BUILD A FREAK
01 / 15
Pamplemoose Games × Rotten · Concept Pitch

BUILD
A FREAK

A card game where you stitch a monster together out of candy parts, then set it loose on your opponent's monster.

2 players · 10 to 15 minutes · Working title

The insight

Rotten already promised
everybody their own freak.

Your FAQ says it plainly. Eat the candy and something wriggles out of you within minutes, and that thing is yours. Feed Your Freak is a claim about ownership.

A normal trading card pack breaks that promise the second it is opened. A finished card hands somebody a monster that was designed, named and completed before they touched it. They get to collect a freak. They never get to have one.

There is one mechanic that closes that gap. Make them build it.

What it is

A five minute build
and a five minute brawl.

Two players assemble a monster out of candy parts while sabotaging each other, then the monsters fight. Whatever ends up on the table is unrepeatable, because it came out of the cards that player pulled and the order they chose.

01

Pick your Rotten

Each player takes a Dr. Rufus Rotten clone. Every clone runs its lab differently.

02

Build

Draw three, play one. Fill five slots while interfering with the freak across the table.

03

Initiate

Unleash your freak whenever you like. It does not have to be finished.

04

Brawl

Attacks target specific parts. Tear the arms off and they stay off.

05

Last freak standing

Win, gloat, eat the evidence.

Anatomy

Five parts.
Five decisions.

Slots are anatomical, so they stay true no matter how the product line grows. Texture comes from your formats: stringy Wormz, crusty Cruncheez, swarming Tiniez, dense Chewerz.

HEADWhere the weird ability lives. Senses, thinking, screaming.
TORSOThe outside. Shell, skin, armor. What an opponent has to chew through.
GUTSThe inside. Organs, parasites, whatever is wriggling in there. Your engine.
ARMSUsually the damage.
LEGSSpeed and dodging.
An assembled freak built from five mismatched candy parts
The signature mechanic

The Hungry Rule

You never have to finish your freak before you let it off the table.

Finish it

More slime, more abilities, and a shot at Full Rot.

A complete freak is durable and does clever things. It also took you five turns to make, and the other monster has been out there eating since turn three.

Or set it loose early

An unfinished freak is Hungry.

Every empty slot adds Bite. It hits harder and it hits sooner. It is also fragile, dumb, and can never reach Full Rot. Rushing is a real strategy.

That single question runs the whole first half of the game. One more part, one act of sabotage, or open the cage right now. It is also the most honest thing a mad scientist game can be about.

The other big decision

Pure Rot or Frankenfreak

Flavor works as a matching key and nothing else. The rules only ever ask whether two parts share one. That question stays answerable at six flavors, at twenty, and after a flavor retires.

2 matching
MUTATION
3 matching
INFESTATION
4 matching
OUTBREAK
All five
FULL ROT
A single flavor freak facing a mixed flavor freak
Left · Full Rot

All five parts one flavor. Bigger, cleaner, hits like a truck, and telegraphs exactly what it is going to do.

Right · Frankenfreak

Five flavors, zero matching. Weirder, more fragile, and capable of combinations a pure build can never assemble.

The brawl

You do not drain
a health bar.

Attacks name a part. You pick the arm and you tear it off, and it stays off for the rest of the game along with whatever it was doing for them.

That makes the build phase matter, because every part you attached is a thing that can be taken away. It also means a losing freak visibly falls apart, which is the most satisfying way for a candy monster to go.

Nothing here gets gory. It stays funny, the way a cartoon does it.

Sample cards

One freak, five slots.

Five cards go down. One monster stands up.

Barfin Blue Raz Spewhole, a head part card
Scary Cherry Crusty Shell, a torso part card
Loopy Lime Spare Stomach, a guts part card
Loopy Lime Noodle Arms, an arms part card
Weirdo Watermelon Swarmlegs, a legs part card

Placeholder art only. Final art would be commissioned.
AI never touches the game design.

