Up to Eleven

Looking back I see that my first post in this blog was in April 2014, so I've been blogging - albeit sporadically - about tabletop game design for eleven years. As this is a nice, round number, I figure it's probably worth a look back - and also a bit forward. 

I have a spreadsheet, on which I record all the games I developed as far as having a playable prototype and note its status, etc., and the earliest entry on there is from 2013, so pre-dating this blog. At present there are 58 entries on there. It misses a few entries, like some speed-design exercises done at an event last year, but it covers most of what I have done. Plenty of these games have had a test or two and been buried, never to be seen again. There were a good number of these games, however, that went through at least a few iterations of playtesting and improvement before being shelved, and I'll have a think about some of those in a bit.

I make it that eleven of these projects have got as far as being pitched to publishers. Some of these were a bit speculative rather than in any real expectation of getting anywhere, but four of them actually ended up being signed. Three of these fell through for various reasons - one of which did have a 30-copy limited edition made first though - leaving the one that is now out on shelves and available to buy.

5 prototypes. Clockwise from top left: Corlea, Invaded, Explore & Settle,
Boogie Knights, and in the middle, My Name is...

Thinking back over the past projects, there are plenty that I would like to go back for another look at. I went through something like this a couple of years ago, but I'm a bit more positive about game design in general than I was back then, so here are some of the ones that come to mind...

Boogie Knights is the first game that I took to a public playtest event, in 2015, and helped introduce me to the Playtest UK community. It was a game that I got to a state where it pretty much always went down well with players, but it felt like something was missing. I think there were some unnecessary complexities in it and a fresh look might find how to straighten it out.

Explore and Settle is a terrible working title for possibly the heaviest game I have designed yet. I think there was some interesting stuff in the game with resource management and map building that could have potential. It might actually be that a new title is the main thing needed here!

My Name is... is pretty much the polar opposite of the last game, and is a mind tangling party game with just a deck of cards and very few rules. For some people, this game just worked amazingly, producing laughter and agonised groans in equal amounts. There was never a satisfying end or win condition for the game though - in this sort of game, scoring and winning is rarely that important for most groups, but that aspect does need to be there for it to be sellable.

Corlea is a midweight Euro-ish game based on a real example of iron age people in Ireland building a wooden road through a peat bog. 

And finally for now, Invaded, my long-running white whale of a game with an interesting concept of being a competitive game with a players being residents of a land under attack from a powerful, non-player colonial force. I never really got this one firing properly, and have had thoughts about remaking it with squirrels, but I dunno... should I get back to it and take advantage of years of more experience, or just consign it to the archives?

That question applies to all of the games really, but I think I left Invaded in a state that is most in need of work before being worthy of a playtest. The others, though, maybe I can get them out and onto the table to see what can be done with them. 

To be fair, though, the last time I did a review of games I could get back to work on, it didn't go anywhere, so let's say that by UK Games Expo (which is just a month away), I'll have at least one of these games in a playable state and will see if I can get it to the table there, if not before.

Games to maybe resurrect...?

 Over the years I have started many projects. Most of them I have worked on for a while and then shelved for one reason or another. Some have come back after a while and I've done some work on them again with a fresh perspective. A few games have been around this cycle more than once. As I'm trying to get back into the game design groove, one of the things that I feel could be fun is to look at some of these old projects to see if any of them spark anything in me now. After all, they all had something that interested me back in the day...

So, I've been through the records and pics, and here are some of the games that I think might be worth having another crack at. Any thoughts from anyone reading this would be greatly appreciated. 

Also, apologies in advance for most of these having truly terrible working titles. Such things are not my strong point.

"Role World"... This one was a lockdown project which I used to learn a load about Tabletopia, and is kind of a map building and exploiting game. The idea is that players each have roles, with things that they can do and things that they score points for. To start with the roles all involve laying map tiles, but later on we move to building towns, roads and the like, and also things like dragons and their gold turn up. It wasn't well organised, and the idea that the rules and objectives change through the game raised some eyebrows (it's a different experience if you know what is coming up compared to just playing as a game of discovery), but I think there may be something here. And this one has never been in a physical form and I'd like to change that, as there is something pleasing to me about tiles being placed to build maps.

