❖ Version History ❖

22nd of February, 2022
After taking the time to adjust the text boxes for there rest of the game, it felt like the right time to revisit the layout and overall situation with the rule cards. These cards have not changed once since almost two years ago… and it shows:

… But what happened to get us from left to right:

Well… There are a wealth of things actually.

For starters, some rules have changed, almost every visual aspect of the other cards in the game have changed by now, and there have been quite a few comments about details that could be added overall.

So, let’s take the card apart and review some of these elements. To begin, lets talk about the very top of the card itself:

In the original design of the rule card, we had only shown what the field of play would look like, and what the two rows of the field were called. However, there are other aspects to the field that are not covered. Notably, there is a place where your deck is kept, and there is also a location where the rule card is meant to be left for others in the game to see. Though the example above is a bit over zoomed to see the rest of the wording around the graphic, the two darker boxes on the left represent these spots for the rule card and player deck, while the five lighter slots to the right of these darker squares represent the rest of the field of play.

Additionally, by virtue of adding these sixth boxes to the rows, we also have what I instantly considered to be a perfect little place for another detail that had been missing previously from the rule cards: an actual written name of the season that you are playing as. I had very much wanted to get this detail included on the cards from when they had been first designed because I do not like the idea of excluding those who are colorblind, and I have always been concerned that the symbol highlight on the bottom of the card would not be enough of a clue for strangers to the game.

Besides the top of the card though, there have been some major edits to the way the rules are shown on the cards as well. I thought it was important to increase the symbol sizes and text sizes, which luckily, was easy to achieve in both instances thanks to the change in font to the rest of the rule text in the game. This other Irish font allows for a larger and clearer statement, and also gives us the space to ramp up the logo size:

But. One set of rules in the game has changed dramatically, which is another aspect that has altered the final view of the rule card. It was decided in the course of our wealth of play testing that the rule for winning with Changeling cards was not working very well in two distinct ways:

1. To win with four Changelings in play was barely ever happening. It takes eight turns of gameplay at minimum to get such a victory, and that is if every single opportunity leads to a situation where a Changeling is used. This is simply not enough, and it needed to be faster in some way, or more efficient.

2. Also, it is somewhat infrequent that a Changeling gets used on a card that is played in the Garden Row of the game… and if it does, it would almost be more interesting to have it not be useful toward achieving victory.

So, it was decided that the number of Changeling needed to end a round would be dropped down to three. It was also decided that the Changeling’s would need to all be in the Court Row of the game in order for this to count as a victory. This accomplished two things on the design of the Rule Cards, for it made one of the rules more simple, and it allowed us to reduce the number of bullet points from 6 down to 4, leaving us with this beautiful consolidation:

Between all of the details with color updates, texture updates, layout, frames, wording, symbol sizes, and highlights behind the text as a final rendition… there is nearly nothing upon the surface of this card that hasn’t gone unedited during this revision…. except for one last detail…

The last complaint that had gone ignored the entire time that the game had existed to this point in time finally got to me. Over and over and over again I had been asked if I would do something, anything, to get the back of the cards to be different on the rule cards specifically. The logic behind this is that without some sort of obvious difference, the rules would occasionally get lost or shuffled within the rest of the playing cards, and once there, would be frustrating to find.

But no. I would not be swayed…

That is until I started playing around with the back of the card artwork one day.
As we will discuss in further detail next time on the Design Journal, I had been messing around with the back of the card for the main deck with an interesting idea that had come up… but while I was exploring that concept I accidentally did something that caused the card to look almost entirely black, save the orange bits in the middle… when I first laid eyes on it, I wanted it… but I didn’t want all the cards to have black backs, I very much liked the white backs.

And then I finally caved.

I glanced back at the rule cards and thought: “If ever there were a more obvious way to identify the rule cards from the rest of the playing cards, it would be to have them colored the totally opposite way”. And I love the look… and I’m happy its here, because it makes the full body makeover feel truly complete.

However.. this was not the end of card back editing, so be sure to check in next time to see what happened to the rest of the playing cards when we return with the
Librarium Games Design Journal!