Apparently, I Make Games Now.

When I started Pretty Unruly, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to be.

Parties. Girls' nights. Fun shit for grown women who are somehow expected to schedule dentist appointments, remember spirit week, answer emails, keep everyone alive, and still occasionally make it out of the group chat.

You know. Normal things.

Somewhere along the way, I decided Pretty Unruly needed a party game.

And apparently that was a gateway drug.

I started with one simple idea: I wanted a game that was actually fun to play with your friends. Nothing that required someone to spend 20 minutes explaining the rules. No keeping score. No strategy. No one getting weirdly competitive and suddenly ruining girls' night over a card game.

Just shuffle the cards, draw one, read it out loud, and deal with whatever happens next.

That became Pretty Unruly — The Game.

108 cards. Five categories. No points. No score. No damn strategy.

Exactly as nature intended.

Then My Friends Got Involved

The physical prototype hasn't even arrived yet, because apparently shipping something I'm impatiently waiting for makes time move approximately 400% slower.

But recently, a couple of my friends were at my house while I had the game pulled up on my computer.

They wanted to play it.

I reminded them that the actual cards weren't here yet.

They did not care.

So we played a party game directly from Canva like the sophisticated businesswomen we are.

And it was actually really fucking fun.

Not “my friends are being nice because I made it” fun, either. These are people I trust to tell me when something sucks.

They started talking about other games I should make. Then somebody created a shared note so we could start keeping track of ideas.

The next morning, one of them told me again how much fun she'd had and how excited she was for the actual cards to arrive.

And that was probably the first moment I thought:

Oh shit. Maybe I make games now.

Apparently One Wasn't Enough

Here's something I'm learning about myself while starting a business:

I am extremely capable of turning one idea into seventeen additional ideas.

This is both a strength and a legitimate financial threat.

Because while I'm waiting for the first prototype to arrive, I may or may not have designed something else.

And I may or may not already have another prototype on the way.

That's all I'm saying about that for now.

Mostly because I should probably see whether either of these things looks good in real life before I accidentally create an entire casino.

But This Actually Makes Sense

The more I think about it, the more games feel like they were always supposed to be part of Pretty Unruly.

This brand has never really been about stuff.

It's about giving people a reason to get together.

Because we're all busy. Somebody has kids. Somebody has work. Somebody has soccer practice. Somebody can't do Friday. Somebody can do Friday but only after 7. Somebody forgot to answer the group chat for six business days.

And suddenly you've been saying “we seriously need to get together” for four months.

Sometimes you need a reason to finally put something on the calendar.

A party works.

A girls' night works.

And apparently, a ridiculous deck of cards works too.

That's the part of Pretty Unruly I'm getting more excited about as I build it. I don't just want to make things that look cute sitting on a shelf.

I want to make the stuff you pull out when everyone finally shows up.

The thing that gets passed around the table.

The thing that starts the story you'll be talking about in the group chat tomorrow morning.

And if somebody eventually says, “Should we go somewhere?”

Well...

The game has officially done its job.

Stay Pretty. Get Unruly. ♡