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Presenting the Freelancer Trading Card Game - Printable Version

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Presenting the Freelancer Trading Card Game - Solo Wing Sagume - 11-29-2025

Hey Folks

For a while now I’ve been deeply invested into Board Game Design and studied making Games and the thought process behind it. With this came an experiment that went way further than initially thought.

With this I wholeheartedly present you my Freelancer Trading Card Game Project

This TCG is a Ship and Item deck building game, where your goal is to grow, adapt in an immersive environment over your opponent following the Agenda of a Faction you represent, while also supporting said Faction as a Freelancer in various ways. The player scoring the most victory points, by winning Combat and succeeding Mission Cards wins.

In this presentation I’d like to run you down what I’ve worked on so far presenting individual Trading Cards, the Combat Board, Rulesets and various Core Game Mechanics in an explanatory manner.

I will provide pictures to visually showcase said cards and mechanics which will be in pop-ups.


How do you collect Trading Cards?

Eventually I will create a game platform where you can play and unlock Booster Packs, I don't intentionally plan to monetize this and rather just make this a Card Collecting Game similar to Pokemon Pocket TCG, where you can gain Booster Packs by battling, obtain cards through trade or sharing and or obtain Cards in Game Events with also Daily Free Pulls included.

The "Gacha" aspect therefore is more cosmetics as the actual collection of all said cards is time and skill based. Alternatively I will try to make a free use platform with all Cards included in Tabletop Sim for playtesting and open play.


The Ship Cards Themselves, Game Loop and Mechanics



Ship Cards come in various Rarities displaying onboard Equipment and Statistics about the ship and its effectiveness during Combat all while referencing contents
of the actual Video Game Freelancer. Every Card is passionately designed and inspired therefore after the real deal!

Here we have a selection of the Beginner Ships. In this deck building game you need consider a few things when it comes to building your deck.
What Faction do you wanna play as and if what Item Cards, Mission Cards, etc would befit to your game plan making your overall selection of Cards to play a specific archetype.
Be a Peacekeeper, Bandit or play an Economic driven deck the choice is yours and how do Freelancers tie into this if you represent a faction and one of the sides of the law?

They are the middle ground. Freelancers can detach from your assigned squadron making actions doable that would be otherwise impossible for your Faction, such as docking on Unlawful Stations playing the Liberty Navy and spying a bit on the Mission Cards of your enemy, gaining Items from the Black Market and outfitting your ships individually with otherwise unobtainalbe Goodies. They are your middlemen and the freedom of a Freelancer opens up new possibilities.

Ship Cards have various Statistics displayed I'll run down some of the key instruments.

IFF and Ship Type - Display the Faction allegiance and Type of Ship Card

Hit Points - Determine how much DMG your ship take, until you place it on your Discard Pile.

Shields - Before you take out the actual Hit Points you need to take out a Shield in a Rock Paper Scissor Manner depending on your Weapons Type.
They don't recharge, unless switched out in Combat or after battle or by using a specific Item Card.

Armor and Countermeasures - These are modifier variables that are important for the Mathematic Hit-Check Formula and interact differently with Weapon Types.
These values improve over time with better ships reflected by new values or monikers such as Imp. Countermeasure Dropper or Armor: 4.

Rank - Ranks are one of the Requirements for Ship Cards to be obtained, they also give an impression of Growth as you will see Ships in the higher Rank ceilings carrying way better equipment than their previous versions. You can have the same ship type just being better in some ways by being of a higher Rank. You rank up by gaining EXP from fullfilling your Factions Mission Cards or hijacking enemy Missions. Ace Cards are special as they don't require Rank Ups but can be played on top of the previous linked Card being a straight Upgrade and enabling Ace Maneuver Cards during Maneuver Phase to be played. This makes growth rates more dynamic benefitting otherwise ships that cap out their maximum potential quicker and are lower on the statistics sides of things.

Agility - Agility defines both maneuverability and evasion of your ship. It is the key stat to define which ship would beat another during Maneuver Phase, when both Maneuvers Cards don't counter one another. During Shootout it defines your Evasion in the Hit-Check Formula alongside the Countermeasure and Armor value.

Speed - While not directly displayed on the card, each ship belongs to a weight class and ship archetype. We have Fighters of different weight classes, Freighters, Transports, etc.
which have different Base Speed Rates dependent on the ship class. Speed is used as your Energy to play out Maneuver Cards.


At the beginning every player starts with a Rookie ship of the selected side and faction they play as. Police forces and Military get thrown into the same pot and is just written this way purely cosmetically. They are the lawkeepers. Additionally in the case of playing as the Lawfuls you can decide to hire a Bounty Hunter early on if you collected the Rookie BHG - Piranha.

You begin by outfitting your ship by spending a turn and Credits while docked on the station. Players begin at their home base. Not every Rookie ship is equal as some start out with much better kitted out ships but will be more expensive and have slower growth rates. Lane Hackers for example only get an upgraded version of their ship every second rank up.

