❖ Version History ❖

16th of August 2022
This story… goes back to one of the most critical moments in my decision to begin striving toward professional life as a game designer, and it is also one of the most incredible tales of my life to date. So… circa three years ago (almost to the day) I myself had funded an amazing Kickstarter: Terese Neilsen’s ‘Tokens of Spirit’ Campaign. This crowdfunding project was to get one of the most famous artists in all of Magic The Gathering history to develop her own deck of token cards to be used with the game.

At the time, I thought it was a bit crazy… but I decided to fund this project at the absolute max level, because the top tier reward was to spend a weekend in Terese’s home with her Kickstarter team, showing the final pieces of the artwork as they were being developed for the printing press before the project was done.

It was not only one of the most magical things that has ever happened to me, it was one of the best networking opportunities I have experienced in game design. I got the chance to meet one of my favorite artists, and a wealth of other people who just orchestrated one of the more successful kickstarter projects of all time under the gaming category ($300,000+).

As I was getting to the point where I was finally building our Kickstarter page for Calendra, I had a moment of deeply reminiscing on this day… and I decided to reach out to this group of people for a bit of last minute questioning about what I should be considering for our campaign. I was just trying to get some ideas about how to get everything to be perfect & ask some questions, but I ended up having a far more important chat than even I had anticipated.

Neilsen had responded to my email personally and gave me the contact information for her kickstarter coordinator: Josh Krause, telling me that I need to have a chat with him and see what he thinks about my setup. Of course, I promptly did this and began having a great chat about design.

One of the most important things that Josh is up to in the game design world is building these absolutely beautiful tabletop play mats for card games like Magic the Gathering. He told me about his process for these and where he goes to get his designs printed. There were many suggestions about the campaign as well, talking about the importance of the BGG community, and how else I might begin to prepare for the Kickstarter. Looking in to his suggestions, I found great inspiration for a simple, but beautiful product to include in the Calendra suite: the 10″x16″ play mat.

Why is this so important? Well, Calendra is an interesting game in that, it will never take up more table space than two cards tall and six cards wide per player. As you can see in this photograph… though it is a bit tight on the measurements, this is exactly the shape and scale needed for the play mat:

I thanked Josh & Terese profusely for having this conversation with me and I immediately got on the grind. I suddenly felt like designing a good play mat for Calendra was one of the most necessary tasks I could put my mind to, but with how late in the summer this conversation started, I had almost no time to even get a product made before launching the Calendra Kickstarter… even as of the writing of this journal entry, there are only about 4 weeks before the launch timeline was to commence. But a magical item was to be made, and so for this night I did not sleep as I frantically threw this together:

Though it is definitely a bit below my standards of art and design, I was quite happy with this initial idea for what the mat should conceptually look like. And, to be honest, I am not even sure if the dimensions behind this idea are even going to work. The measurements are so tight and so close that I am pretty convinced that (while I really really really want it to work) I am expecting the size to not be functionally large enough for what we need to hold playing cards AND look good.

To give a sense of how concerned I am about this, take a look at the proximity of our trim lines in the Inked Gaming Web Editor:

While I am deeply intimidated about this idea working, as I mentioned above, I was set to the task and desperate to get answers. So I put in an order for these with super expensive high speed shipping and got to crossing my fingers for two weeks.

Luckily I was on vacation in Maine for a good portion of this time. By the time I had come home from my travels the mats and arrived… and against every single expectation I have ever had in my design of things, these measurements were truly the most perfect thing I have ever created on the first try. They hold the cards EXACTLY. Like… it was as if the game was designed for these measurements from the start.

I am so thrilled for this outcome I can’t even express myself properly. I am daunted now with another quite large design project on an incredibly rushed timeline, but this is one of the coolest assets that Calendra could possibly get before our crowdfunding experience, and I am all the more inspired and excited to get these to the people! But. We need mats in five different colors, and we need them to look a bit nicer than this in the final design, so back to the drawing board (literally) for me for now!