"Puffins in Hats"... A few years ago I did a personal challenge of drawing something every day for a year, and during that year I drew a lot of puffins for... reasons. One day I drew a bunch of puffins with hats on, and that got an idea into my head that there should be a game called Puffins in Hats. I did a set of passable digital art of these puffins, which is a deft way to start a game design, but nobody stopped me. Then I tried out a couple of variations of rules based on the art, and never found anything that felt much good, so this is the least functional game on this list, but I'd still like to figure out a game here.

"Corlea"... This is one of the most Euro-like games I've worked on, and it has been through a couple of iterations, being something more-or-less like a worker placement game about building a wooden trackway through a bog in iron age Ireland, all inspired by a visit to a fascinating site in County Longford. This wasn't terrible, but not quite engaging enough as a game of its type, but I still like the idea of basing something on this setting, and the overall mechanism of communally processing wood in order to build the trackway.

"Steampunk Workshop"... This one is not really an engine building game in the way that most hobby gamers would understand it, but rather a game where one of the core elements is assembling a shared "machine" of tiles with half-cog connectors. You then have the ability to traverse the machine in different ways to essentially convert resources, plus there are a load of gadgets with steampunk illustrations (which came out of that period of lots of drawing I mentioned earlier) that can help you in different ways. There are potentially some interesting interactions in the "machine" as different tiles get connected and player agents get in the way of each other, but I think the game felt a bit plodding in its pace when I last tried it.

"Courier"... You're a small courier company charged with delivering packages around the city. This was my attempt at a pick up and deliver game; in this case your playing pieces are card stands that you can move around, and the consignments are cards that slot into the stands, and which show where they come from and go to, and the amount that they earn for you. Actions are card driven, so you can upgrade your capabilities by buying more stands or more cards. The big problem I was having with this was in managing how the consignments could be brought out in a way that feels right for the game. 

"Explore and Settle"... This was a bit of a beast that was way too crunchy for its own good. I don't mean that good "solve a puzzle" crunchy, but more of a "way too much to think about for what it is" combined with a bit of confusion about one of the core mechanisms. It's largely based around a map build using standard cards, where the main part of the card is a square of terrain, while the remaining "tab" produces resources and other benefits, but only until it is covered over by another card. I think there is probably something good here, and I've not looked at it for a few years, so I might have some new insight.

"Monster Invasion"... This is a little solo game about defending a fantasy village from a monster horde, where each card constrains which cards can be played next. Some cards increase "threat", some allow you to power up in preparation to use magic, and some cards reduce the threat level. If you can't play, you can draw a card and increase the threat. Too much threat and you lose; get through the deck and you win. I rather liked this one, though the play was often tense and edgy until it wasn't, and then the game just played out. That's a matter of tweaking and balancing. I was also trying to figure out how to get boss monsters into the game in an interesting way. 

"Roll-Move-Race"... So I wanted to try making a roll & move game, so this one involves racing robots across the table on a track that you build as you go, with the potential to gain upgrades that provide various boosts and luck mitigations. I quite liked this (though it certainly had a long way to go) and I'm not sure why it fell off the "active" pile, so I should probably pull it out again and give it a fresh look.

I think that'll do for now. I'm sure I can make some good progress on some of these, but we'll just have to see what grabs me most. As I said, any thoughts, questions, or input would be gratefully received.

Remember remember the rest of November

I seem to have slumped to a monthly blog posting schedule here, which is not exactly ideal, but is better than nothing, I guess.  With the nights drawing in I've been finding myself a bit tired and sluggish on many fronts, but I've not been completely off the game design path.  Most of my efforts over the last month have been working on one of three projects which are at very different stages.

Explore and Settle

This is an old design that I alluded to in last month's post, and one that has a pretty misleading name. It's what you could describe as a "3X" game (explore, expand, exploit, but not exterminate), and it is based on cards that overlap to form a grid of squares, but the additional "tab" of the card (the bit beyond the square) has a game effect until it is covered over, as well as providing uses when played from hand. The core mechanism is pretty fine, and gets a bit brain-burny (more than anything else I have designed), but overall the game is just not compelling, so I need to find an "angle" to use, and it may require a major redesign. 

At least it's prettier than it used to be.

This was the game that I took to this month's London playtesting meetup, as well as coming out for another game designer meetup I was at, and I got some interesting feedback, but I'm struggling to figure out how best to move forward.

Scurvy Crew

I'm still in a development phase here, working on building the campaign mode of the game. We have some really interesting ideas bouncing around for how we can carry threads on from game to game. There'll be missions and changing threats and opportunities through the campaign, but things aren't locked down enough for me to be able to talk about them much at the moment.

