Our Philosophy

Argentum Age is a project for lovers of Collectible Card Games. CCG's provide a compelling and unique experience for players. The steady progression and discovery and collection of cards. The crafting of decks. The contests between players mixing luck and skill.

However, CCG's are generally commercial ventures and rely heavily on a "pay to win" approach. The best way to "collect" cards is to buy them. Players with a large bankroll enjoy somewhere between a moderate to an insurmountable advantage over players with a modest bankroll, depending on the game and precise circumstance.

Many games do attempt to provide a "free to play" path where a player—especially one willing to invest a great deal of time in lieu of money—may play completely for free and still have a path to competitiveness. The design of these games is still obviously biased toward encouraging players to spend money on cards.

Argentum Age is a project for those who want a CCG which takes a very different approach. Rather than being developed for profit, Argentum Age is developed for love of the CCG genre. Intended to be a CCG by players, for players. In Argentum Age, you still collect cards, but you do it by playing the game. Some cards are still difficult to get, but the only way to get them is by playing and earning them—an activity which we aim to be enjoyable—not by paying for them. Our only "bias" in the design of the progression aspects of the game is thus to make collecting cards as fun and rewarding an experience as possible.

Argentum Age is a project that welcomes its players aboard as developers. Founded by some developers from the community-developed, open source Battle for Wesnoth, we hope that Argentum Age will foster the same kind of developer community. If you, as a player, have an idea for something that improves the game, we would love to not only hear your idea, but help you make it a reality.

One aspect of a CCG that is enjoyable, and that too few people have had the opportunity to experience, is the joy of making cards. Of brainstorming card ideas and then trying them out. Of tweaking and balancing. Making a card or two, even if it's just for fun, is something we highly recommend to anybody who has any interest in contributing to Argentum Age. We have a little guide on how to do that right here.

Like many CCG's, Argentum Age divides cards into 'sets'. This means that if you love the idea of card design, you can go so far as to make your very own complete 'set' of cards. You can also make your own single-player campaign, complete with a storyline, to accompany your set. We are planning on having features where players can 'publish' their sets, similar to the content server from Battle for Wesnoth. Then players will be able to choose which sets they want to play with when participating in a multiplayer game.

Argentum Age also accepts contributions in many other areas—programming, art, sound and music, testing, writing, and much more—if you see something that you would enjoy helping with, we would love to hear from you.

While the goal of Argentum Age is to make an enjoyable CCG (and enjoy ourselves doing so), we do hope we might grow to have some revenue stream derived from the game. A revenue stream helps in making it feasible to produce high quality content, as well as maintain project infrastructure for a high quality development and player experience. We hope that our player community will recognize that a revenue stream makes for a higher quality game and we plan to open a Patreon which will allow players to contribute.

In addition, we may also consider attempting to raise a revenue stream by having content which has cosmetic only differences from freely available content. For instance, an alternate-art version of a card. We may also have special tournaments or events with small entry fees, hoping that players appreciate the opportunity to participate in events with other players who take the event as seriously as they do.

Argentum Age is an Open Source game. Our engine is licensed under the zlib license, and the Argentum Age code is licensed under the GPL. The game content available in our Github repository is available under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license. We feel the framework we have built for Argentum Age would be useful for other similar card games or tactics games and we would welcome other developers to make their own games reusing our code and content.

While Argentum Age is committed to being Open Source, we do currently use a small amount of content (but never code) that is more restrictively licensed in our binary distributions. We do try to avoid this, but we are pragmatic about developing the best game possible and providing the best experience to our users. All content in our github repository is completely Open Source and has Open Source alternatives when necessary.

Argentum Age aims to be distributed on a variety of platforms, some of which have certain licensing requirements. To ensure we can distribute Argentum Age to a wide audience, we ask our contributors to agree to give us a perpetual license to any content they contribute allowing us to relicense it as we need. Our goal in asking for this is to allow us to pragmatically distribute Argentum Age as widely as possible. We are committed to always being an Open Source project under a libre Open Source license.

To get involved with Argentum Age, please come to our Discord Server and introduce yourself.