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Trinkets & Crows was designed around a simple idea: give players a goal, but never tell them how to reach it.
As the Designer, I created a competitive card game where players steal buttons, build hidden collections, and adapt their strategy around Trinkets and Actions. I focused on making different colors and mechanics valuable in different situations, while using variance to create opportunities rather than make decisions feel irrelevant. Through repeated playtesting and data analysis, I iterated on player goals, scoring, and game flow to understand not just whether a system worked, but how it shaped the choices players actually made.
Trinkets V1 — Too Specific
My first Trinkets tried to make players pay close attention to the buttons everyone had collected.
X points if no color exceeds another by more than 3
X points if your highest color is at least double your lowest (don't count zero)
X points if you have more buttons than both neighbors
On paper, these created interesting strategic questions. In practice, they created too many questions at once.
Players had to constantly count colors, compare themselves to multiple opponents, remember thresholds, and evaluate whether pursuing a Trinket was still worthwhile. Instead of giving players a direction, the Trinkets became another puzzle they had to solve before they could make their next decision. That made me rethink what I wanted a Trinket to accomplish.
Trinkets V2 — Broader Goals
I started simplifying the requirements and making the goals broader.
Gain 4 points for each color you hold the majority over all other crows.
Instead of requiring a very specific board state, this Trinket could be approached in several ways.
A player could:
Continue collecting a color they already controlled.
Steal buttons from another player.
Switch colors when an opponent became too difficult to compete with.
Use an Action to create a new opportunity.
The goal was no longer telling players what their strategy should be. It was changing what they considered valuable.
Measuring the Game
I didn't want to balance Trinkets based only on how they felt. After games, I tracked player count, game length, button distribution, Trinket completion, and points earned to understand how the scoring actually behaved. I used those results to compare Trinkets against the situations players encountered during a game.
QUESTIONS I WAS ASKING
How many points does this Trinket realistically provide?
Does that change with player count?
How long does a typical game give players to pursue it?
Does a high-value Trinket create an interesting decision, or simply become the obvious choice?
This gave me a way to connect the numbers back to what I was seeing at the table.
Iterating Through Playtests
The more I tested, the more I realized that balance wasn't just about points. A Trinket could be mathematically balanced and still create a poor experience if players couldn't understand what they should do with it.
So I started watching for the moments behind the numbers:
What did players notice?
What did they ignore?
When did they change their plan?
What made them decide a Trinket was worth pursuing?
Those observations became just as important as the spreadsheet.
Designing Pivots
The result was a shift toward Trinkets that act as signposts.
They point players toward opportunities without requiring them to follow one path. That also made pivoting more important. If a player couldn't realistically pursue their original goal, the game needed to give them another reason to care about the buttons and Actions available to them.
I began designing around a simple tension:
MOMENTUM
“This is working. How far can I take it?”
PIVOT
“This isn't working anymore. What else can I do?”
The goal wasn't to eliminate variance. It was to make variance something the player could respond to.
What I Learned
Player behavior is part of the design.
Trinkets started as scoring conditions. Through playtesting, they became a way to shape what players noticed, valued, and pursued.
Tracking the numbers helped me understand whether the system was balanced. Watching players helped me understand whether it was interesting.
The biggest change wasn't simply making Trinkets easier to understand. It was learning to evaluate a design from two sides:
What does the system technically allow?
What does the player actually experience?
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