Elvic

This is the game designed by Tom Coldron that I've been doing some experimental development on. It's a fast-playing game (usually takes about 15 minutes), so we usually get to have at least a couple of plays in a row, often trying a small rules tweak in between to compare and contrast.  Small and quick games are so much easier to playtest. :)

I think I'm getting to the end of a development arc with this game though, so I have one last round of playtesting coming up (see below) and then, unless that opens up some new avenues that I want to explore, I think I'll probably send it back to Tom and see what the original designer thinks of the ways I have destroyed his original idea!

Dragonmeet

It's that time of year. As I write this, I'm avoiding getting ready for Dragonmeet, which is on tomorrow in London (Hammersmith, actually), though actually I've got most of what I need to do done.  I'll me spending most of the day at the Playest UK stand -- volunteering there until 2pm, after which I'll have a couple of hours playtesting the latest version (of mine) of Elvic.  If you are there (if you are in the area and want something to do, why not come along?), please swing by and say hello.

Exploration of Multi-Function Cards -- Oh, and Some Settling

The game known as Explore and Settle (or Gamey McGameface, as I facetiously touted it online) has had its third visit to a London playtest meetup, and in a very different form to previous times.

After a load of thrashing ideas around and some solo playtesting (sometimes it's worth just playing against myself to see how things pan out), the game got a lot of components removed and a very different play dynamic added, and I was looking forward to seeing how it worked with real people.

So now I have got rid of gold, resource tokens and the like, and rolled loads of functions into a deck of cards.  Essentially, the terrain cards still have a terrain tile as their main part, and they still have a built-in indicator of resource production, but now they also each have a pair of actions that the card can be used for, including builds and settlement movements.  Oh, and the cards can also be discarded (or passed to other players) as payment, so the cards act as currency as well.  Each turn you draw some cards, and cities allow you to draw additional cards.

The big questions were, at this point, are the choices afforded by these new, multi-function cards interesting, does the game flow OK in this form, and do the options just make everything grind to a halt?

Our game at its end, with the blue player having constructed his third monument.
Note the hole in the middle, where there was a void where cards could not be played.

We had a three-player game, with me giving the caveat that I was wanting to look at overall game play and flow, and noting that the balance of costs, victory points, and so on, was likely to be horribly wrong at this stage.  That latter prediction did, indeed, turn out to be correct, but what else did we learn?...

It turns out, not surprisingly, that there is a fairly heavy cognitive load when figuring out what you can do on each turn.  Figuring out if you have enough cards to, say, build a monument can take some working through, and this can make for some periods of staring at cards and doing mental gymnastics to solve the puzzle.  None of it is actually too difficult, but it does take some concentration, and this is all something that could attract some players but put others off completely.  I will need to decide if this is something I am happy with in the design, or if I can simplify and smooth the play out.

My testers also had some difficulty just getting their heads around how the game works, with the combination of terrain, production, actions, and cards-as-currency, and there was a comment that some aspects (particularly the way cards are used to pay for certain things) are somewhat unituitive.  This is a potential problem, but given the way that the latter half of the play through went (pretty smoothly overall), I think it might just be that I need to improve the presentation of the game with better iconography, player aids, and rules explanations.

While cities and monuments were build all over the place, only one production location was built, which surprised me a little, but it was felt that there wasn't really any incentive to undertake these builds, partly as it was too easy for other players to move settlements in and poach access to these facilities.

On balance, though, this was a very positive test.  I think the overall shape of the game is now one I like, and with some more (or a lot more) attention to costs and benefits of things, I think I can make progress here.

This is definitely the heaviest game I have got to this stage of development, although it is probably still just a middleweight in the grand scheme of things.  I did get one interesting suggestion, though, which was to strip the game back down to a very basic level (need to decide what that is first!) and see if the gameplay is still okay.  While I am still wanting to work on a meatier game than others I have developed over the last year or so, this is probably a very worthwhile exercise to learn more about what I am doing here, and it may well help me find the elements that need focussing on.

Apart from testing this game, I of course played games designed by other people.  This time we had a short and chaotic game of queue manipulation, a game of storytelling with a stack of words you have to use (in order) in your story, and a game about building a telegraph network in mid-nineteenth century America.  As always some very interesting (and varied) stuff with great potential.

