AMBITION

A two-player card game of historical figures, where ambition is the mechanic, not the theme.

Working title · A concept by Pamplemoose Games

Genghis Khan and Thomas Edison have
exactly one thing in common.

They both wanted something badly enough to bend the world around it. That's the only honest common denominator in a roster this wide, and it happens to be the one a card game can actually model. So we made the wanting into the game.

Two players. One hidden figure each.
A race to the moment they come to power.

The Ascent

Your most powerful card starts face down and stays there. Most card games hand you your centerpiece early and ask you to keep it alive. Here you spend the whole game earning the right to turn it over.

Six lanes. Every figure
lives in more than one.

A figure has the ambition they're known for, and one or two running underneath it. Da Vinci reads invention first with arts close behind. Capone reads corruption first with politics closer than most people remember, and Edison sits closer to a fifty-fifty split of invention and corruption than his reputation suggests. Mixing lanes in a deck is encouraged, because the interesting decks are the ones that refuse to run in a straight line.

What a hand looks like

Figures do the scoring. Events are moments that happen and resolve. Items are objects you hold onto.

Named figureThree ambitions. Rare.

ArchetypeOne ambition, one ability.

EventScores once, then gone.

ItemStays in front of you.

Twenty in a single ambition.

Won cards stack into columns in front of you, one per ambition. Your hidden figure's own score counts toward the total, which is why two players chasing the same lane are never the same distance from the end of it.

Thirteen banked, seven on the card. Twenty. Da Vinci turns over.

Every round puts one thing
on the table.

CategoryThree arts points.

CategoryTwo politics points.

Contested eventJefferson takes it outright.

Contested itemKeeps paying after you win it.

The plain category cards are the floor. The interesting ones are real history with a hook attached, and the hook is what turns a scoring round into a decision.

It also keeps the history load-bearing. What people buy in historical entertainment is the sense that these were real people and the moments actually mattered. A game about what they wanted leaves that intact and makes it the thing you play with.

One set is a game.
Four is a franchise.

Every set is an era, and every set plays complete on its own. Rome ships as Rome. The system underneath never moves, so the day a second set arrives the two shuffle together, and a player who owns both can build something a player who owns one cannot.

Ambition is what lets that happen. A Roman general and a Victorian inventor never share a century. They always share a lane. Whichever era you open on, nothing about it locks the next one.

Poker, with history
dealt into it.

Keep the shared river of cards in the middle of the table, and resolve the round closer to actual poker. The figures and their ambitions still do the work. The structure underneath is one almost everybody at the table already knows.

Lighter than direction A by design, and a faster build. Direction A is everything you just read, and it is the one we recommend.

The one everybody
pictures first.

The third option, and we'll be straight that it's our least favorite. Same roster, reimagined as heroic versions of themselves. Tesla throws lightning, Genghis rides down your board, and the whole thing resolves as a straight duel. It's the fastest build of the three.

Why we'd steer you off it. Historical entertainment works on reverence. People buy in because these were real people who really did these things, and that weight is the product. Trade it for superpowers and you have a fantasy game wearing famous names.

If the duel is the direction you want, we'll build it properly and we'll build it well. Ambition is the one we want to build.

Direction AThe same man.

Direction CAlso the same man.

Tell us the era.
We'll start building.

Zack Howe & Cole Beardsley · Pamplemoose Games · zack@pamplemoosegames.com

Concept pitch prepared by Pamplemoose Games LLC for Keepsake Collectibles. All Keepsake Collectibles brand assets and names appear solely to demonstrate this concept and remain the property of their owners. Game mechanics and designs are original work of Pamplemoose Games LLC. Placeholder art only; final art would be commissioned. AI never touches the game design. Not for distribution.