would be guessing least. We are not recommending it as the core game. It covers one night and the story is five centuries, so it would cap the product at the moment before everything interesting starts.
As a later expansion it is excellent. Two or three sets in, when players know Diego as the man with the full Mark, going back to the night he got it is the set that recontextualizes everything they already own.
Here is exactly
what we guessed.
We built this from the public synopsis, the SDCC coverage, and the campaign page. Everything below is an assumption we made to get to a playable shape, and every one of them is yours to overrule.
Anything here that contradicts the book, tell us and we will move. Most of these change one mechanic rather than the whole design, and the asymmetric spine holds either way.
Two designers, one session,
no committee.
Pamplemoose Games is Zack Howe and Cole Beardsley. We design card games for IP holders, and everything in this deck came out of a single working session between the two of us.
A two‑person studio is the right size for this. You get the designers in the room every time, and the turnaround of a team that never has to route a decision through anybody.
Five answers tell us whether
this direction survives.
These are the things we cannot answer from outside the book, and they are the first questions we would put on the table in a working session.
Some of those answers will confirm what we built here. Others could break it. If the lore contradicts the spine of this design, the honest answer is that we start again from a different angle, and we would rather find that out with the book open than spend a month defending a guess. What this deck shows is that Year of the Devil has more than one good game inside it. Scope and structure are in the companion business case.
Zack Howe & Cole Beardsley · Pamplemoose Games · zack@pamplemoosegames.com
Concept direction prepared by Pamplemoose Games LLC for PCB Productions. All PCB Productions and Year of the Devil brand assets, names, characters, and imagery appear solely to demonstrate this concept and remain the property of their owners. Game mechanics and designs are original work of Pamplemoose Games LLC. Not for distribution.