Exploration and Monumentalisation

Sunday saw me having another opportunity to go to London for an afternoon of playtesting.  Unfortunately this session was a little truncated due to the pub being booked for a private function for the evening, but thanks to a slightly earlier start than usual and some careful wrangling of game designers, we still managed to get three 90 minute sessions.

This time I was up in the first slot, which was a little disappointing in that I missed out on a couple of games I really wanted to try, but that's always the problem: so many games and only so much time to play them.  This meetup was a little lighter on people than previous ones, so I ended up joining in for a three-player game of Explore and Settle -- though a fourth arrived half way through, too late to join in, but he watched and was able to contribute feedback at the end.

Slightly blurry picture, but then so was the game itself.

My latest iteration of the game had a few elements added in an attempt to fill out the game and address some of the issues raised last time.  I had added more variety in the monuments that could be built, introduced objective cards which provide victory points for various things (each player is dealt two to start), made some actions more costly in terms of gold, and changed the resource supply mechanism, and this last deserves a paragraph of its own.

Previously you were able to use resources if you could trace a path of no more than three cards back to a location that is producing that resource.  This seemed OK, but we weren't sure about keeping track of where everything was coming from, so you couldn't just use resources from the same location repeatedly.  This time round I went for a different approach.  Each time you added a card to the map, the card you added would trigger production in some locations -- you may see resource icons in circles, in the corner of the cards in the picture above; these are the triggers.  To stop things getting too messy, I figured that resources were only produced in locations that didn't already have unused resource markers there; so a maximum of one resource per card.  I also added "trade goods", effectively a wild card good that you could buy with gold from cities by the sea, and these were produced whenever a sea card was played.

Our three-player game wasn't disastrous as a game, but it wasn't a lot of fun.  As a playtest, though it was pretty good, as we found several issues that were a problem and were able to talk through several ideas that may allow me to make things better.  Thanks to Dan, Dave and (later) Mike for providing really valuable feedback here.  Some of the major points discussed were...

• We got a bit resource starved for one of the resources in the early part of the game, which made things rather frustrating for a while. There was acceptance that there are sometimes plays like this, and it's not necessarily a huge deal, but I feel that I should try to avoid creating a game where the first few turns are full of frustration.
• One possible way to ease the early game is to make the start cards special ones that always produce and never lose their production. Possibly even make the start cards coastal.  Thematically this could be a good decision for a game with an exploration element.
• The way resources were being produced, there is a real incentive to do your best to use everything up on your turn, as anything you leave is an advantage to someone else.  Later in the game most resources were fairly plentiful, so this became less of a thing, but it seems a bit of a design smell.
• Some of the choices I made about how money moves around were unintuitive, largely because it relied people to remember when they pay other players and when they pay the bank.  Need to think about this.
• There was a feeling that monuments were too hard to build, though later on, with money and resources being more available this eased, so I think this may not be a problem: when it becomes easier to build monuments, that is the end game approaching.
• The objectives look very unbalanced and a couple of them are far worse than the others.  This is something that I suspected, and will certainly pay more attention to it for future versions, as I like the idea of keeping them in.  Another thing to think about, however, is the balance of where points come from because it would be nice for there to be multiple paths to victory.
• Given that the resource production system just didn't seem right we discussed a few possible options, including going back to my previous way of doing things.  One suggestion that I very much liked was that you use your settlements to activate locations on the cards where they are sitting, so you can effectively generate one resource somewhere for each settlement you have.  This potentially means that there is an incentive to have more than one settlement on a card.  It also suggests that they aren't settlements, but clans or something.
• Finally, we had a lot of discussion about whether it is allowed to partly cover a production tab on a card.  I've always said not, but thinking about it, I could rearrange the design of the cards so that production is indicated by icons in the corners  rather than the centre of the tabs.  That way, one tab could neatly cover over one of those icons, but not the other.  This has all sorts of implications that I am thinking about.

So while my ego took a knock or two here, the outcome of this play was amazingly helpful and leaves me with a lot to work on.  Now I just need to make some changes and get a playable set again and get it in front of people soon.  I've set myself a target of having a playable set for UK Games Expo at the start of June; I won't be running an "official" playtest of it there, but hopefully there will be some opportunities in the evenings.

But I do seriously need to come up with a new name for the game.  Any suggestions would be appreciated so that I don't end up resorting to Gamey McGameface.