Rookie Ships generally are very weak with low armor and equipment, but have higher Agility, this enables situations where you could buy and outfit older ships when reaching a higher rank with new unlocked Item Cards. Rookie Ships generally also don't carry a Cruise Disruptor with a few exceptions, said exceptions usually belonging to higher rarities and limitations such as how many copies can be in a deck. This is to make early game more PvE orientated to let the players immerse themselves and get aquainted with the core game mechanics, until you unlock missions inviting for PvP on higher ranks also providing better rewards and victory points. Won PvP battles also further provide more Victory Points with an extra tally on how many ships of a player you take out.

Faction Allegiance also determines Diplomacy and Relations - While a Rogue player can team up with a Lane Hacker, they must not ally with a Xeno player. However as you still need to score Victory Points I make it that at a certain Rank Up you can break ties and start shooting eachother.

I can not provide pictures of Mission Cards and the System Overworld yet but imagine a hexagonal game board with various references to the game, such as space stations, fields, planets, miscellaneous solars and space infrastructure.


Ship Cards come in Lines. Each Rank Up provides an improved upon version of said ship in a horizontal manner or vertical going to the next ship line.
You don't specifically require the ship version of a previous rank to obtain one of a higher rank, but you can exchange them to reduce the prize for the newer ship by half.
Ace Cards specifically require their linked to previous cards.

Here we see three examples, the Lawful Line, Freelancer Early Game Line and Liberty Rogues Fighter Line. The Freelancer begins with a Starflier which improves one more time
then already capping out this lines horizontal development with an Ace. This provides the benefit of an otherwise weak ship growing and enabling Ace mechanics fast.
Vertically we can either go to the Startracker, Defender for Lawfuls and Wolfhound for Rogues. With every Rank Up you will notide an increase of their Hit Points, Weapon Class, Shields, etc.

Faction ships have different growth rates at which point their ship lines cap out and grant the Ace Card to be played.

There are other ways to enhance your deck with supplementary cards. The Rogues and Lane Hackers can choose for the Liberty expansion to also include the Outcasts Dagger
line into their ship pool. However Lane Hackers must not put any Rogues ships into their deck and vice versa. This counteracts the Lawful sides way of hiring Bounty Hunters or
future Corporations which migh hire the services of these.

Additionally we got some special ships and obviousely Freighters to choose from. Cargo vessels will open up other playstyles, but usally aren't very agile relying on turrets and cargo oriented missions or be usable to hijack other economically oriented Mission Cards via Cargo Piracy.

Freelancers also get the option to obtain ships used by other factions at certain ranks, however these are just individual ships usually without Ace Cards and capped out at the rank received, but enable mechanics otherwise not usable by a faction. Especially for future expansions... Last but not least we also got some special ships, such as transports with me also wanting to honour and including some ships from other mods. Sometimes I like to rename them to more fitting names...

As of now I do not plan to add any bigger warships other than gunboats, which will be introduced in a mini expansion including the first Corporation and the Junkers.
The first expansion includes the following factions:

Liberty Police, Inc.
Liberty Navy
Bounty Hunters Guild
Liberty Rogues
Lane Hackers
Xenos
Outcasts (As the shown outcast ship line starts as a non-rookie you must not play this as your sole faction but only to supplement the selected allied faction you chose.)



Now that we covered the collectible ship cards themselves I would like move on to actual game mechanics and how Combat Works.

Once you initiated combat you bring out your side deck - the Maneuver Deck emulating space dogfights. In the following pop-ups I will provide screenshots of my rule book, with the explanation already written down inside. So look at them carefully.

I will run you down the following topics:

Combat Board and Turn Order, How to play Maneuver Cards, The Hit-Check Mathematic Formula and Heat Maps of already calculated statistics each Agility stat, a shield type chart as we introduce Shield and Weapon types that are weak to or resist different weapon types, Item and Maneuver Cards.


As you can see with the Countermeasure and Armor Curve, I already did the math for you guys. These charts are supposed to help the player determine the evasion of your Ship Card. We take for example the Private Navy - Defender, look at both its Armor and Agility stat and go to the Armor Curve. Since it is not a Light Fighter we add a range of -1 and check what Combinations we would need to roll if we were hit by an Energy Weapon with the Accuracy of 6 - an eight and nine! For ballistic weaponry we don't use Ranges.
I forgot to add this in the Hit-Check Formula Pic - Homing Weaponry also grant you to roll 4D6, drop 2 instead of the regular 3D6, drop 1.

This would be all for now. I'm currently working on designing the Overworld Board and Mission Cards, but technically I got the Combat system all done. I will try to keep you updated for future updates and would really like to hear your thoughts on this.

Obviousely, all of these shown cards are skeleton placeholders and the actual trading cards will feature beautiful illustrations also considering Full Arts and Holographics. Ships in different liveries, such as Navy Dark Grey and White Bottom Defender referencing our old LABC for example. Starter Kits, Theme Decks and obviousely the Game Boards with designed figurines to move along and various infographic chips and a note pad.