A blank card for a player to draw their own freak part on
The one in every bag

Make Your Own

One card per pack has a blank face. The player draws their own part, names it, gives it a slot and a flavor, and plays it for real.

This is Feed Your Freak taken literally. The monster on the table is theirs because part of it came out of their own head.

It costs almost nothing to print, and it hands your social team a campaign that runs itself from week one.

Two ways to play

One set of cards.
Two audiences.

Versus

Two freaks, one table, ten minutes.

The core mode. Kids and their friends, loud and fast.

Lab Escape

Everybody against Dr. Rotten.

One to three players build while a small Dr. Rotten deck flips a card each round trying to ruin them. Then the freaks turn on him. He is already the antagonist and already has clones, so this costs roughly fifteen extra cards and no new rules.

A part card reads identically in both modes. The only thing that changes is whether the opposition is a person or a deck. Versus sells to kids. Co-op sells to the parent standing behind them, who buys games they can actually play alongside their kid.

Why now

You said you were building
a cartoon universe.

Michael has been public about wanting Rotten to become an entertainment property with candy as one revenue stream. A card game is the cheapest possible proof that the IP travels off the bag.

~6,000
nationwide shelves as of last October, every one of them a distribution point you already own
4
product formats and six flavors, already a parts system before anyone designs anything
2
sold-out limited drops, so the audience has already proven it chases scarcity

An animated series is a multi-year bet. A card game is a season, and it produces characters, names, art and a measurable audience that make the bigger bet easier to justify.

The honest part

The concept is done.
The game is not.

What you are looking at is a concept with its core decisions solved. Stat curves, rarity splits, deck construction limits and a tested balance pass are development work, and none of it should happen before you tell us the idea is worth having.

The art here is placeholder made to show the register. Real cards would be illustrated by commissioned artists working from your character bible.

And we would want to see that bible before naming a single Freak. You have a cartoonist and a world already. We would rather build inside it than invent next to it.

Expansion

Your product roadmap
is the content roadmap.

Because no flavor is ever named in the rules, the game grows every time marketing does its job.

Every launch is a drop

A new flavor ships with five new cards alongside it. No reprint, no rules update, no second rulebook.

Retired flavors get rare

When a flavor leaves the lineup its cards do not break. They become the ones people hunt.

Collabs become premium sets

The NOFX Cruncheez model, with cards attached. Scarcity you already know how to run.

One set is a game. A schedule of them is a franchise, and yours is already on the calendar.

What this looks like

You own Rotten.
We design it.

You approveArt direction, character voice, copy. Everything that touches the brand stays yours to sign off on.
We handleGame design, card development, illustration direction, production and fulfillment. Your team never opens a spreadsheet for this.
FormatsOne card in every bag, on the FSC paperboard you already print. Plus a standalone starter set for the site and the Build A Box.
Second surfaceDisplay trays, multipack cartons and the Build A Box are paperboard you are already printing on. Cards can be die cut straight out of them, so a panel that used to be a logo becomes a game piece.
PackagingNothing here adds plastic, blisters or shrink wrap. The zero waste story stays intact.
Who we arePamplemoose Games is a two designer studio. Our flagship is HAVOC: Gen Zero, the card game we designed, funded on Kickstarter in under thirty minutes.
Next step

Let us know whether
the freak gets to live.

Thirty minutes is enough to tell whether this is interesting. If it is, the next thing we would want is your character bible and a sense of the flavor calendar. If it is not your thing, that is a completely fair answer and we will say thanks and mean it.

No number on this slide on purpose. Scope decides cost, and scope is a conversation.

Zack Howe & Cole Beardsley · Pamplemoose Games · zack@pamplemoosegames.com

Concept pitch prepared by Pamplemoose Games LLC for Rotten, Inc. All Rotten brand assets, names and imagery appear solely to demonstrate this concept and remain the property of their owners. Game mechanics and designs are original work of Pamplemoose Games LLC. Placeholder art only; final art would be commissioned. AI never touches the game design. Not for distribution.