The couple of other games I played were a deckbuilding game set in space, with similarities to the excellent Star Realms but including the development of planets and colonies, plus some interesting other mechanisms, and a true analogue game of motor racing, where you move your car using measurements on a ruler and have to plan acceleration and braking by estimating distances on the race track. And, of course, there were some great sounding games that I missed out on too.

Building Monuments but Getting Off at Victoria

Yesterday I took another trip into London for a playtesting session.  So, that's three trips into the capital so far this year, which is more than I usually do in any given 12-month period.

Anyway, this time around I took my current version of the inappropriately-named Explore and Settle, for which I managed to recruit three testers, and I joined in for a four-player game.  At this point, the game is still in a very early stage of development, having had little testing beforehand, so the aim was really to see how the game flows and whether there is something there that could be built on.  I admit to being nervous with such an unready game, but previous experience told me that this was one of the friendliest and most helpful places I could be, so I had confidence that this would be productive.

And it was.

Just a few turns in and the map is developing nicely.

We identified a number of problems, including:

• After the first few turns, supply of gold vastly outstripped the need for it, so we ended up running out of coins and besides people got to the point where they just didn't bother taking their income. 
• Resource supply got a little fiddly with trying to remember which spaces had been used for supply each turn.  
• The end-game was ill-defined, and benefits for building monuments (in terms of victory points and other benefits) just didn't seem right. Plus the game felt like it needed some form of "hidden" victory points to give some uncertainty at the end.

For all of these we discussed possible solutions, so I now have tweaks that address these issues and may help overall, so I know what to do next.

Finding problems -- especially when accompanied by plausible solutions -- is definitely a benefit for me, but there were also some things that were simply straight positives, including:

• The flow of the game was good, with not too much downtime for players between their turns.
• The testers all game thumbs up for the general idea and style of the game.
• The map grew in a pleasing manner.
• The cards comprising a square and a resource tab was considered something that was sufficiently new and interesting.  (I wouldn't be surprised if I later find someone else has done something very similar, but it felt reasonably fresh to this table of players.)
• The game took about an hour to play, which I think is a good target time, so I will be aiming for maintaining that game length.

Of course, I wasn't only playing my own games, and this time got to try out two other prototypes.  One was an auction game with partial information about the value of lots and some interesting risk/reward decisions for the auctioneer.  The other was about aliens trying to abduct sheep from fields while being shot at by angry farmers with shotguns. What's not to like?!

Once again, these meetings are proving to be a great inspiration. Aside from the fun of playing other people's games and getting feedback on my designs, just getting to spend time with and talk with other designers is really encouraging and helps me to keep going when my drive is flagging.  It's worth going from time to time just for that.

Monumental exploration

You know I was talking about my Explore and Settle prototype and how it needed some sort of a spark?  Well, I think I have got somewhere on that front.

First I will step back and outline the game as it stands.  The main flow is that on your turn you draw a card, which is dominated by a terrain type, and you add it to the table to extend a growing map; you may then add a settlement to that location, move a settlement (people migrate sometimes), and use resources to develop cities and resource production locations like mines and farms.  You get resources to develop or build things by being able to trace a line of supply (of limited length) to locations producing those resources, and you pay other players if you need to transport goods through areas where they have a settlement but you do not.  Resources are produced according an icon on the end of each terrain card, but this can be covered over by other cards, after which the card only keeps producing if someone has added a production location to it.  Cities (which mostly provide gold) and production locations are not owned by any player, but can be accessed by anyone with a settlement marker in the same place.

The intent was that one of the things players can build is a monument, and these are the things that provide victory points. I had originally envisaged earning the most points for building monuments that stand at the edge of the map at the end of the game, so they mark the borders of the kingdom, as it were.

I figure players would be building things like this. Maybe giant statues and stuff too.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons, by Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 2.0

This is all well and good, and the basic mechanisms seem to work, but they don't really drive the game forwards and they don't yet provide that spark of excitement that is needed to make a game more than just a collection of rules.  To get through this, I think I need to figure out what the focus of the game is, and in this case, I think it is probably actually the building of monuments.  So I need to actually make people want to build those monuments and give them an appropriate boost when they do.

What I am working on now is that on completion of a monument, you get a special reward which includes victory points, but also some extra ability; maybe you can now transport resources further, build certain things cheaper, avoid paying for certain things, or gain an extra settlement marker to place.  Thematically, this would probably be a boon offered by the king to acknowledge your services to His Magnificence.  Probably these boons would be available on cards, and when you build your monument, you can claim one of the small selection on display.

