Art Weekend: Card Illustrations

Alright, so maybe Art Friday as a concept isn't exactly working out. Weekends in general are just kind of a leisure time for me, and I'd rather not let my studies get in the way of my pleasure seeking (seems backwards somehow...). As a result, I think I'll just stretch the art stuff to include the entire weekend from now on. That way, I'd have more opportunities to get stuff done and maybe spend more time on a piece instead of rushing everything to completion.

Despite the heat, this weekend ended up being very productive for me. I'm able to go back and start working on the Pirates game (again!), and as a result of that I've drawn a few illustrations to go with the new card designs. They're more of a study than anything for now, but I'm still quite happy with the output:

This is the illustration for "strike", the first study I've done. The foreshortening needs work, and the soon to be cropped parts of the drawing are crude, but I think the pose is effective.

Here is one for "counter". I like the illustration, but it'll probably be scrapped later since the card it describes don't trigger unless the player is under attack. This probably works better as "ripose". Poses involving more than one person is always tough, so at least I'm happy with the characters' layouts.

This is "focus". Pretty simple. The hair and the beard turns out well.

This is "brutalize". Now that I have a second look I guess the poses are a bit wonky... at this point my hands are getting tired but it's also loosening up, so the anatomy looks wrong in several places but the idea behind it feels right. I was wondering why the right arm of the sword guy didn't look right - I think the forearm should be brought to the front.

Finally, one for "unload". Something frilly to finish up the set of illustrations. Man, that right arm looks super short.

After scanning the pictures, I've also messed around with painting one or two of them:

I tried messing with ArtRage's watercolor. I don't know why, but compared to their oil (not that I've actually painted with oil based paint) brushes the watercolor just feels wonky. It looks so cool when it blends right, though. I suppose one of these days I'd finally figure it out. Until then I should mess around with it every now and then.

One in Photoshop, a quickie. I need to find a way to get rid of flat slabs of color since turning on pressure sensitive size and opacity never feel right for me, so I end up having brush strokes with round tips.

Now, to prototype the cards... then I can do another post about the design changes to the game.

Design Diary Monday: Brainstorming Solutions

Alright, so starting from this week there's no more scripts for me to follow. I've arrived back at the point where I need to make changes to the game, and I'll be spending the time on these posts actually working out problems instead of reporting results from the past.

The first order of business is to try and see if the pirates card game, in any form, is salvageable. I had a chance to watch some of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies over the past few weeks, and I was reminded of the things I wanted to portray:

• Hunting for legendary treasure (Aztec gold, the compass, the heart, what have you)
• Deals and betrayals
• Satisfying broadsides making ships explode

I didn't think I was successful in getting any of those points across. I've never come up with a convincing way to make players go after specific pieces or types of treasure; none of the versions ever got to a stage where temporary alliances made sense. The closest I've gotten were the ship battles, back when there were dice rolling... getting a good cannon roll and making ships explode on the spot felt good, but that was all the way back to the first version of the game and I don't want the rules to ever get that complicated again.

Honestly, let's just pretend I have the Pirates of the Caribbean license for a moment and think about how I can get the back and forth wheelin' and dealin' between all the characters work as game mechanics. In Dead Man's Chest,

• Jack needed the Dead Man's Chest to avoid his fate of servitude
• Will needed the Compass from Jack to secure Elizabeth's Release
• Elizabeth acquired the Letter of Marques but needed the Compass in return
• Jack agreed to trade the compass for the chest...

...

Actually, this is clearly not as complicated as I remembered, is it? An easier way to describe the formula is,

• Player 1 is after item A
• Player 1 has B but for some reason cannot directly reach A
• Player 2 is after item C, and he can trade B for C
• Player 2 now has the option to get A so he can trade with Player 1 for B, or steal B from player 1, or negotiate with a player 3 directly for C instead...

Okay, the trading is getting Catan-ish. I can work with that. Ultimately, I think I'll need to introduce secret objectives to the game: for simplicity's sake, let's say each player needs to acquire some unique item that won't come up as a found treasure.

Secondly, there would be time limited opportunities that allows items to convert from one type to another. probably a set of cards that shows the item obtained with the item requirement in small print.

