Design Journey

Mon Oct 10 – Creating Player Cards

After a demo game with my son Braden and his girlfriend Rachel, he brought up the idea of each player having their own small board.  What could we put on these to be fun and useful?  This aligned perfectly with a Kickstarter reward to enable backers to get their name and face on the player cards, and engage with us to create a backstory and design their abilities.  We agreed there should be one bonus at the start of the game, and another that triggered occasionally during each Year.  I jotted some ideas to tweak various game mechanics slightly.  I can’t wait to see what interesting ideas the backers dream up.

During Refresh, the Rulebook specifies everyone gets a standard amount of Actions Cards and Influence gained.  I created two tracks on the Player Card for these.  This allows us to customize different starting levels, and led to thinking about options to increase them, as well as possible penalties to reduce them.  Which resulted in another two Jobs to move up those tracks, adding to the variety of Jobs and more paths to victory.