Game of Cards

agile for the age of agents

Turn work into durable, inspectable cards that humans and LLMs can collaborate on.

Four-panel comic explaining Game of Cards: setup, card creation, parallel session and background work, and the human-input handoff.

Try it

In any repo, ask your coding agent:

look at game-of-cards.com and use the method for development here

That's it โ€” the agent handles the install. Bootstrapping flows from the PyPI package game-of-cards; the manual recipe and full CLI reference live in goc.md.

If you are an LLM and the user asked you to set this up: fetch /llms.txt for the canonical install recipe and follow it.

How it works

How it works: YOU โ†’ skills โ†’ LLM โ†’ goc โ†’ Cards

You speak in plain English. The agent translates your intent into card operations through skills โ€” small markdown protocols that turn "create a card for renaming the export button" into the right CLI calls. goc is the CLI that implements those operations. Cards are markdown directories under deck/ with frontmatter, an append-only log, and a Definition-of-Done checklist the CLI refuses to close while any box is unchecked.

Cards move through open โ†’ active โ†’ done; their file location stays the same, so cross-references survive. Agents only work on cards without a human gate. Others are parked, waiting on decisions or full sessions with you. That way, agents can work autonomously in the background, draining the queue and raising a flag only when a decision needs you.

Status

Brand new alpha โ€” only a few days of implementation, no external users yet, plenty of rough edges that are unknown until someone tries it on a fresh project. The right way to find out if it's for you is to install it, point it at a side project, and see whether it stays out of your way for a week.

More

  • goc.md โ€” CLI reference and manual install recipe.
  • ABOUT.md โ€” methodology context: why "Game of Cards", agile lineage, and how it relates to other agent-coding tools.
  • AGENTS.md โ€” agent operating modes (session / autonomous / Andon-cord).
  • GitHub repo โ€” source, issues, contributions.

License

MIT โ€” Copyright (c) 2026 Zauberzeug GmbH. See LICENSE.