Thirdly, items randomly appear and the players have low influence on the items they can get their hands on. It sets up scenarios where two player can trade items that'd benefit each other. There needs to be justifiable reason for trade to make more sense instead of just killing or blowing up each other, which should be an option...

I guess this is how the game would proceed. Next week I can continue this work or try and fix the rock-paper-scissors combat!

Design Diary Monday: Consolidation

The design diary is now caught up with the current version of the game. Hopefully this is an iteration of the game that I can stick with for a while, and even more hopefully this will be the last major revision I have to make before getting to a publishable version of the game.

UPDATE: From the field testing that took place after the initial design went out, though, things are not going well. I'll have to figure out what can be salvaged and what needs changing... it looks like this will be a temporary stay after all.

This version of the game focused on the consolidation of assets in games and the simplification of rules... I also wanted to add some cooperative aspects to the game, which had not worked out so far. But before I make any changes, here are the current rules:

Components:
The game consist of one deck of 36 pirate cards (shown in picture), 24 plunder cards, and 16 captain cards. The full list of individual components are:

Pirate Deck
12 Broadsides,
4 Deckhands (2 of pirates),
4 Grenadiers (3 of pirates),
4 Brutes (4 of pirates),
4 Corsairs (2 of sailors),
4 Swashbucklers (3 of sailors),
4 Mariners (4 of sailors)

Plunder Deck
8 Merchant Frigates (+1 card, strength 2, vp 4)
8 Gold Convoys (+2 cards, strength 4, vp 7)
8 Warships (strength 6, vp 10)

Captain Deck
16 unique captains, each with one special ability.

Game Flow:

1. In the beginning of the game, each player chooses a captain and draw 3 to 4 pirate cards according to the crew size listed on the captain chosen.
2. On each turn, a player:
• Reveals a card from the plunder deck. If it is has +1 or +2 cards, add more cards accordingly (but additional +1s and +2s are ignored)
• Attack plunder targets. To attack a target, a player must reveal strength equal to or higher than the total strength of all plunder cards drawn that turn. The player can additionally add any number of cards face down to support the revealed crew. This form the capturing hand. The target is consider captured at this point; if the player can keep the crew alive until the beginning of his or her next turn, the plunder can be scored for points.
• Plunder targets can be attacked by multiple people with a combined strength higher than the total strength of the plunder cards.
• A player can also attack other players with captured ships that have not scored points. The game enters a battle phase at this point.
3. Player versus Player battles
• The defending player picks up the capturing hand, and the attacking player can use any card currently not involved in other capturing hands.
• Each player chooses one of the pirate cards available in his or her hand, played face down, and both cards are revealed at the same time.
• The battle resolves. The general premise is Broadsides beat Pirates, Pirates beat Sailors, Sailors beat Broadsides. If the same cards show up, the numbers on the cards determine the winner.
• Whoever wins the battle keeps the treasures, whoever loses must discard the entire hand
4. Captain abilities can be activated, and refreshes at the beginning of a player's turn.
5. A player can lose a turn and all cards on hand to change captains and draw a new hand.
6. Whoever has the most points when the plunder deck runs out wins.

That's the gist of the game. Starting from next week I'll actually go over the details of individual test sessions, the tester feedback, and some horrible truth about the difficulty of designer expectations versus playtesting reality. That's when the pain begins...

Art Friday: Pirate Mariner

One of these days, I'll actually ink and color these! One of these days.

Very simple composition this time, I'm trying to get the crazy old man thing going but ended up getting George Carlin as a pirate. Well, I don't dislike it...

Design Diary Monday: Papercraft and Player Boards and Ships, Oh My!

When I thought I've designed my card game to my corner, I've considered my options and I've decided to make some changes, radical changes. So many changes that only things remained were the two principles of rock-paper-scissors ship battle and the use of the pirate dice. Well, that actually fixed a lot of things in place. So how different could the new iteration look? Well...

Behold, CUBES!

