The idea for my new card game, Don’t Ask, came during an evening of socializing with some girlfriends. To be perfectly honest, creating a product wasn’t something I had ever considered—but the more we talked about my new book, Don’t Ask and I Won’t Have To Lie, the clearer it came to me that I could create a fun activity for women.

So what all is involved in creating a card game? You might be surprised to know that it’s not all that complicated. Here are some suggestions I used to help me:

•First, you have to develop an idea for a card game. In my case, I used subject matters I wrote about in my new book Don’t Ask and I Won’t Have to Lie. With the help of my friends, I came up with even more questions that I thought would make the game interesting. I then created mutliple choice and yes or no answers to coincide with those questions.

Your own card game can be as simple or elaborate as you like, but it must have certain specific traits to work. There should be a winner, whether it’s an individual or a team. It also needs strategy options for players to adopt in order to reach those win conditions. In addition, you will need a hook to pique the players’ interest: something simple and easy to grasp that provides the card game with a unified theme.

•2
Determine the rules of play for your card game and don’t make those rules complicated.

•3
Draw up a list of all the cards in the game. A standard deck is 52 cards but you can have as many as you want. My particular card game has 76 (including instructions).

•4
You can design preliminary versions of your cards using a graphic design program and print them out on your printer. I created a word document and then turned it into a pdf file. They don’t need to be fancy at this point; they just need to include the correct number of cards you want to include. Once they have been printed, cut out each one or take them to Kinkos to have them do it.

In Part II of How to Create a Card Game, I’ll share how you put the finishing touches on your cards before you decide to sell it.