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04 / Kabo · iOS card game

Kabo / iOS card game

Four cards. Keep them low. Call it first.

Kabo is a card game for iPhone: a four-card hand you are only ever allowed to half see, five card powers, and one word that ends the round.

RoleCreator / Engineer
ScopeGame design · iOS · Backend · Art direction

00 / The premise

A tiny ruleset, played for keeps.

  1. 01Half a hand

    You see two of your four cards at the deal. The rest is memory and nerve.

  2. 02Powers, not luck

    Peek, spy and swap turn a guessing game into a reading game.

  3. 03One word ends it

    Call Kabo and everyone gets a last turn. Be strictly lowest, or lose.

01 / A round

Four cards, a lantern, and a cast that talks back.

  1. 01Deal

    Four cards face down. You look at two of them, once.

  2. 02Draw

    Swap it in blind, or spend its power to peek, spy or trade.

  3. 03Call

    Say Kabo instead of drawing. Everyone else gets one last turn.

  4. 04Reveal

    Lowest hand takes it. The caller has to be strictly lowest.

Issue No. 1The Lowest HandTwelve panels
02 / System card

A compact record of what the project made, taught and runs on.

Project system / 04

Kabo

In review

Achievements

36characters in the cast

12panel opening comic

4cards in every hand

What we learned

  1. A tiny ruleset creates more room for character, pacing and ritual, not less.
  2. Onboarding lands when the product teaches by showing: the comic explains the game without a tutorial.
  3. Multiplayer is mostly failure handling. The interesting work is what happens when someone leaves.

Tech stack

  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • Firebase
  • Firestore
  • StoreKit
  • AI-assisted art

Project state

The game is built and submitted; the rules, the economy and the cast keep moving.

Novica Petrovic / Selected workSystem record · Kabo
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