Pyrrameds

Pyrrameds is a simple card game about giving your animal patients the medicine they need.

During the game, you play cards in a pyramid shape. To play medicine, its number needs to be lower or higher than all its neighbors. You can only play a patient, however, if there’s a path through the pyramid that has exactly all the medicine they need!

A very simple and short game with remarkable depth.

What’s special?

This is the first game where I coded the simulation before even doing my own paper prototype (or having designs for the cards).

Why? I was really unsure about the difficulty of the core mechanic of the game. How easy/hard would it be to create the perfect path through the pyramid to be able to play patients?

By writing the game logic in code, and asking the computer to play 10,000 random games, I could answer all these questions. Much more easily than playing 10,000 games for real, with my own paper prototype ;)

After tweaking the numbers and rules to make sure it was tough but certainly not impossible to play your patients, the game itself was pretty much done. The simulation turned out to be very good at predicting the real game, meaning it was already mostly balanced by the time we did the first playtest.

Needless to say, this increased the number of simulations I do for games even more.

Also, I struggled to combine the “medical / healthcare / hospital” theme with a more approachable and cute look. The game is themed around medicine—you’re helping sick pets—but if I leaned into that look completely, the game looked sterile and serious.

The final choices for fonts, colors and layout were my best solution to blend the two tones. But I never struggled so much with that before making this game.