(Of course, with this focus, my working title is looking more dodgy than ever, but it doesn't really matter at this stage.)

Balancing the boons will be a challenge, but that can come later. First test the concept.  And that's what I'm doing right now...

Settling on More Exploration

My game development time got sidetracked a little over the last week as I, for some reason best known to my subconscious, decided to put together a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle for the first time in my life.  I think that is out of my system now, and I have ticked off an item in what might be the world's most boring bucket list.  So now I can get back to something a bit more creative...

Having posted about how I put together prototype cards using nanDECK, I printed and cut out a set of cards for Explore and Settle (that name really must change!), comprising 9 sea cards and 27 other terrains, and I sleeved these in different coloured sleeves.  As an aside, I usually put my cards into opaque backed sleeves, which keep everything neat when my cutting is a bit on the rough side, and add enough stiffness to standard 160gsm cardstock to make adequate playing cards.  Anyway, I also made a sheet of counters representing each of the resource types, which could be used as resource production locations; the idea is that when the resource tab on a card gets covered, it stops producing unless one of these production tokens has been placed on the location.

Seems quite strong to control a row like blue is doing there.

I'm rambling.  A few wooden components and cardboard coins from the stuff box makes this pile of stuff into a playable prototype.

So far I have done some solo testing of the game, and it seems to basically work, but I'm struggling on my own to make half decent moves to see how things go, and I don't know yet if other people will find my resource rules too fiddly; you don't actually gather resources, but have to set up (or pay for) supply lines of sorts.  The game also doesn't yet have a real "spark" to get it going, but I have a couple of ideas to go with which I may talk about in another post.  I really need to try this with actual real people again.

Fortunately there is another London Sunday playtest session coming up, so I'm planning on taking whatever I have of this game and seeing what feedback I can get, which should help me in the right direction.

Explore and Make Cards

Moving back to a game that has been getting little love in recent months, the one that I have currently codenamed Explore and Settle, I have decided to actually set up the cards on the computer, so I can quickly make whatever cards I want in whatever quantities, and start moving towards a bigger and better prototype than I had before. And I figured I might as well share how I do this, in case anyone is interested.

So, if you remember, the basic idea is that we have playing cards divided up into a square section, showing a terrain type (and possibly other features, though I'm not worrying about that right now) and the remaining part of the card is a tab which indicates a resource production type, which can end up being obscured by another card.

...a bit like this.

My tool of choice for this sort of job is a program called nanDECK, which provides a simple programming language designed to allow you to create game cards (or, potentially, other printed components).  A short script can combine with a data file (which can be a spreadsheet or a comma-separated-values file, which is what I usually use) to provide a way to easily (once you have learnt the basics) produce sheets of print-and-play cards.  The program also has a visual editor, but  I have never used it as it is not how my brain works best, so cannot comment on how effective it is.

As an aside, nanDECK is designed to run on Windows, but my PC runs a Linux operating system, which is inconvenient in this case. Fortunately we have the Wine software available; this is basically something that allows a lot of Windows software to run on Linux, and it is very handy.  Unfortunately it is often more complicated than just installing and running and, in the case of nanDECK, I had to spend a little while chasing down libraries from the Internet to make everything work.  It's all good now, and it works fine, though I'm afraid I can't go into how I did this, as it was quite a while back.

Anyway, a short bit of nanDECK code like this...

BORDER=RECTANGLE,#000000,0,MARKDOT PAGE=21,29.7,PORTRAIT,HV DPI=300 CARDSIZE=6.3,8.9 [VersionString]="Version 0.0" [AllCards]="1" ELLIPSE=[AllCards],1.5,2.5,3.3,6,#000000 ELLIPSE=[AllCards],1.7,2.7,2.9,5.6,#FFFFFF RECTANGLE=[AllCards],0.3,0.3,5.7,5.7,#000000 RECTANGLE=[AllCards],0.5,0.5,5.3,5.3,#FFFFFF FONT="Arial",6,,#000000 TEXT=[AllCards],[VersionString],0.5,8.5,5,0.5,RIGHT

...defines the size and shape of the card as well as the paper that I plan to print on, and lays down some background shapes.  Note that I also always put a version number on the bottom of the cards, which helps me keep my revisions in order, and also the "AllCards" bit is just a handy label for all the cards in my set, later on I will change it to something like [AllCards]="1-54" to define a 54 card deck.  That little script allows me to produce a basic template for the cards which comes out like this...

