# The Making of the World Cup Card Collector — Owen Howe

> Panini crossed with FUT: how the World Cup Card Collector opens packs when real 2026 matches finish, stickers goals onto cards, and got a friend group checking in daily.

Source: https://howe.app/games/world-cup-cards/story

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Case study · NO. 01

# Panini, meet FUT.

A sticker album where the packs open themselves — the moment a real World Cup match goes full-time — and the stickers reflect what actually happened on the pitch.

Started

Spring 2026

Status

Available to play

Data

ESPN feed, near-live

Team

One human, many agents

## The hook

I grew up on Panini albums and FUT squads, and the two never met: Panini has the romance of a collection that fills in as the tournament happens, FUT has the game. This glues them together. Packs unlock the moment a real match goes full-time; pull a striker who scored that night and his card arrives with a goal sticker on the back — a red card earns the shameful red rectangle. By the final, your binder is a record of the tournament that actually happened.

June 20 in the app: four full-times, eight packs on offer. The Netherlands put five past Sweden, so that’s the one you open first.

Every card flips to a 2026 TCG back you can favourite or share — the little detail that makes a digital pull feel like something you actually own.

## The hard part

The live pipeline took longer than any feature you can see. No official free feed carries goalscorers, so the game leans on ESPN’s, with a scores-only backup, a shared cache, and fuzzy name matching that lands “L. Messi” on the right card and never on the wrong brother. The other hard part was human — getting someone to open it _once_. After that they’re in: my friends looked one time to be polite and found themselves back every day for the streak pack, the objectives, the arena.

## A one-person studio

By any sane measure this is too much game for a side project: a pack economy, daily rewards, a scout market, and a PvP arena whose matches are simulated deterministically — the server and browser can replay the same match from the same seed, making results reproducible. I built all of it alone, on nights and weekends around my day job at The New York Times, and the honest answer to _how_ is AI. I build with coding agents — Claude Code, mostly — the way an editor works with a fast writer: I decide what the game should feel like, the agent drafts, and I playtest, cut, and redirect. The group chat is the QA department. It’s still not finished. It’s not supposed to be.

The binder mid-tournament. Every card remembers where it came from — a group-stage pack, a starter pack, an objective — and the NEW badge does exactly the job you think it does.

[Open a Pack →](https://howe.app/games/world-cup-cards)[next story: the bracket →](https://howe.app/games/world-cup-brackets/story)