❖ Version History ❖

20th of July, 2020
If you’ve been following the Design Journal story behind Calendra so far, you will know that I have already had some serious printer issues in previous prototyping. My first attempt at getting a set of the cards made was so dark I literally could not even photograph it for discussion, because it was a deck of black cardstock. Needless to say, this caused a month long fix that needed to be made for every single card that had already been designed (and left me aggressively chasing after these fixes with a deep desire to see the finished art). Luckily, the removal of the problem regarding the blackened designs was fairly easy in terms of timeline, but the waiting period for an order of cards to be printed and shipped is a few weeks usually… so the patience was running very thin on the “I must sit here waiting” side of things.

But. After two weeks anticipating the mail, the very first prototype (with proper color) finally arrived. These cards are featured in the photograph above, and this particular version of the prototype is comprised of all 124 playing cards, with the four rule cards included along the bottom of the image.

To take things one step further though, it had been my hope to throw together a simple box design. I needed to know how the artwork would look on a box, and I needed to gauge how that artwork would fall on the box as well (in terms of where do the bends in the three-dimensional design fall, and how do the bleed edges look on a final printed product). *It is important to remember here too that this is the very first box design that I am ever making, as, this is still about 4 months before I’ve even begun the process of prototyping The Great Chase project, which incidentally was published first.

Needless to say, I did not want to put a ton of effort into the first box design, because I was concerned that there would be many similar problems to the card design that I would later need to come back and fix. So, what I decided to do was add the same image from the back of the card design onto the box itself, with some simple trim work along the sides and the basic “Ferric Fable” from earlier on in the design process along the bottom tray of the box. Though this designing was mostly copy and paste (and only took one afternoon for me to throw together), it came out so good that many people who first laid eyes on it assumed that this would be the final packaging:

By comparison to the earlier editions of things that I had printed in this way, this was without a doubt one of the greatest moments in the game design process thus far. I was so elated by the look of this stage of the product that even I was totally satisfied with the idea that the game could be published looking like this… but that of course was but a brief moment of thought as more and more elements of improvement came to my attention. One critical detail of this improvement being the rules…

It is almost hard to believe… but to this point in time the rules of Calendra have never even been written down by anyone at any time. We had only been touching up how to play based on what felt like it was/wasn’t working… So, needless to say, there was still plenty of work cut out for this process in the days to come, but this was a great day.

Stay tuned for more about composing the rule book in our next adventure of
The Librarium Games Design Journal!