Caravan: New Prototype

It has taken time, but a new prototype of Caravan has been made. It has a 'board' to play on and updated cards. The cards took me considerable time as they needed to be printed, cut out, glued onto notecards, and then trimmed to size. I developed a bruising on my fingers from having the use scissors for several hours straight.

Fig 1: Prototype

The board just has large paper with sections of the game map tapped to it. It is not anything special and will require more graphical work in the future. I can say though that with this new version of everything a much more severe focus on testing mechanics can begin again. For now, I will be researching heuristics for cards game to see if that helps me come up with a way to balance things.

Fig 2: Action Cards

Fig 3: Barter Cards

Redesigning Cards

Been redesigning cards for my board game. Initially the cards were meant to be laid out in front of the players, so they had a horizontal layout, figure 1. There were both Barter Cards and Action Cards, one is for getting points toward winning the game and the other toward enhancing or disrupting barter cards.

fig. 1

The greatest issue with the Action Cards were their text. My testers indicated confusion at what part of the text was for flavor/theme and what parts were to describe what the card did. The other issue was how players preferred to hide their cards, so a new vertical layout was needed to make holding the cards easier.

fig. 2

The first redesign went with minimal changes. The card was made vertical and the non flavor text was bolded. The card comes off as rather clunky in design. Just a big rectangle with a dividing line and text scrunched together. It does not read smoothly.

fig. 3

The next redesign option removed flavor text and centered all the text. The card name was placed just above the text to keep things together. The blocky style remains, but there is less text that is also larger and easier to read.

fig. 4

The final design is what was decided upon. The blocky design layout was removed. The title 'Action Card' was reduced down to a single 'A' in the corner. The text is still centered but flavor text was both reduced in size and italicized. This design for Action Cards allows the eye to travel freely across the card, while the previous blocky design tended to make people stop scanning the card due to the dividing line on it.

fig. 5

Next comes the barter card redesigned layout. The initial barter card design. figure 5, was relatively simplistic. It was just meant to convey the item and points received from selling it. The main change required was to allow the card to be easy to read in hand but also on the board, whether when deciding to draw the card from the open market or disrupt another playing selling a card.

fig. 6

The title text 'Barter Card' was removed as the back of the cards will have an indicator of what card type they are. The vertical layout of the card reads the same as the above Action Cards, except there is no text beyond the item name. This change allows for the symbol of the item to be larger and easier to see. The horizontal layout is simply a triangle in the corner showing the value of the card '1 point'. Also, the font for the cards overall were changed from Lancelot to Almendra because the former's font made '1's look like 'r's.

That is all for this update. Eventually I will put more work into my table-top game [Asteria Rising] or make a post involving Dungeons & Dragons again, but for now I am placing my energy into the board game while I have plenty of time.

Farewell, enjoy your day.