Board Game Post Mortem : The Good

The Cards

This is probably the element I feel that best represents what I was striving for with this board game. They are both clear in their rules and evocative in their theme and flavour text. The flavour helps aid in the player's comprehension of the rules and the rules reinforce the comedic nature of the cards, creating to my mind the perfect balance of form and function. I also wove element of non-linear storytelling throughout some of the cards creating miniature stories that over the course of one or more games the players will piece together giving them both a motive for further play and an incentive to engage with the item card mechanic.

Moving forwards I really want to try to continue to incorporate narrative elements into the mechanicals systems of my games. Telling a story through the actions available to the players and allowing the player's actions to create narratives is something I value incredibly highly and I feel at least in parts my use of narrative mixed mechanical items worked well towards that end. Had I had the same success with the board and rules text then I would feel the board game as a whole had succeeded in this as a goal but unfortunately, the cards are the only place currently that I think this is true.

The visuals of the cards also leave something to be desired. I attempted to make them as simple as possible to allow the rules and text to do as much fo the heavy lifting for the game's theme, but I fear this was a mistake and next time, or in a subsequent version of this game I will need to more fully utilise visual style and flair to convey thematic ideas and mechanical functions. Currently, the border colour informs the player of the class of the time card but that's as far and any aesthetic element goes in expressing game systems or ideals.

Were I to remake the cards I would firstly for visual clarity segregate the four different texts into their own distinct boxes and would create the text itself using a program other than illustrator as it lost some of the definition on the letters as well as being unable to process the text in a way that allowed me to easily fix errors in line placement and such. I would also strongly consider the addition of graphics which would probably also help in producing the cohesive theme and visual style which is currently sorely lacking.

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