The Card Game That Replaced the Game Master

For eight years, Mike Selinker worked on a problem nobody else was trying to solve: could you run a tabletop RPG campaign — persistent characters, meaningful progression, cooperative storytelling across dozens of sessions — without a game master?

The answer was the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, published by Paizo in August 2013. It sold out at Gen Con in under four hours.

PACG introduced a system where your deck was your character. Every card represented something you carried — a weapon, an ally, a spell, a piece of armor. When you took damage, you discarded cards. When your deck ran empty, you died. The elegant brutality of the concept was that every powerful action cost you survival margin.

Selinker formalized this tension through a graduated cost hierarchy: Reveal (show but keep), Discard (lose temporarily), Recharge (return to deck bottom), Bury (gone until scenario’s end), Banish (permanent removal). Five tiers of sacrifice, each one a decision about how much this moment was worth.

No major tabletop game had done this before. The cooperative game study site Meeples Together confirmed that no one had attempted an ongoing cooperative campaign of this kind. PACG didn’t iterate on an existing format. It answered a question the industry hadn’t asked yet.

The Developer Who Became an Architect

Before he built his own systems, Selinker spent a decade fixing other people’s.

He arrived at Wizards of the Coast in the late 1990s and served as one of four creative directors on the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition relaunch — the project that unified D&D’s chaotic rules into a single d20 framework. He wasn’t the system designer, but he was one of the people who managed the transition that let the game survive the next twenty years.

He developed the revised Axis & Allies, worked with original designer Larry Harris to strip the stagnation from 1980s wargaming. He developed Risk: Godstorm and Betrayal at House on the Hill. The Betrayal credit matters because it’s where Selinker’s instincts became visible — turning a prototype into a publishable game, refining the Haunt mechanics that would make Betrayal one of the best-selling horror board games ever produced.

After roughly eight years at WotC, he grew tired of corporate constraints and left. The systems he’d been fixing weren’t his. The next one would be.

Building with Ernest

The most important creative partnership in Selinker’s career is with James Ernest.

Together they co-founded Lone Shark Games and co-designed Pirates of the Spanish Main (2004), which pioneered the Constructible Strategy Game format and won the Origins Vanguard Award for Innovation. Lords of Vegas (2010), an economic board game where dice-based casino control creates genuine strategic tension. Unspeakable Words, a Cthulhu-themed word game where losing your last sanity chip makes every letter combination valid — madness as a game mechanic.

The partnership is productive and genuine. But it complicates attribution. Ernest’s existing profile credits him as lead designer on Pirates, with Selinker joining at the development stage. Lords of Vegas is a co-design. Most of Selinker’s highest-profile work shares credit with Ernest or with the Lone Shark team.

His solo-designed work — Alpha Blitz, Apocrypha, Risk: Godstorm, Veritas — is less commercially and critically successful than his collaborative output. This pattern — brilliant collaborative work, thinner solo catalog — shapes the scoring.

The Honest Assessment

Invention lands at 7, not 8. The adventure card game genre is real. PACG was the first commercial realization of cooperative campaign card gaming without a GM. The deck-as-health system was genuinely novel. A few games followed and the genre became a recognized sub-category. But the 8 threshold requires “widely adopted” and “became an industry standard.” The adventure card game remains a niche, not an industry-wide shift.

Architecture lands at 7, not higher. The PACG system supports hundreds of hours of campaign play. The graduated card-cost hierarchy is elegant engineering. But propagation is nearly zero. The PACG engine powers Apocrypha and Thornwatch — all Selinker’s own games. No external designers built on the system.

Mastery lands at 7, not 8. Selinker has thirty years of published designs and a clear craft evolution. But Ernest earns an 8 with 200+ solo-authored titles. Selinker’s solo catalog is a fraction of that. The methodology weighs solo work more than team credits.

Total: 27 points. Year: 1996.

The campaign fit in a card box.