We are in crunch time, now! So, get excited: this is happening. One of the strange side-effects of tabletop design is that you have to be very conscious of a number of factors you can't control. Cards can print darker than expected, game pieces might not all fit in the box, and, oh so paramount, the cards aren't all going to get cut on the lines. So, if you're designing cards with CCG-style borders, you can either do a large print run (this is expensive), or deal with the drift. Our publisher once told me that clever designers can design around any problem. Challenge accepted.
For Galapagos, I decided to go with a few repeating patterns, and to let them bleed well beyond the card cuts. The patterns are also mildly reminiscent of the diagrams you might encounter in a biology textbook: gene maps, hexagrams, and Punnet squares.
Most of the art is not yet in the templates, but I'm going to share them anyway!
Here's one of the nucleobases, the genetic materical that serves as currency in the game:
Creatures, like Phillip and Francis, will go in these lovely templates:
Mutations, cleverly shaded from the colors of their genetic material costs, will look like this:
Oh, and how about a preview of the back of the cards? Okay, you twisted my arm:
We're going into beta in June. So there's that.
xoxo (CW) Alex.
Posted Monday, May 20th 2013 @ 10:04