Most teenagers spend their summers playing video games, watching TV, and hanging out with friends. They usually aren’t trying to do anything productive—but freshman Anthony Mangus did the opposite. In the summer of 2018, at the age of 13, he created his own card game: Kingdom Conqueror.
“It’s a game about colonizing territories. There are 6 spaces, and you can place People cards on the spaces and protect them with buildings, and if you put people cards on all the spaces then you win,” Mangus said.
And while the game sounds fairly simple, it’s more complicated than it seems. According to Mangus, it can take between a few minutes and an hour to play, depending on the experience level of the players.
“I play Kingdom Conqueror every day, multiple times a day. It’s a lot of fun,” freshman Sydney Kincaid, who bought the first deck of the game, said.
However, the success of Mangus’s game isn’t just due to beginner’s luck: this isn’t
the first time he’s created a card game.
“This was my third attempt at making a game. For the previous two, I had an idea and I tried it and it didn’t work out,” Mangus said.
But Kingdom Conqueror did, and although Mangus’s first cards were drawn on the back of his mom’s business cards, he’s since created several editions of the game.
“The first edition was on printer paper, then I made one on cardstock, and since then I’ve kept revising it. Each edition is a little different,” Mangus said.
Mangus designed the cards on Adobe Illustrator with the help of his family, and the artwork on the cards are all of his own creation.
But the card game isn’t just something he plays with his family: he has a website where he sells the game, and last year, he had a group of friends who would play the game together.
“We made a card club in Mrs. Foltz’s room during lunch last year, and there were about 10 people playing, depending on the day,” Kincaid said.
And even though he hasn’t sold too many Kingdom Conqueror decks yet, Mangus continues adapting the game.
“I’ve made prototype cards for new expanding decks, which I hope to print in the future,” Mangus said.
Although Kingdom Conqueror hasn’t reached the success of Uno or Go Fish, who knows? Maybe in the future, we’ll be buying it to play with our families on game nights.