In 1995, the collectible card game market was filling with Magic imitators.

Most of them solved combat the same way: compare a number to another number, add a modifier, maybe trigger an effect. Attack value meets defense value. Bigger number wins. It was clean, familiar, and easy to print on a card.

Mike Sager did something stranger.

He built a sword fight.

Highlander: The Card Game used a 3 by 3 grid to turn every exchange into a positional duel. Attack cards aimed at body zones. Defense cards covered body zones. If the block did not cover every square the attack targeted, the defender took the hit.

That sounds simple until you play it.

You are not asking whether your card is bigger. You are asking where the blade is going, whether your guard is in the right place, whether the face-down card is a bluff, and whether you can afford to spend the defense now or save it for the head shot that may be coming next.

Sager called the engine SwordMaster.

The broader design world mostly missed it.

The Grid

The Highlander license gave Sager a very specific design problem.

The property was not about armies, spellbooks, or abstract duels of resource management. It was about immortals fighting with swords, wearing each other down across time, and ending everything with one clean decapitation. If the card game did not make the duel feel physical, the license would become decoration.

So Sager put the body on the card.

Each attack and defense showed a nine-space grid. The upper row mattered because a head shot could end the game outright. Other attacks could bleed away your Ability, but a clean strike to the right zone could finish the fight the way Highlander fiction demanded.

The result was a card game with geography.

Not a map in the normal sense. No board. No miniatures. Just a little square diagram that made the player think in angles, lanes, coverage, and risk. A standing guard might protect several zones while restricting your own attacks. A hidden attack forced the defender to guess. A dodge solved one problem and left another open.

The grid did not feel pasted on.

It was the game.

ABILITY

The other important idea was Ability.

In Highlander: The Card Game, Ability was not just life total. It also governed hand size. As your Ability fell, your hand got smaller. A smaller hand meant fewer attacks, fewer defenses, fewer answers, and less control over the next exchange.

That is a cruel loop.

It is also thematically sharp.

An immortal in Highlander is hard to kill, but not untouched by damage. The duel is attrition. You lose options. You lose tempo. You become easier to read. By the time your Ability is low, the next bad exchange can feel inevitable.

Many games create death spirals accidentally. Sager made one on purpose.

That decision gave the game its tension and one of its flaws. Once a player fell too far behind, the ending could become less interactive. The wounded player had fewer cards with which to make a comeback, while the stronger player still had enough hand size to press the advantage.

The system could be exciting.

It could also close like a trap.

Exertion

Then came Exertion.

Players could reveal cards from the deck to search for what they needed. That offered immediate tactical control, but it burned through the deck. When the deck ran out, exhaustion punished the player. Every search asked the same question:

Do you need the right card badly enough to spend your future on it?

That is the part of Highlander that holds up best as design.

The game creates pressure from several directions at once. The grid asks you to read the duel. Ability asks you to manage the body. Exertion asks you to manage time. Head shots ask whether this is the turn where one mistake ends everything.

For a 1995 licensed card game, that is unusually integrated.

A lot of licensed CCGs from that boom treated the property as art direction. Put a famous character on a card. Rename a spell. Sell boosters to fans. Sager’s game tried to make the central action of the source material happen through the rules.

That is why the game still has defenders.

It did not merely say Highlander.

It moved like Highlander.

Towers In Time

Sager’s first step was not Highlander.

It was Towers in Time, another 1995 collectible card game from Thunder Castle Games. Towers in Time was a fantasy battle between wizards, with schools of magic and a five-shield victory structure. It arrived in the same crowded year as a flood of other fantasy CCGs.

The game did not separate itself.

Its production problems became more memorable than its play. Starter decks shipped without rules. Players had to request them separately. An icon explanation card existed, but early printing problems meant it did not explain everything it needed to explain.

That is a rough debut.

It is also useful context.

Towers in Time looks like a designer and publisher learning under market pressure. Highlander, released the same year, looks like the lesson landing fast. The second game has a stronger hook, a cleaner identity, and a mechanism tied to a specific physical experience.

