The Grid Nobody Found

In 1995, while thirty-eight collectible card games fought for shelf space in the aftermath of Magic’s gold rush, a Kansas City designer named Mike Sager built something none of them had tried. He built a sword fight.

Not an abstraction of a sword fight — not a comparison of attack points versus defense points. An actual positional duel. A 3×3 grid representing nine zones of the body. Attack cards targeting specific squares. Defense cards covering specific squares. If your block didn’t cover every square the sword was aimed at, you bled.

He called it SwordMaster. He built it for Highlander: The Card Game, a licensed CCG based on the television series about immortals who could only be killed by decapitation. The system was genuinely novel — the game “plays like no other TCG before or since,” as TV Tropes would later note. And for thirty years, a small community of players has kept it alive — through bankruptcy, corporate transitions, fan expansions, and multiple official editions.

The broader game design world never noticed.

SwordMaster — The System

The core is the 3×3 grid. Each attack and defense card features a grid representing nine body zones — upper left through lower right. Attack cards mark target squares; defense cards mark protected squares. A defense only succeeds if it covers every targeted square. Color-coding distinguishes types: red for basic attacks, gold for specials, blue for blocks, green for dodges.

The Ability score functioned simultaneously as hit points, maximum hand size, and death spiral trigger. Players start at Ability 15. Taking damage reduces Ability, which reduces maximum hand size, which means fewer cards to attack and defend with, which means more damage taken. The loop is vicious and deliberate. The design mirrors the Highlander franchise’s themes: immortals fighting a war of attrition where every wound compounds.

The Exertion mechanic added a third axis of tension. Players could “exert” by revealing five cards from their draw deck to search for better attacks or defenses. But those revealed cards went to the discard pile, depleting the deck. When the deck empties, the player “Exhausts” — losing five Ability and reshuffling. Every exertion is a gamble: immediate tactical advantage traded against long-term survival.

Every mechanic served the license. Not decoratively — structurally. The grid simulated swordfighting. Ability simulated gradual weakening. Head Shots simulated decapitation. Quickenings simulated power absorption. This design-through-theme approach was rare among 1990s licensed CCGs.

Thirty Years in the Arena

The most remarkable fact about Highlander: The Card Game is not its mechanics. It is its survival.

The CCG market of the mid-1990s was a killing field. By 1997, most new CCGs were dead. The survival rate for non-Magic CCGs from this era was likely under ten percent at the five-year mark. Sager’s company, Thunder Castle Games, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 1998. And yet the game survived.

After the bankruptcy, Sager re-emerged in 2006 through a new company, Le Montagnard, Inc., with a completely revised second edition. As of 2025, the official Highlander TCG website actively recruits regional tournament directors. Organized tournaments still run. New content is still produced. This is extraordinary for a CCG with no corporate backing, no mass-market distribution, and no designer with a recognizable name.

The game survived on the strength of a small but intensely devoted player community. Fan-made expansions sustained interest during dormant years. Sager himself articulated what the second edition was designed to fix: he had learned what made the game fun and sought to enhance strengths while diminishing weaknesses. The honesty is disarming. The revision was genuine.

The Honest Assessment

Mike Sager built something real. The SwordMaster system was genuinely novel in 1995, and the community that formed around it has sustained the game for thirty years. These are not small things. But the methodology measures what propagated, not what survived. And Sager’s innovations propagated to no one. No game designers outside the Highlander community have cited his influence. No academic or journalistic analyses of his design contributions exist.

His total output is narrow: two CCGs, one barely documented RPG. Game design was likely not his primary profession. He won no awards. His company went bankrupt. His greatest design innovation — a spatial combat grid for card games seventeen years before BattleCON — remained invisible to the people who could have built on it.

18 points. 1995. The designer who built a duel and never let it die.

Total: 18 points. Year: 1995.

The designer who built a duel and never let it die.