Paws and Portals: The Deck of Destiny

Paws & Portals: The Deck of Destiny started with a simple question: what if the game didn’t pretend to be fair?

Most tabletop games carefully balance turns, probabilities, and outcomes so that control feels evenly shared. This game does the opposite. It hands authority to a deck of cards and asks players to react, adapt, and occasionally laugh when plans collapse. The goal was not randomness for its own sake, but visible momentum — moments where pressure builds, breaks, and resets in ways players can feel immediately at the table.

Removing dice was a deliberate choice. Cards are familiar, readable, and dramatic. When a high card wins a fight, everyone sees it. When Overdrive spirals, it’s exciting because it might end at any moment. When it does end, it ends cleanly. That rhythm — surge, pause, reshuffle — is the engine of the game.

Cats and Dogs were chosen not just for charm, but because their personalities naturally support asymmetry. Cats reward speed, timing, and audacity. Dogs reward durability, cooperation, and commitment. Neither side is “better”; they simply thrive under different kinds of pressure. The campaign scenarios were written to explore those pressures in different ways: speed, control, and endurance.

Finally, the setting — a house turned battlefield — exists to lower the barrier to play. Furniture becomes terrain. Cushions become objectives. The game works just as well on a kitchen table as it does on a carefully built board.

If this game does its job, you won’t remember who won. You’ll remember why things went wrong, when the deck betrayed you, and the exact moment everyone realised it was already too late.

That’s not a flaw.

That’s the point

Gameplay: There are no turns. Everything in this game is controlled by one standard 52-card deck plus two Jokers. Activations. Combat. Reactions. Magic. All of it. If a card is drawn, it came from this deck. When the card is done causing trouble, discard it. When the round ends, discard everything, reshuffle, and pretend this was the plan. Red cards activate Cats. Black cards activate Dogs. Jokers activate whoever the deck feels like, which is usually the worst possible option. Jokers never end rounds. They simply arrive, ruin the mood, and leave.

—description from the publisher