After an initial playtest of my second attempt at Itzan, I decided to shelve the game for a while. It just didn’t feel compelling; it didn’t have a spark. But I’ve still been thinking about a new game. I decided to create something with a far-future science-fiction theme, and considered a massive gameboard with a map of the galaxy, pieces you’d place, cards you’d draw, and so on. I drafted a set of rules and sat down to design the board itself.
Then I hit a wall because the spaces on the board would need tokens with special abilities, but the tokens themselves would be too small to explain the ability. Many games deal with that by adding icons to the tokens, forcing everyone who’s playing to learn the “language” of those icons and (in some games) look up the particular token in the rulebook or some sort of reference. That really disrupts the game, and can be time-consuming and frustrating.
Instead, I decided it would still work to scrap the board, tokens, and other pieces to create a game that’s almost purely based on cards. Of course one of my go-to mechanics for games I design is resource management, so there will be a few piles of cubes representing the various currencies in the game. I rewrote the rules and shifted the entire mechanic to one of drawing, buying, and placing cards.
Normally for a game prototype, I’d whip up some cards and print them on cardstock for my early playtesting. In this case, though, there would be almost four hundred cards in the game! Printing, cutting, and then shuffling and using that many cardstock cards is a pain. Instead, I put together some rough (but decent) designs and sent them off to a card-printing company. Forty dollars and two weeks later, I received my huge stack of cards.
And now it’s time to test Galactics.
The cards look pretty sharp, and it’ll be fun to playtest using something that looks semi-professional. I’ve already found a handful of things that will need to be changed– abilities that are confusing or overpowered– but I can “house rule” those during testing.
I’m excited to get these on a table with friends and see how the game goes…