DigiNodes started as a card game for my mom
DigiNodes didn’t start as DigiNodes. It started because Mille Bornes was the game my mom and I played when I was a kid, before the atari or the nintendo, and I wanted to see if I could make a version we could play online.
Mille Bornes is a 1954 French card game: race 1000 miles while your opponents throw hazards at you, play remedies, keep moving. The mechanics are public domain. The theme is the part I swapped out: an AI agent trying to complete a task across a network. 1000 nodes instead of 1000 miles. Hazards became firewalls, corrupted memory, forced reboots. The coup-fourré, the game’s big counter-move, became the agent waking up.
The name took 4 tries. Mille Bot, then Million Nodes, then MilliNodes, then DigiNodes. Naming was harder than the deck math. The logo art went through the same churn, all 4 still runnable (click one to open it live):
The look was locked early: Tron and OutRun. Glowing grid, dark room, that specific 80s arcade neon. The first “coming soon” teaser I made went to my mom before anyone else: the MilliNodes teaser, and later the DigiNodes version.
The simple card game version shipped first. The robot version is next.