The distance between those two designs is the interesting part.

Sager went from a fantasy CCG that could disappear into the pile to a card game whose core mechanism was recognizable from across the table.

The Long Survival

Most 1990s collectible card games died quickly.

That was not a moral failure. The market was brutal. Magic had opened the door, and everyone rushed through it at once. Retailers could not support every new booster line. Players could not keep buying into every new system. Licensed games had to survive both game-store economics and the expiration of fan attention.

Thunder Castle Games did not last.

Highlander did.

The first edition received multiple releases through the late 1990s. The official game history lists Series Edition, Movie Edition, Watchers Chronicles, Arms & Tactics, Four Horseman, Duncan Collection, Methos Collection, and The Gathering as part of that first-edition period. Fan and community support carried the game through lean years. The Missing Link Expansion, an unofficial digital continuation, became part of the player memory before being shut down in 2022.

Then the game returned.

Le Montagnard announced a second edition in 2006, with Sager identified by ICv2 as the designer of the Highlander game system and president of the company. The official site describes the second edition as the current edition most players still use, with later Versus Sets and a 2022 Legacy 3 Set adding more material.

That is the unlikely part.

A licensed 1995 CCG, from a small publisher that went away, still has an official website with rules, errata, deck lists, card database links, community links, and organized-play recruitment for 2025 and beyond.

Not many games from that shelf survived long enough to have a second life.

Fewer survived because of a rule system players could not quite replace.

The Problem With Being Too Local

Sager’s achievement has a hard limit.

SwordMaster did not become a school of design. It did not seed a family of unrelated games. Designers did not cite it as the ancestor of later card-fighting systems. It did not become a phrase people use when explaining spatial combat in card games.

The game survived inside its own arena.

That distinction matters.

A mechanism can be good and still fail to propagate. Highlander’s grid was tied to a license, a community, and a small company’s distribution limits. It was also trapped inside a market that was already overwhelmed. By the time later designers explored card games that felt more like fighting games, Highlander was easy to miss.

The irony is that Sager built the thing people often say they want from licensed games.

He did not simply decorate a generic engine. He found the physical act at the center of the source material and made the card play imitate it. Blade, guard, wound, head shot, quickening. Theme was not added after balance. It was the skeleton.

But influence requires visibility.

Highlander had devotion. It did not have visibility.

What He Actually Built

Mike Sager did not leave behind a large catalog.

The documented tabletop design footprint is narrow: Towers in Time, Highlander: The Card Game, and the later Highlander continuation through Le Montagnard. That is not the profile of a prolific professional designer working across many forms.

But narrow does not mean empty.

Sager built one genuinely distinctive card-game system. SwordMaster turned combat into spatial reading at a time when most collectible card games were still discovering how many ways they could compare numbers. Ability tied health to hand size in a way that made damage feel like loss of control. Exertion turned deck depletion into a tactical temptation. Head shots made the license’s central danger mechanically present.

The flaws are real.

The death spiral could choke late-game agency. The first-edition ecosystem was hard for outsiders to enter. The broader field did not absorb the design. Towers in Time was a shaky first attempt, not a hidden masterpiece.

Still, Highlander matters because it answers a design question cleanly:

What if a licensed game simulated the thing people loved, instead of merely naming it?

Sager’s answer was a grid.

Where To Find Him

The public trail for Mike Sager himself is thin. The work is easier to find than the designer.

Start with the official Highlander: The Card Game site, which remains active as a resource hub for the second edition. It directs players to rules, errata, card databases, community spaces, deck lists, prize packs, and organized play. The official history credits Sager with creating the first edition under Thunder Castle Games and tracks the game’s survival through fan support, second edition play, and later releases.

That is the story now.

Not a famous designer name.

Not a mechanism everyone copied.

A sword-fighting grid from 1995 that never became common knowledge, but somehow kept finding hands willing to play it.

The grid nobody found is still there.