Perfect Family
A physical card game about adopting pets and finding neighbours they can bear to sit beside.
Perfect Family is an original physical card game for two to four players. Pets sit in a row on your sofa, and their personalities decide whether they are settled or grumbling beside their neighbours.
The game began with research, rules, and a simulation engine before receiving its illustrations and printed cards. Two physical copies have been printed, but the standalone design still needs human playtesting. An adaptation is playable in the private H&A Play collection.
Highlights
- An original game for 2–4 players
- Pet personalities shape your household
- Illustrated cards and a playable iPhone version
The puzzle lives between the pets
A pet's personality changes what counts as a good neighbour. A clingy cat wants another cat beside it; a prickly cat wants the opposite. A bossy pet prefers the sofa's end, while a nosy one wants neighbours on both sides. Adopting a pet affects the existing household rather than simply adding another valuable card.
Settled pets of the same species score together. One grumbling pet can break a promising group apart. Care represents the household's capacity to look after its pets. The game allows overcrowding: keeping a crowded family happy can pay off, but letting it become unhappy carries a penalty. Over nine rounds, the question is how much growth your arrangement can support.
Competition without taking away the pets
The shared kennel creates competition before an adoption. Choose two neighbouring pets, bring one home and rehome the other. That choice changes what the next player can take. Once adopted, a pet stays in its household; the game does not need attacks that steal or discard somebody else's animals to create interaction.
The achievement Ribbons are more contentious. They reward visible qualities such as a large household or a particular kind of settled pet, and another player can take an award by overtaking its holder. Improving your sofa, adding Care and chasing an award pull a turn in different directions. The theme stays affectionate while the table still has reasons to watch one another's choices.
Building a game that can be examined
The project began with research and design constraints, then moved through several rules versions in a Python simulation engine. Card definitions and constants are structured data. Different automated players can play recorded deals, comparing cautious households, rapid growth and other strategies instead of relying on one automated player.
The tooling checks legal moves, replays saved decisions and compares results across player counts and seating positions. It also keeps separate definitions for the printed and mobile rules, which have developed differences. These experiments make a proposed change inspectable; they do not prove that the game is perfectly balanced or replace people playing it. Unresolved questions stay documented.
From illustrated deck to native app
The physical set contains 66 individually named pet cards across six species, alongside Care cards and achievement Ribbons. The artwork pipeline builds cards, a rules folio, a box and an insert from the printer's actual templates. Checks cover dimensions, bleed and fold boundaries, so the files are more than a collection of attractive illustrations. Two physical copies have been printed.
H&A Play gives the household idea a native iPhone table, with previews showing an adoption's effect before committing the turn. It adds a computer opponent and saved final households. The physical deck and app explore the original game through cards on a table or an interface that helps explain a move's consequences.
