Card Grammar - Teaching Machines the Rules of Complex Card Games

This article is Part 3 of the Card Architecture series, detailing a stress test of a card generation pipeline that creates mechanically coherent cards and exports them to Tabletop Simulator. The pipeline uses a five-field schema (name, type, effect, cost, role). When tested against 13 influential card games, only simple games like Dominion fit perfectly, while complex games like Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, and KeyForge broke the schema. The article discusses the limits of automated design, the nature of game complexity, and introduces 'Card Grammar' as a solution that rethinks what a card fundamentally is, emphasizing that cards are more than data templates.