Instead of ships being represented by ship cards, the players actually have paper ships... the pirate and cannon crew cards became pirate and cannon cubes. Treasure from the locations? Cubes. The only thing that remained cards were the locations and the single use voodoo cards. Instead of forming ship and crew with cards, you loaded cubes into your ship... when attacking, you added cubes to your ships. Ship to ship combat still revolved around the strategy cards, but the cubes determine the dice numbers when cannon or melee rolls were made.

The changes looked good in theory. It radically redefined what information was hidden and what was known  since you can't put treasure or crew cards face down. Treasure hunting also became very eurogameish when players basically look for the best way to obtain the most treasure in the current round. Ship to ship combat was available to throw players seriously off-balance when necessary.

Unfortunately, the radical change of appearance was accompanied by rule changes that broke the system: for example,

• A new rule was added to encourage risk taking, where if you decided to haul your treasures in, you'd lose your shot at the rest of the treasures on the table. It forced every player to stay at sea for as long as possible, and created some truly bizarre scenarios where every single ship from every player destroyed each other completely, ending a turn with zero treasure taken.
• The sea combat rules were patched to a ridiculous degree to accommodate for the possibility of ships attacking without cannons, exasperated by loopholes around the evade->broadside counter. If evading cannons meant starting a new turn without changing the state of the game, a player with a ship without cannons but with superior pirate count could simply evade to force the game into an infinite loop. If evading cannons grant the player without cannons a chance to pursue (which broadside normally beats), then it weakens the usefulness of broadsiding. This might be hard to explain without the rest of the rules, but imagine if paper beating rock only resulted in a draw... or paper can transform to rock when faced with scissors. Any patchwork solution that me and my friend could come up with ended up short.

among other things. As a result, I believed the noble experiment of radically changing the game to a board game failed... but changing the game's format gave me a lot of insight about the workings of the core mechanics, namely that the pirate/cannon strength numbers play an extremely important role in combat and should not be arbitrarily quantized; that the treasures were not interesting enough to form a eurogame system around; that forcing players to take too much risk for removed real choices. Those were all lessons that I took to heart as I humbly remove all the cubes from the game and transform everything back into card game format.

Next week: heavy consolidation.

Art Friday: Pirate Grenadier

Probably will work a little harder to bring out the "happy psychotic" expression if I get a chance to go back on this... otherwise, this is pretty fun. If her card stays in the game, it's suppose to be a pretty big game changer.

Design Diary Monday: Let the Pirating Begin

After the design process for Summoner went badly, I wanted another shot at designing a Magic like game. I dropped the "design a card" mechanic and returned to cards with fixed powers and abilities. Then I introduced two new X-factors: the rock paper scissors combat that is broadside/evade/pursue, and pirates dice with special dice faces. By the time of this writing, I've thrown away and reused the majority of the card sleeves for later iterations of the game, so here's just a tiny sample of how the game used to look like:

The players were pirates trying to control as much treasure (yellow cards) as possible by the end of the game. Each player controlled a hand of pirate crew (white cards) and several pirate ships (blue cards). In the beginning of each round, a set number of treasure was added to each location (green cards) on the board. Players took turns attacking locations by forming a ship and crew where the total rum use of the crew must not exceed the rum supply of the ship (the circled numbers). A ship loaded with treasure was considered sailing at sea and was open to other player's attacks.

Combat mainly revolved around the broadside/evade/pursue strategy cards. Each player chose a strategy and revealed them at the same time, and the general resolution was broadside beat pursue, pursue beat evade, evade beat broadside. Several strategy combinations would require tossing dice equal to the strength numbers (numbers next to cannons and cutlass icons) to resolve, such as a broadside exchange. Almost all cards had special abilities attached: the crew, the ships, and even some treasures could modify some part of the game. Putting the ship and crew together made the game interesting, but ultimately it also made the game too difficult to track.

To be fair, this version of the game was great for two players, with reasonable downtime and a manageable amount of information to track. The game got too complex once it scaled up to three or more players, though, and I personally lost track of my crew abilities while testing a four player game. When that happened, I was convinced that some dramatic pruning of game mechanics was necessary to scale the game up to my goal of six total players.

In fact, the next version had so much change that it felt like the game took a wrecking ball in its face. Next week: what happened? Paper ships and cubes?