Four decades after an unknown disaster brought about the end of the world in 1986, pockets of humanity linger in the New York City subway tunnels. Some of these survivors compete in a gladiatorial bloodsport broadcast through old subway system speakers and ham radios. A train rolls up, a Boss steps out, and the winner of the ensuing brawl gets to ride the train to the next stop.
This is the world of Cataclysm Arcade, an upcoming trading card game from Brian David-Marshall (who’s often publicly referred to as BDM) that debuted Nov. 21 at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia. In a video call with Polygon, BDM described how the retrofuturist post-apocalyptic setting for Cataclysm Arcade emerged naturally out of his love of VHS-era genre films.
“Anything that opens with something like ‘The year is 1997,’ I’m there for it,” he said. “Blade Runner is tattooed inside my brain.”
BDM developed the story behind the game with Jay Van Hoy, the award-winning film producer behind movies like The Witch and The Lighthouse. BDM has spent nearly 30 years as a major player in the trading card game space. He ran the former Neutral Ground game store in Manhattan, commentated Magic: The Gathering tournaments, and more recently worked designing digital games. But he felt inspired to design his first tabletop game to tackle a specific pain point that’s bugged him for years.
“I’ve seen time and time again people whose first experience with trading card games is that the first thing they buy is an unplayable object,” he said. “I really wanted people to not have an excuse to not play the game when they open a booster pack.”
Even if you pull a killer chase card out of a typical booster pack, there’s not really anything you can do with it other than gawk. Newcomers have to either buy a bunch more packs and/or a preconstructed deck just to actually play. That’s why every single booster pack for Cataclysm Arcade is immediately playable. It’s a literal game-changer.
Every 15-card pack (plus a punch-out components card) is a fully playable microdeck called a Booster Deck. Each one contains a Boss character, Fighters, Weapons, Tactics, Responses, tokens, and even flat pop-out dice — enough for a complete head-to-head match or a four-player brawl. The concept is so unusual that, according to BDM, nobody believed him at PAX until they sat down to try it.
“No one ever believes us about that, by the way,” he said. But then, as players got hands-on withCataclysm Arcadeat PAX Unplugged, BDM said that 90% of them bought additional packs after a single sample. In terms of soft launches at conventions for a new game, that’s pretty significant.
While most competitive TCGs start with 1v1 duels and later bolt on social formats, Cataclysm Arcade was designed around multiplayer from the start.
“I don’t believe in competitive play at the launch of a new game,” BDM said. “The game had to be built from the ground up to accommodate multiplayer, not just accommodate it, but embrace it.”
Four-player free-for-alls were the default mode at PAX, where players cracked open packs and dove straight into chaotic subway-platform brawls.
Mechanically, Cataclysm Arcade is built for clarity and speed, like a more streamlined alternative to Magic: The Gathering’s Commander mode. Bosses start out on the mat and act as your avatar, each with a unique health total and faction. Fighters are additional combatants you can play that are “level-gated” instead of mana-gated: a level-one Fighter can be played on turn one, level six on turn six, and so on. Weapons, Tactics, and Responses create tactical depth, while the resource system is intentionally simple: players accrue one generic resource per turn. There are no lands, no colors, no manipulation of mana curves.
Within the world of Cataclysm Arcade, Bosses are described as “warlords clawing for power in the concrete rubble of the broken world” and include everything from shapeshifters and mystics to synthetics and run-of-the-mill desperate human survivors. Vector, a sort of AI god and overlord, runs the titular Cataclysm Arcade (also the name of the competition).
According to BDM, the “ultimate champion” of the league is The Decommissioner, a robotic Terminator-like Synth with synthetic skin and a chrome endoskeleton. Each Boss fights to eventually battle their way out of the subway tunnels, but it’s a bleak way to make a living. “Generations are born and buried without ever glimpsing the sky,” an official lore overview for the game reads.
BDM has mapped the story forward five full years and plans to tell it gradually as new sets of the game are released. He said each would reveal a new piece of the mystery behind the 1986 collapse. Some characters who appear as mere Fighters in the first set might eventually rise to become Bosses in the future. And this NYC subway pocket is just a “twisted fragment of humanity.” What’s going on elsewhere in the world? What really happened to end it all? These are the questions that drive the narrative.
“We’re going to do a physical fanzine to tell stories and create role-playing opportunities,” BDM said. He wants players to identify with the characters they pick, and based on how often PAX attendees scanned the demo table for the Boss that “felt like them,” that lore-heavy approach seems to be working.
The PAX preview edition came packaged inside a plastic audio cassette case, complete with fold-out liner notes full of in-world story fragments. Dice boxes and art kits came in VHS clamshells. A limited number of PAX preview cassettes remain available through Top Deck Games.
BDM said the hope is to launch a Kickstarter fundraising campaign in March 2026 with a tight turnaround followed by a retail launch and a full slate of organized play in the second half of 2026. His hope is that by leaning into the aesthetics, Cataclysm Arcade might stand out in a way that gets fans invested in the mechanics and the lore in equal measure.
“There’s something really special that happens when you form a community around a game,” he said. “Basically all of my friends I’ve made over the years and all of my professional opportunities, they all come from being immersed in this community.”
Cataclysm Arcade, in his mind, is an attempt to give future players that same experience: a TCG that’s playable right after you rip open a pack, making it a low-barrier, social-first TCG with a world worth caring about.