For Now... That's all folks!

RE: Presenting the Freelancer Trading Card Game - Solo Wing Sagume - 12-09-2025



I have gotten the first Updates prepared to present you today.

Finishing up the placeholder values for Hit Points, Shields, Weaponry in this presentation I will generally run you down Ship Cards and their design philosophy in a more detailed manner also pointing at different playstyles a faction's domestic shipline will offer all in conjunction with the Maneuver system. Especially pointing at how and when to use which specific weapon system found on each Ship Card.


Let us first refer to Hit Point Growth and Shields, for a detailed infographic, please refer to "Hit Point Growth Curve" and "Weaponry Index and Shields" listed in the spoilers below.
Hit Points generally are all balanced around Vanilla Freelancer ships HP Pool divided by 4 (only considering the ships available from Mission 1-4.) and then adjusted to grow by a small percentage modifier for each new version of a ship on a new Rank. As mentioned before Ranks indicate the overall combat proficiency and equipment strenght, which will also affect all other Stats such as AGI, HP, Armor, Countermeasures, etc.

This also resembles that ships get heavier as they grow in HP and Armor Protection, making predecessing variants of a ships more nimble Agility wise. A player might consider therefore experimenting with glass cannons as they access each Rank Up not only better ships but also better equippable Weaponry Item Cards, they can even mount on older ships with limited hardware. This is to counteract the snowballing effect, when players are credits wise in a pinch.

The Hit Points are tailored to resemble actual vanilla ship lines in an authentic manner, even with ships belonging to the same vessel type having fluctuations among them, making some Light Fighters like the Dagger get close to a Defender, but less agile than lets say a Patriot. As ships grow in equipment strenght shields procedurally gain more value, making Shield Batteries as a consumable and Shield Upgrades valuable assets for vessel types capping out earlier on like Light Fighters who will struggle to keep up Base HP wise on the long term. While other vessels with greater HP Pools like Pirate vessels profit from Nanobots.

This will also affect your general factions playstyle as you can even use your Hit Points in very risky maneuvers as a sacrificial tool to counteract otherwise more nimbler vessels catching them off guard. Other playstyles benefit the main poster childs of a faction with signature formation flight Maneuver Cards benefitting both Heavy and Very Heavy Fighter lines of the Liberty Navy. Figuring out which Maneuver Cards work best in tandem with the equipment and statistics of your factions shipline will get you far.


Next up we got Weaponry itself and deciding when to use which set of weapons, keep in mind certain ships don't carry all types of ordnances, as some are exclusively locked on higher ranked ships or ones belonging to different types. We distinguish between Energy Weapons, Ballistic Weapons, CD's, Mines. Please refer to the following infographic "About Weaponry" for a detailed explanation running you down weaponry. Getting as close as possible to how weapons would interact and react in the actual game I tried my best to capture the experience in the trading card game aswell. Different Shield type interactions, weapons required for larger spacecraft or armored depots, Turrets and Mines working for diversion and all weaponry systems referencing their factions who make use of them in an authentic manner. To look up Base DMG and already calculated modifiers when weapons hit shields super effective or get resisted, please refer to infographics "Weaponry Index + Shields" and Weaponry Index Modifiers.

To close the presentation off I've also prepared a Ship Catalogue, listing detailed informations and key statistics about the logistics of a ship. Each ship has an assigned set of copies you can carry in your deck, Faction they belong to and can be mixed with which - For more I'll keep you updated on the Missions and Overworld presentation in the near future, the Cargo Space Modifier defining how much more credits you will earn completing Cargo Mission Cards or determining the extra amount of Item Cards you may carry around and the Purchase Prize of a Ship Card, for aquiring them. That last value I still have yet to define, but this also gives you an idea of how many Ship Cards there will be to collect in the first set. A whopping 111 Ship Cards with 5 Promos which will be gifted or rewarded from events opening up little different playstyles and game openers for some factions. Please refer to the last spoiler "Ship Catalogue" for more information.




This is all for now. Trying my shot one more time to probe the curiosity of you guys, let me know what you think so far? I'm very well aware that the scope and detail of this TCG by far exceeds that of others and even rather goes into soft tabletop territorry with the effort I put into the Combat System alone. I streamline the process as much as possible to already perform most advanced calculations so people only need to add and subtract DMG and HP values and every number gets rounded. With this the Combat System should be ready for playtesting and I only need to wrap my head around to find a good platform to do so, as mentioned before maybe trying to get Tabletop Sim will be my go to route. But for now I gotta work on designing the Game Board and Mission Cards system itself and giving finishing touches. Will keep in touch. That's all folks!

Also it can be that I might have confused this forum section with the other general discussions forum tab. If its posted in the wrong area please move it, my pardons I'm blind.