The intent is to stick a terrain image in the big square at the top, and put a resource icon in the outlined space near the bottom.  It's not the last word in graphic design, but the intent is simply to make something neat and presentable.

At the moment I am using five types of terrain for the game: grassland, forest, hills, mountains and sea.  I quickly made some rough terrain images that will be adequate until I find something nicer later on -- though I might not bother; we'll see.  I have also grabbed icons from game-icons.net to represent the basic resources: food, wood, stone, ore, gems.  These assets are all put into my project directory as PNG files (actually they are symlinks to the assets which are elsewhere, but that is irrelevant), and will be pulled in by my data file.

My card data file is pretty straightforward.  A spreadsheet might be easier in many ways, but I usually use a comma-separated-values (CSV) file because years of working on Unix/Linux command lines has pretty much made me happiest when using Unix tools to manipulate text files, and that is what these are.  So here's the contents of my data file for my first pass, just to check things work OK...

Quantity,CardTitle,Image,Resources 2,Grassland,tile_grassland.png,F 2,Forest,tile_forest.png,W 1,Mountain,tile_mountain.png,O 1,Mountain,tile_mountain.png,G 1,Hills,tile_hills.png,S 1,Hills,tile_hills.png,O 1,Sea,tile_sea.png,

And I can now add the following lines to my nanDECK code to pull in the data and put the images in the right places.  Note that for the resource icons I am using the ICONS directive which is a really useful tool to effectively turn letters into pictures, which is great.  I could actually also use this for the main image, which may allow for some interesting manipulation of the card data, but I'm not worrying about that this time.

LINKMULTI=Quantity LINK=exploreandsettle_cards.csv ICON=[AllCards],F,"icon_food.png" ICON=[AllCards],W,"icon_wood.png" ICON=[AllCards],S,"icon_stone.png" ICON=[AllCards],O,"icon_ore.png" ICON=[AllCards],G,"icon_gems.png" IMAGE=[AllCards],[Image],0.5,0.5,5.3,5.3 ICONS=[AllCards],[Resources],2,6,2.3,2.3,1.5,1.5,0,T

And I changed the "AllCards definition to fit that I now have more cards in my set...

[AllCards]="1-9"

And, after building all that, here are the cards I have generated...

So I just need to figure out how many of each type of card I need and I'm done.

Are these cardy tiles or tiley cards?

This is the benefit of thrashing around with all sorts of ideas: sometimes you figure out how to mash some of them together.  In this case I seem to have worked out how to add two not-really-games together (both of which I have written about here and tagged as KingdomBuildingTiles), and this is starting to turn into something that is showing a little promise.

A mid-game position for three players, although it is actually close to end game
as I hadn't made many more cards.

So I'm going with the idea of having cards with part of each being a square representing terrain and the remaining part of the card indicating a commodity that the square produces.  This "production tab" cannot, in general, be obscured until the other three sides of the terrain square have had something placed adjacent to them, but when the tab is obscured, the terrain stops producing the commodity.

UNLESS, that is, someone has managed to build a production facility (this terminology is terrible, must fix!) on there.

Building anything on a terrain square, whether a production facility or a city (which produces gold) requires resources.  Those resources must be produced by a square that is no more than three squares away (experimentation suggested that two would not allow enough flexibility, and I want to encourage building rather than seriously restricting it), and if the production square or any intermediate squares are controlled by opponents, you have to pay those opponents for access.  The idea that you have to pay people and they have to accept is pretty much lifted straight from 7 Wonders, and I reckon I'm OK with that.

When you place a card, you gain a gold coin if you place the terrain adjacent to like terrain.  This results in mostly creating areas of similar terrain, which is something I like, but I think there is a potential problem here with thematic justification for the rule.  I'll worry about this later, though, as it seems to work pretty well.

After a little experimentation I ended up with having a separate stack of cards for water/sea, so players have a choice to draw and place either land or sea.  All the sea is alike, but if you have a city adjacent to water, it is considered adjacent to all other coastal cities (thanks to ocean trade), which opens up all sorts of possibilities.

So far I've been playing around with this using my stash of blank flash cards and sharpies (plus assorted stock tokens and little bits of card) which has allowed me to make a fair bit of progress, but I think I now need some input from other real people.  The game seems to be showing some promise so far, but I think it is lacking some sort of a spark that would make it really worth pushing.  Still, you have to start somewhere, right?