[crazy idea] Ankylosaurus Revisited

Once upon a time, a long time ago I came up with the idea of an open source customizeable card game. Not a game where you would just build a deck but also build the cards and the rules and the "cost" of including a card in your deck wold be tied to the abilities of the cards... I started building what amounted to a programming language that you would use to design your cards and calculate their cost.


At the time I called this game "Buffer Cards" and while I thought it was great at the time:
http://bcards.pbworks.com 


Unfortunately, after putting a bunch of stuff online I realized that the barrier to entry for a game where everyone could make their own cards based on a complicated programming language was too complicated and basically forgot I'd ever put it online.


A few years later I decided that maybe the way to go about this was to make enough example cards to have the game be playable and gathered together a group of friends to help me and called our group the "Customizable Card Game Authority" and made a google group for us to collaborate on the project... (this isn't public unless you are a member but this is the link
http://groups.google.com/group/ccg-authority )


Over the course of discussion with this group of people we came to the notion of making a specific "game" with a default format "deck building rules" and "pre-constructed decks" of cards and that cards would be published by a central "authority" for that "game" in distinct "released sets"... basically like a commercial CCG... people could fork the cards, deck building rules or even the game itself and just use the same general "concept".


<edit> Also around this time I came up with a proposal for the release of what I called "Game A Standard Constructed Format" tentatively named "Governor's Gambit". I found a copy and have shared it from Google Docs  so you can get an idea of what I was thinking:  See it here. (it was converted from an odt document so some formatting got broken) </edit> 


In the end, after a few posts everyone either got too busy or just plain lost interest but not too long after that I decided that maybe the problem was that I hadn't found my audience so I remixed all I'd learned and accomplished so far into the Ankylosaurus FOSCCG Authority and created a sourceforge project for it... hoping to draw interest from the open source community to help me achieve my vision.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/afosccga/


As it turns out... just making a sourceforge project doesn't magically drum up interest so after a few weeks of checking in my own efforts and trying to get people to join my cause... the project just fell flat.






Which brings us to today!
I follow a bunch of game designers on Google+ and I have regularly participated in discussions about game design... I have also done a fair number of Hangouts and found them to be useful for talking things through... so I'm thinking... maybe it's time for me to try again... I have the idea and I have a mechanism for garnering feedback... maybe it's time for me to get my ideas back in order and see if maybe, finally, I have a way to get this crazy idea into other people's heads.


It's currently a mess and I'll need to look over all the stuff I have in various places across the Internet and then make a more formal request for interest... so sometime over the next couple days I'll put together an introduction to what I've got and what I'm still missing and make a more corherant blog post.


In the mean time... what do you think? How would you feel about a Free Open Source Customizeable Card Game System?