LDS Game Card of the Week - Gather the Sheep

John 10:16 “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold... and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” Sacrifice Cost: 2; Markers: Wisdom, History; Themes: WHH; EFFECT: Choose two Histories verses from your deck, add them to your hand, and reshuffle your deck. I remember this one from way back in the day in my own seminary class. It was always used, both then, and later, in my mission, to show evidence of the need for God to be God of the whole world, not just of Palestine or the Middle East. When Jesus visits America, after His resurrection, He says, “And verily I say unto you, that ye are they of whom I said: Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” The point was, to prove that the Bible references the Book of Mormon. Of course, if you didn’t already believe the Book of Mormon, it was really a meaningless argument. Still, in the game, I wanted to capture the sense of gathering and binding together, so I used the fetch mechanic to represent the “one fold” feeling. If I were playing this one in a constructed deck, I’d probably fetch “The First Vision”, which lets you fetch two more Histories verse and set them right away.


Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.

This LDS Game Feels Complete!

 So, after reworking the card set, which increased the number of cards by over 50%, and redoing the layout, and printing the pages and pages of cards, then cutting them and sleeving them, Brendon and I finally got a chance to playtest this cardset.  I truly hope it's the last test. I've been working and reworking these cards in this LDS game for over seven years, now!  And always with the Scripture Mastery verses.

We played two quick games, and they were both thrilling.  These cards are so much more balanced and flexible than ever before.  With the addition of the Life icons and evening out of the other icons, the game was much more playable.  There were more options, but it wasn't overwhelming!

I was concerned that there would be certain verses that would be too powerful.  There were some powerful cards, it's true, but no one verse dominated the game.  There was plenty of quoting and even some quote challenging, but again, it didn't rule the play. Since Brendon had studied many of the verses in seminary, for Scripture Mastery, he was able to knock off quite a few quotes.

We played with random verses in our decks, as if we had just opened the game out of the box.  We used one set of verses as our base to draw from.  We'll have to try and work with constructed decks sometime soon.

We also discovered that Brendon's work on this whole project has almost earned him the game design merit badge.  This is a relatively new badge, only about a year or so old.

At any rate, this is a great LDS game.  I'm really proud and excited to have been able to work on it all this time.  I really, finally feel like this revision is the most complete of all the versions of it so far!




Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.

Version 11.0 of the Rules and Cards

I've just posted version 11.0 of the cards and rules.  Really, there were almost no changes to the rules.  I had considered some, but Brendon and I decided to pass on each of the changes.  So, why a new version number?

Well, the cards were so deeply changed that I decided it warranted a new version.  Here are the changes:

1 - The addition of all of the new seminary Scripture Mastery verses, as outlined by materials I found at the lds.org website.  At first I struggled to decide what to do, because I really liked a lot of the passages that were removed from the list, and I really liked a lot of the cards and verse rules I had created for them.  I the end I decided to include the old ones and add in the new ones.  So, all of the verses are marked as either SM 2013 (meaning they're included in the new list), or SM Legacy (meaning they were only in the old list).  Verses that were on the old list and are still on the new list are marked SM 2013, too.

2 - The addition of a new theme icon: Life.  These are passages that relate to being alive, and living in the temporal day-to-day world.

3 - The icons and markers are more evenly balanced now.  I did some counting, and discovered that Faith and especially Wisdom were heavily over-represented, and Histories were sadly neglected. Much of this was due to the fact that the Scripture Mastery verses are more conceptual and doctrinal.  Still, I did some re-reading of the verses, and adjusted the icons and the markers so that there is a much more equitable count.  They are not equal, but it is much more balanced than it was before.

4 - Some of the basic verses were upgraded to power verses.  I know this really doesn't change much, but if the game is ever published, and we use my current packaging strategies, it will make the game more balanced.

5 - Brendon and I went through the verse rules, verse-by-verse and corrected a lot of verbiage and phrasing to make things more consistent, and fix ambiguities.

6 - I had to rework the layout of the prototype print-n-play pdf cards, because there were new things to include, like the Scripture Mastery SM 2013/Legacy label.

So, with all of those changes, I decided it deserved a new number.  I'm really hoping that, at this point, we've got the rules and the cards to the point where we could publish.  As I play the game, it really feels more complete now.

The new rules and cards are available for printing in the left sidebar.





Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.