The Card I Almost Left Out of the Harbour

Dockside Three Card was cut from the launch list twice before it finally made it onto the site, mostly because I couldn't decide if a card table fit somewhere that was meant to feel like a working harbour rather than a card room.

The turning point was realising I'd been thinking about it backwards — the games here don't need to look like fishing to belong, they just need to sit comfortably in the same quiet, unhurried mood as everything else. A card table on a quiet dock, played slowly between other things, fit that just as well as anything with a net in it.

Once I stopped fighting the idea, building it went quickly. The ante-and-fold decision each round felt like exactly the kind of small, calm choice the rest of the site is built around, nothing rushed, nothing loud.

It's become one of the games I hear about most from the handful of people who write in, which still catches me slightly off guard given how close it came to not existing at all.

I've learned from it to hold my early instincts a bit more loosely. The first version of an idea isn't always the right shape for it, and sometimes the better fit only shows up once you stop insisting on the original plan.